"The more you raise your prices, the more customers will slip through your fingers."

The Humanx Commonwealth is one of the most fascinating ideas I've seen in science fiction. I'd like to see more of exactly how that works, but it's probably impossible -- the premise is that the Thranx have strengths, weaknesses, insights, and blind spots that are mostly such that one's blind spot is the other's insight, and one's weakness is the other's strength. Together, the two cultures are far more than the sum of their parts.

Alas, being human, it's probably too much to ask for Foster to really see the human blind spots and what insights from the Thranx compensate for them. And show it in a story so that other humans would say "Oh, but of course!"

I do like the stories, though.

Solar is not base load, because it's intermittent. Same for wind.

Coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear are base load. They're constant power sources.

Hydro has the disadvantage that all the good locations are already in use, or are unavailable. What we've got now is all we're going to get.

I've found that few of the greenies have any comprehension whatsoever of what is meant by "base load". Or they pretend not to.

Show me energy storage on a scale needed for base load, and then, and only then, are solar and wind contenders for taking up the base load mantle from fossil fuels.

The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Rocky Mountain Institute -- two of the groups most responsible for causing as much coal to be burned as there is, by doing everything in their power to prevent coal plants from being replaced by nuclear plants.

"The Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice"? Never heard of them, but dang...

This isn't about "environment". This is about "More Woke Than Thou" pandering to the groups he expects to be running things in the next administration, in hopes of not getting Amazon broken up.

This, of course. I was tempted to write in Cthulhu.

I settled for voting Libertarian, my usual "A plague on both your parties" vote, at least, when the Libertarian candidate isn't a complete nutburger like Budnarik. I actually didn't research Jo Jorgensen enough to say for sure that she isn't a complete nutburger, but in her favor, whatever the result turns out to be, I can say with pride "I did not vote for that SOB." That's something, at least, and all that's available this year.

It's reprehensible, of course, whoever's doing it.

But I can't help but think that maybe we'd be better off with whoever is stupid enough to fall for that ridiculous claim not voting.

Only a politician would believe that you could make a blanket longer by cutting a foot off the the bottom and sewing it onto the top.

"Max Cossack, the famous novelist, saw a correction on Parler saying Hunter Biden was NOT holding a crack pipe! It was a meth pipe. Words cannot describe how grateful I am that I don’t know a single person who could tell me the difference. Personally, I thought it was a kazoo." -- Ammo Grrrl

I have only ever heard about QAnon from liberal-to-left sources.

Not one word -- ever -- from anyone promoting the conspiracy theory.*

I'm not isolated in a liberal bubble (though sometimes it feels that way in California); I have lots of friends who are, by my "conservative to libertarian" standards uncomfortably right-wing. None of them have mentioned any of this QAnon stuff to me, and if they were into it, they probably would.

No, it's all people on the leftward side of liberal Viewing With Alarm "what those Insane deplorables are up to."

So... Does this QAnon thing really exist, beyond some 4channers spewing "the usual" for the lulz, and the usual people willing to believe without question or evidence any horrible thing about "the enemy"? (I'm talking about the people screaming about The QAnon Threat, and people who actually believe in QAnon if such actually exist other than a tiny percentage of crazies.) My impression is "No."

* ... unless you count that "Jefferey Epstein didn't kill himself" meme that pops up every now and then. I suspect he actually did, but the circumstances of removing every impediment to him killing himself, when he'd already made one attempt, and it was clear he was highly motivated to escape the inevitable fate that awaited him... That seems to me to go beyond the plausible bounds of mere incompetence.

A high school friend of mine (after a stint as reactor operator on the Nimitz) worked at a nuclear power plant that was under construction. No fuel had even been brought to the site yet; no plumbing even, there was a row of Port-A-Potties set up to take care of necessities... when all the radiation alarms went off.

Someone who had had a radioactive iodine treatment for some thyroid disorder had used one of the Port-A-Potties.

Regulations required them to rope off an area around the Port-A-Potties with "DANGER! RADIATION!" signs, and bring in some new "uncontaminated" Port-A-Potties until the iodine decayed away.

But what's in the spa is organic radioactivity. The tritium from Fukushima is unnatural artificial radioactivity. Probably GMO radioactivity to boot. /sarcasm

There was a similar issue at Three Mile Island -- a bunch of RO pure water with a little bit of tritium in it. The proposal to dilute it with enough river water so that the tritium content was well below standards for drinking water were Viewed With Alarm by all the usual suspects, with shrieking "THEY WANT TO DUMP RADIOACTIVE WATER INTO THE RIVER!" headlines.

I'm not sure what they actually ended up doing with it. One proposal at the time was to just evaporate it all.

What I would love to see, if this "electors are required to vote for the national popular vote winner" thing that some blue states are pushing were to cause a Republican to win even though he would otherwise have lost the electoral vote. I bet you'd see a lot of the people pushing this suddenly start trying to change the rules after the election.

What seems odd to me is that I have a fairly wide variety of viewpoints represented in my Facebook friends list, from people more conservative than I am (i.e., uncomfortably right-wing) to wacko leftists.

I have heard absolutely nothing -- not one single word -- about this QAnon stuff from any of the moderate-to-right-wing people on my friends list. Nothing. It simply does not exist there.

But I have gotten walls of text from the left-of-center to wacko leftist side, Viewing With Alarm this ... whatever it is ... that supposedly Everybody Not A Liberal is being controlled by.

Maybe we need more tinfoil hats, but I can't find any actual tin foil. It's all this aluminium stuff.

... but an interesting enough diversion, if you don't go nuts and take it seriously.

First off, the supposed "real universe" in which the simulation of our reality runs... everybody seems to be assuming it's just like our universe, more or less. That does not follow. There's no reason that the outer universe would have any more similarity to our universe than our universe has to a Ms. Pac Man game.

There's the question of, if we're processes running on some sort of virtual machines, well, we have seen vulnerabilities in our own virtual machine code that has allowed processes to "break out" of the simulation and access and affect things that are supposed to be outside it's ability to access. (Nice SF bit that did this, the simulation of Michael Garibaldi in "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", figured out he was a simulation, figured out how to break out of it, and used the outside computer to send a "Here they are!" message out to the enemies of the people messing with him in the simulation. "Whoops, I guess the system's busy...")

Then there's the issue of magic. It worked in the past? But not now? "Oh, crap, another hole. Save the state, halt the simulation, restart it after I get the patch in."