Googling is not hard

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

Two things I think are frequently lost in these discussions:

1. When Fauci made his statement about people not needing to wear masks, people tend to forget the context of the situation. At the time, mask manufacturers were caught off-guard and there was a huge run on masks. They were extremely hard to find to buy. Hospitals were running out and having a very hard time procuring the masks that they needed to perform operations. They were actively trying to discourage people from hoarding masks so that medical providers could have "dibs" on acquiring them first.

Once the supply line caught up with demand and they were more easily obtainable, they changed their position—but not because the facts or evidence of their effectiveness changed.

It wasn't just masks to which this flawed logic was applied. When the COVID vaccines first became available, people who were over the age of 65 were given priority on getting them. A bunch of people willfully ignorantly took that to mean that people who were younger just plain didn't benefit from having the vaccine. Nothing could be further from the truth; it benefits them greatly. But with a highly limited supply, we necessarily had to prioritize who got the shots first.

2. When you wear a mask, it isn't particularly effective in protecting you from COVID. Its purpose is to protect everyone else if you have COVID, especially since in the initial stage of infection many people were asymptomatic. As mentioned in comments above, it prevents a 10-foot plume of aerosolized infected saliva from projecting forth from your sneezes, coughs, and even just breathing. The idea is that if everyone is wearing a mask to protect everyone else, then you'll have a much higher level of protection also.

Living in the South of the US, I can't count the number of times I heard chuckleheads explain to me how those masks still let particles through. They couldn't wrap their brains around the point being that those particles for the most part won't be there if everyone is wearing masks. And it's not just COVID that controlled by masks. Did anyone notice that cases of the flu dropped to a fraction of its normal rate of infection where people consistently masked up?

Because of huge sums of money involved if he can hit this hail mary. It sounds like he doesn't give a shit what Doctor Who fans think about him, so why not take the shot?

(Note that I'm not endorsing that mentality, it's asshattery. But I certainly understand why he's doing it, and why others in his position might also take a shot at it even if deep down they know it's not right.)

Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen during non-peak hours, so there's no extra load on the grid. I have an EV, and that's how I have my car set up today to charge; in the middle of the night when the grid is nowhere near peak load. This "problem" has been solved long ago.

The availability of solar or wind power has nothing to do with this conversation. We were talking about load distribution and how much the grid would be taxed with batteries at people's houses, not energy sources. But just to counter the FUD...

Wind turbines work fine during bad weather if they're properly maintained. Plenty of countries with more bad weather than we have generate plenty of wind and solar power, including places like Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, and Germany.

What you're likely thinking of is the problems that Texas had in 2021 due to a freak ice storm. A bunch of right-wing nitwits got all over television and the internet to decry how unreliable wind power is, when in fact, it was natural gas that took the heaviest hit in failing to supply enough power. Windmills actually worked much more reliably during that snowstorm. (Citation)

As for solar, it can be impacted, but it's rather unusual for it to be. It has to be really cold or a really heavy snowfall, because the surface of solar panels generally are warmer than the surrounding area, meaning that snow generally melts off of it quickly. Also, solar panels are typically mounted at an angle, which induces snow to slide off of them. And even panels that are partially obstructed generate decent amounts of power. (Citation) Again, in practical use, this is a non-issue.

The total demand, yes. But if everyone has on-premises batteries, the peak demand can be spread throughout all 24 hours of the day, making the load that the grid has to handle much less.

You're not a DISH, you're a MAN!

Hi, meet me. I'm in Michigan, not a morning person. Am super excited about the possibility of permanent DST.

Shh... don't give them any ideas!

It was a thing when GMail first launched

That would certainly be a huge incentive

Ok, you're right, thanks. I can still make additional mods in the thread afterwards though.

This. I hate that Wikipedia is dominated by the deletionists/exclusionists (and on a separate note people who think just because they edit a lot of pages they have the right to "own" pages and delete information the don't like). The potential of Wikipedia is so great to be a comprehensive repository of knowledge, and way back when it used to be working towards that goal. Now, the deletionists dominate, and I will never donate until Wikipedia finds a way to limit their influence.

replying to undo accidental mod

Democrats DO have a platform. Unfortunately, while Republicans hold the state houses, Congress, presidency, and now the Supreme Court, they are utterly powerless to make anything on that platform come to fruition. Any bills they propose just get squashed, never even coming to the floor to be voted down, even simple, stupid stuff that has wide national bipartisan support. (Such as DACA, since you rather helpfully brought it up.)

In such a circumstance, about the only thing they CAN do productively is to keep Republicans from passing yet more stupid legislation undermining our economy and freedoms, which is what they've been much more successful at doing these past couple of years than I honestly expected.

Nevertheless, there is still a clear Democratic platform. Seriously. They even publish it on the web so that anyone who wants to can go out and see it. There's even a section specifically on immigration.

Of course, that doesn't mean that every Democrat is in lockstep on every issue in that platform. We're not a hive mind, and there is sometimes ardent disagreement within the party over the nitty gritty details of how things can best be accomplished. For example, Bernie Sanders wants to have the federal minimum wage immediately go up to $15 everywhere. Hillary Clinton wanted to immediately increase it to $12 per hour, and allow individual cities where the cost of living is higher have the option of raising it higher as appropriate. Which way is better? I honestly don't know, I can see merits and downsides to both plans. But one thing I can say for damn sure is either plan would be better than the "Let's just leave it where it's been since 2009," or "Let's do away with the federal minimum wage completely!" plans that Republicans have embraced.

By the way, that Republican "Contract With America"? Very, very few of the items in that agenda actually got implemented. The dirty little secret that they didn't bother to tell anyone while they were hyping it is that the vast majority of the things on it would never get past the senate, let alone past a presidential veto. That whole thing was just a marketing gimmick. Yes, it was effective—if you define "effective" as getting people elected. But if instead you define "effective" as actually getting stuff done? Not so much.

Like it or not, that crown in recent history has to go to the Democratic Congress and Obama, who got the ACA passed. Like it or not, it was one of the most major overhauls of the health care system in our country's history. It was a huge undertaking, and even after it's been repeatedly undermined and gutted by Republicans, it's actually still helping people.