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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • The Inflation Reduction Act included $65 million in research grants for low emission aviation and $245 million in development of biofuel based Sustainable Aviation Fuel (aka SAF). And the $3 billion in loan guarantees for manufacturing advanced vehicle technologies included certain aircraft.

    There were also $5 billion in loan guarantees for shutting down our heaviest polluting power plants or retooling them to greener generation methods.

    There was $3 billion in buying zero emissions vehicles and charging infrastructure for the postal service.

    The Inflation Reduction Act, which inherited a lot of the stuff from the Green New Deal, was a lot of things, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it called deeply unserious before today.


  • I haven’t combed through the data in a minute, but I want to also say that they’re also leading in fossil fuel deployment too.

    Yup, China is also leading the planet on new coal plant construction. As of 2 months ago, it seemed to be on track to add 80GW of coal generation capacity in 2024 alone, and accounts for more than 90% of new coal construction.

    By way of comparison, the US peaked in total coal plant capacity in 2011 at 318GW, and has since closed about 134GW of capacity, with more to come.

    In context, what we’re seeing is massive, massive expansion of electricity generation and transmission capacity, both clean and dirty, in China. We can expect China to increase its total carbon emissions each year to be closer to the West, while the United States reduces its own from a much higher starting point. Maybe the two countries will cross in per capita emissions around 2030 if current trends continue, but there’s no guarantee that current trends will continue: will the United States continue to shift from coal to gas? Where does grid scale storage, electrification of passenger vehicles, demand shifting, or dispatchable carbon free power go from here, in a future Trump administration? What’s going to happen with the Chinese economy over the next 5 years? What technology will be invented to change things?


  • You could put Wendy’s, Walmart, Northrup Grumman, Tyson, Bank of America, whatever, into this, and just change the last line a little bit, and I still would not be able to determine if its satire or not.

    I read this as an oblique reference to the “you’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. It’s a bit of a reach, but it works.

    Corporate Advertisement in general is almost completely stylistically played out

    It’s like any other thing with fashion or styles. Trends come and go, different eras have distinct markers, later eras may intentionally evoke references or tributes to earlier eras, or other contemporary trends in other fields.





  • Oh and Best Buy owes its survival to investing heavily into cell phone plans and contracts. They would’ve folded without it.

    Radio Shack limped along for maybe a decade after their core business stopped making sense, because of their cell phone deals. This Onion article from 2007 captures the cultural place that RadioShack operated in at the time, and they didn’t file bankruptcy until 2015 (and then reorganized and filed bankruptcy again in 2017).


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlChoice
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    2 months ago

    This is a counter to the Democratic party supporters you see everywhere who always get irrationally upset at third party voters, not about Republicans.

    Plenty of us Democrats are very much in support of a ranked choice voting schemes, or similar structural rules like non-partisan blanket primaries (aka jungle primaries). The most solidly Democratic state, California, has implemented top-2 primaries that give independents and third parties a solid shot for anyone who can get close to a plurality of votes as the top choice.

    Alaska’s top four primary, with RCV deciding between those four on election day, is probably the best system we can realistically achieve in a relatively short amount of time.

    Plenty of states have ballot initiatives that bypass elected officials, so people should be putting energy into those campaigns.

    But by the time it comes down to a plurality-take-all election between a Republican who won the primary, a Democrat who won the primary, and various third party or independents who have no chance of winning, the responsible thing to make your views represented is to vote for the person who represents the best option among people who can win.

    Partisan affiliation is open. If a person really wants to run on their own platform, they can go and try to win a primary for a major party, and change it from within.

    TL;DR: I’ll fight for structural changes to make it easier for third parties and independents to win. But under the current rules, voting for a spoiler is throwing the election and owning the results.












  • I think the comment is specifically talking about storing future times, and contemplating future changes to the local time zone offsets.

    If I say that something is going to happen at noon local time on July 1, 2030 in New York, we know that is, under current rules, going to happen at 16:00 UTC. But what if the US changes its daylight savings rules between now and 2030? The canonical time for that event is noon local time, and the offset between local time and UTC can only certainly be determined with past events, so future events defined by local will necessarily have some uncertainty when it comes to UTC.