thinkcontext

They can be resold, they have great value for anyone wanting to provide their own power to a DC. Demand is so high they might be able to make a profit.

Wouldn't you want more data to learn if its "fine" vs "not fine"? If you learned that small departments were significantly worse than larger ones on use of force, corruption, etc wouldn't that inform a decision?

Well, how fine grained do we need to get? A police force with 5 officers is pretty fine. In this case law enforcement is being taken over by the county (of which there are 254 in Texas) so its still pretty local.

> Last week, the [state] agency sent a letter to the city notifying it that its five-member police department would be closed effective Sept. 18. Law enforcement duties will be transferred to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office until a permanent solution is found.

> The agency said its investigation found the department failed to meet minimum standards and failed to provide sufficient evidence that it provided a "public benefit to the community." The department also failed to provide resources to its officers, including bulletproof vests and an evidence room.

The US has many thousands of little law enforcement jurisdictions like this. The argument for it is local control but in practice you too often get situations like this one. Poor quality, abuses, corruption, good-old-boys network, lack of accountability, frequent unnecessary use of force, etc. Large police organizations are certainly not w/o problems but at this point there are accountability mechanisms and modern standards.

The WaPo did an excellent article a few years ago looking at the fragmented LEO landscape

"Most police departments in America are small. That’s partly why changing policing is difficult, experts say"

https://archive.li/05zA7

> The NASA/ESA MSR was of substantially higher quality

If it doesn't happen then its of worse quality.

Grok did ask its users what it thought about the right wing fever dream of genocide of white people in South Africa so its definitely relevant to one's consideration of the product.

> I'm curious if you feel the same about re-migration of Belgians from the Congo?

Can't say I've ever heard anyone implying that colonialists leaving Belgium was unjust. Colonialists is actually not the right word, more like extended occupation, only slightly better than the enslavement of the Leopold II era. The Belgian's were less than 1% of the population and all but an ancillary amount worked in exploiting the native population.

> And the problems haven’t been completely ironed out: the first launch attempt of Starship’s flight test 13 was aborted automatically by the vehicle’s flight software at T-0 (right before liftoff) this past July when several Raptor 3 engines failed to start

And several engines failed to relight on the booster for flight 13. I believe ice in feed lines is viewed as the most likely cause.

> The problem with Solar is once someone buys it they can continuously use it for a long time with out participating in the economy.

An odd statement. That could be considered a "problem" for an incumbent energy provider, like say Exxon. But it would be considered a solution for an energy user who would now have more money to devote to something else in the economy.

None of those are ready to deploy, they are in experimental testing. They have several phases of that still to go before they can get a license.

There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.

Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.

NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.

Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.

Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.

> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.

Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf

> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?

In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.

For those that don't recall or weren't around the Obama administration send thousands of medical and military to assist with the 2013-2016 outbreak. A big part of what they did was construct medical wards, but they helped with treatment, PPE, testing infrastructure, etc.

That outbreak had 11K dead and things were on the verge of being a lot worse. There were beginning to be neighborhood level lockdowns to prevent spread and civil unrest. Its difficult to play what-if games but it certainly was a very serious situation.

From what I've heard this outbreak is spreading faster than that one at the same stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemic

The US has travel restrictions, therefore you are incorrect that "western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control"

https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/returning-travel...

Depends on how easily the Canadian electricity can be replaced. The market is pretty tight right now.

This would seem to be an issue MAHA would want to engage on. But they instead seem to be focused on issues for which there's no evidence or even substantial negative evidence like vaccines. What a wasted opportunity to actually improve public health.

Isn't this what Elon Musk has unironically claimed he is doing with grokipedia?

Maybe a non-event for safety but what about getting the plant operating again?

Its a particularly galling policy for disproportionately hurting small businesses given the number of money laundering, sanctions avoidance, etc big fish Trump has pardoned, ended investigations and enforcement generally.

I wonder how much this will drive adoption of crypto for remittances.

Even more significant is the timing, it's 18 launches by the end of 2027. Even before New Glenn and Vulcan broke they couldn't have scheduled a single launch before the end of 2027. Their manifests were full because they were years late.

SpaceX could easily charge more for timeliness. Its way more important than price per kg for a military customer.

You brought up the working class as sensitive to price and now you say they aren't. That doesn't seem like a logically consistent position but maybe I'm not understanding what you are saying.

We're talking about new cars, which in the US the average price of is $50K. The working class tends to buy used cars, of which 3 times more than new cars are sold each year.

> Perhaps the money being used to fund a superfluous vaccine should be used to fund access to PrEP in the Third World

An astounding statement. Is it not possible that a vaccine giving decades of protection would give better health outcomes than doing PrEP every 6 months?

Not likely. There's a saturation point where excess just gets filtered out by your kidneys.

That's the point, the grid operator does not want more solar. They have an excess of solar available during those 3 hours that would otherwise go to waste and not enough later in the day.

"Free" electricity is an indication that the economics are out of balance. If the power provider isn't getting paid for those 3 hours, it means they'll need to be paid more at other times. It also means the grid needs to spend more on storage and less on new solar. Its cool if you have the ability to load shift but in general it means costs go up.