It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.

The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.

Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.

As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)

You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).

Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.

Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.

It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.

Which is more or less what happened the last time Biden tried to forgive student loans. Eventually Missouri was found to have standing, and all his efforts were thrown out.

Aside from a nagging feeling that it was known this was going to happen, and this was all for political talking points, I wanted to info dump.

A few tidbits from that prior lawsuit:

• MOHELA supported loan forgiveness, although I can’t recall why. (I think it was about simplifying administration in the face of a bunch of loans that had already paid for themselves in terms of the interest collected. At this point the cost to maintain the loan on their books and or chase accounts they can’t write off is more expensive than attempting to recover the loan.)
• MOHELA refused to be a plaintiff, and it was the state of Missouri claiming standing.
• The state of Missouri only had standing due to a voluntary agreement where MOHELA would pay a certain percentage of revenue back to the state of Missouri - something it had not done for nearly a decade. Missouri’s standing was merely technical, and more or less un-realized.
• Yet it still was used to fuck over millions of people, because Misery loves company.

The bear-pig part merely raised eyebrows. Manbearpig is what got the feds involved.

Well now I’m thinking of Babe the Blue Ox as being a mighty hunter.
Maybe they call him the blue ox because he crushes his victims to death (starving them of oxygen!), leaving them blue?!

The problem is that now the first page of results is all AI garbage and wrong, so you’re not 100% sure at what point you’ve reached the sane internet.

“The secretary also increased the readiness of additional U.S. forces to deploy, elevating our preparedness to respond to various contingencies,” Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday.

Military.com: Thousands More US Troops, Attack Aircraft Heading to Middle East as Israel Targets Hezbollah in Lebanon

Ehhhh…… Israel is making this threat because the U.S. is sending more people to the region. Israel’s insanity and posturing is enabled by the U.S. putting itself in a position to be committed.

We already know Russia has assets in Syria and is fighting a proxy war with both the U.S. and Ukraine there.

It’s so shameful what greed and broken electoral finance laws in the U.S. have done to the country. Right now, an investment of a few million by a PAC can turn into billions of dollars from the government, via direct aid, passing laws, or simply looking the other way if a company isn’t being too obviously evil.

The primaries this year were highly telling in that regard - politicians were being nakedly bought in plain sight, but, again, because “you don’t fuck with the money” it’s not a question in political circles of whether overhauling campaign finance should be undertaken.

Devils advocate: It may not be “pee tapes”, it may be video of him sexually assaulting a Miss Universe candidate.

Well. That’s it. Get the flamethrowers. Time to burn down the Amazon.

No. Not the one that’s already burning. The other one.

Who was it intended toward?

Someone that hasn’t watched TV since the 1980’s? ChatGPT, for when someone invariably turns it loose on the fediverse?

It’s not niche as a concept. Your explanation is known worldwide.
Its inclusion in the discourse is unwarranted.

Next time you feel the need to add a disclaimer that justifies/explains/adds caveats to racist language: fucking don’t.

I like to look up stuff, even if I’m not remotely qualified to understand the results.

Tartrazine induces structural and functional aberrations and genotoxic effects in vivo
Is tartrazine really safe? In silico and ex vivo toxicological studies in human leukocytes: a question of dose

My (thin) grasp of things is that even though it’s a food additive, it’s not heavily studied, and not at higher doses, but the two studies above don’t paint a great picture. And slathering it on your skin is definitely more than you’d come into contact with than what’s needed to color food.
So, yeah - not a parlor trick I’d do to gross out my friends.

The article I read mentioned this person has co-morbidities. Presumably, that’s why their symptoms are worse/they even got tested. Perhaps this means that it only weakly infects humans (currently, anyway). Hence the lack of prior detection.
I’m sure we’ll start to see more community cases. Hopefully that won’t translate to the virus mutating further in ways that make it more infectious or harmful.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This might sound tin foil hat-y, but the doctor - Petrak - is a contractor without an incentive to complete the work in a timely or efficient manner. I can’t see why he would push for a speedy closure.

