And by the time the first "warning" was raised- the girl's camp was under water. The "emergency" wasn't raised until hours later.

And the republican legislature (including the repp for Kerr County) voted down the flood siren warning system. He says now that he "might" have voted differently.

The emergency alerts on the phones do not discriminate. They play that incredibly nasty noise.
And they also play it for amber alerts--- for kids who were kidnapped over 100 miles away -- 24 hours a day.

One you get woken up for a watch or an amber alert at 3am out of a sound sleep, the alerts get turned off.

Is that even with all this solar, wind, etc.... China *still* must build more coal plants even tho we are finding out their population is smaller than we thought.

In time, alternative energy will destroy demand for coal but for now, the projections are still for more coal plant by 2045.

I'm hoping they are wrong and solar/wind comes online faster. It's cheaper than coal but they simply can't produce and build it out fast enough globally.

I watch a lot of maritime disaster videos, so YouTubeâ(TM)s genius algorithm thinks Iâ(TM)d be interested in traveling on a cruise ship.

Is that with all this solar, wind, etc.... China *still* must build more coal plants even tho we are finding out their population is smaller than we thought.

In time, it will destroy demand for coal but for now, the projections are still for more coal plant by 2045.

I'm hoping they are wrong and solar/wind comes online faster. It's cheaper than coal but they simply can't produce and build it out fast enough globally.

And it's not just kids (won't someone think of the children)...

In Texas, we can get a half dozen "watch" alerts a day when storm systems are moving through.

That's *POINTLESS*. If your alert system is sending more than one message a day, you probably didn't set it up well.

And worse, the watches usually mean "stay at home, avoid getting caught in deep flood waters" and not "leave your home because floodwaters over your roof will be there in under 90 minutes."

And it's not even just amber alerts. You can get a half dozen "watch" alerts from a fast moving system *per day*.

At that level, "watch" alerts are useless. Especially since in most of texas they mean, "don't leave home or your car may be flooded out" and not "leave home- your home will be flooded out".

And the short staffing of the service in the U.S. due to Ham-handed layoffs this year did not help.

Well, your buying power would be crippled.

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.

That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".

In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.

Just not going to support the fascist overthrow of the U.S. government.

I'm beginning to suspect the election might have been hacked.

Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.

Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.

It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.

Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.

The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.

As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.

Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.