That plus a hospital that doesn’t want to be sued for malpractice, plus a government agency where they would rather check boxes and maximize their metrics*, than consider the damage of their policies to innocent people is a recipe for torturing the public.

* I would assume they’re going for number of investigations, and not efficiency. They probably count raw numbers, and do what they can to catch every little thing - thoroughness can be good, mind you - because finding something is “proof” of their efficacy.

It’s a shame more families don’t sue in these circumstances to make the involved parties check themselves to ensure they aren’t causing more harm than good.

Plus an advertisement, 3 paragraphs about Ian’s age, an advertisement, 4 more about the show that are just an advertisement for the show, an advertisement, a segue about the importance of bone health as you age and why the author likes Dasuquin senior supplements to keep himself feeling young, an advertisement, and finally that the fat suit maybe helped.

You connect with someone, pool your resources and efforts, and live together.
If nothing else, you’ll have someone to miss you when you choke to death.

But seriously, all we have is each other. Some folks may never partner up romantically, but they can still build their own sense of community and family. Cooking for 2 is easier than cooking for 1, and cooking for 4 is even easier still. According to realtor.com’s July rental report, a single bedroom apartment in the U.S. averages $1600, and a 2 bedroom is $1900. Splitting that 2 bedroom with a roommate is way more economical than going it alone. Paying bills, planning things, having a vehicle break down, needing to share housework — Life is just easier with community. Many hands make light work.

I’m not trying to paint a rosy picture. It seems right now that capitalism has “won.” With rare exception we’re all peasants, and we all face the same grim reality of being captive to systems that lower our quality of life and increase our challenges to strip every ounce of value from us and the environment around us. Maybe together, we can make it suck less, or at least try to.

I’ve even seen news stories that indicate the IDF is clearing and trucking out/burying rubble so it cannot be reused or recycled if rebuilding ever occurs.
Because of the concrete blockade, there used to be a decent trade in Gaza to recycle concrete to build new things. (I don’t know how they do it. Maybe they just use it as aggregate?) I imagine the metals could be repurposed (some), or more likely, sold as scrap and those funds used to buy new materials.

I don’t disagree with the points you’re making in terms of military explanations.

I think the U.S. definitely wants to provide Taiwan with all manner of drones, as they can use that as a test bed for their own drone efforts. Even if it’s unlikely to actually occur, I think the specter of China getting involved militarily is an opportunity the U.S. is keen to exploit that will allow them to deploy and test drone systems on the dime of one of their strategic partners, rather than solely at their own expense.

But I also think that China is working on a diplomatic/economic win in Taiwan.
With the recent passage of the … oh, I can’t remember the name of it … the law that allows China to arrest people who criticize China online that will apply to Chinese citizens who live/work in Taiwan, or to Taiwanese citizens who have reason to visit China, it means that there is a pall of fear over criticizing China in Taiwan.
If folks can’t criticize China, it skews the narrative in Taiwan. A few more laws like that, some social/election influence campaigns (in the U.S. and Taiwan), and I could see a gradual undoing of Taiwanese-U.S. relations, and perhaps even a voluntary joining of PRC in a few decades.
I’m sure, though, that the U.S. is doing the same thing in Taiwan, to try to keep the relationship tight. So it sorta comes down to who can do the best data mining, influence campaigning, and crafty diplomacy.

All armchair speculation on my part, but that’s how I think it’ll shake out. Less of a military conquest, and more of a cultural conquest.

I was editing my comment as you were typing yours. But - yeah.

The supremacy clause wouldn’t even have the chance to be applied, because the case wouldn’t ever leave the state.

Purely hypothetically now, I was not so much thinking of Roe or the reasons used to undo that decision being applied here, but just any spurious legal justification they could come up with.