Wow, 100 years ago, Texas looked different. Amazing.

Let me guess, you know all this because Joy Reid, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and the ladies on the view said it was true?

For example, Reagan in the late 80s recorded a radio speech explaining why he was imposing high tariffs on Japan, a Canadian province took that speech, cut out the parts they didn't like, and tried to sway public and political opinion on trade discussions between Canada and the US with a $75M ad buy on US television. (Remember when Democrats were all upset about "deep fakes", "selectively-edited" and clips "taken out of context"?) President Trump called "Bullshit" on that and ended trade talks with Canada. That's a leader taking a stand and putting America first. Democrats can cry about our "bestie to the north", but that was a bullshit move, period. Imagine if Trump took a tariff speech from a Canadian leader (Pierre Trudeau?) selectively edited it, and spent $75 M on an TV ad buy to influence Canadian public and political opinions... would the left be OK with that?

Your link is about anti-renewable bills dying in Texas gov't - how does that support the statement "The Texas legislature and governor are rabidly anti-renewables"?

By killing "anti-renewable" legislation, doesn't that mean they are, you know, if not pro-renewables at least not "rabidly" anti-renewable?

You can be against subsidies for something and still be pro the thing others want to subsidize. You can support the idea of EVs, but be against giving car buyers $7,500 of taxpayer money to buy one. You can be pro green energy, but think it's wrong for taxpayers to subsidize installing them on private residences.

I'm sorry, what was the villainous act T Boone Pickins did? Simply identifying the value of water and trying to control it doesn't make one a villain...

You mean like Norway, which is sitting on what may be the largest oil reserves in the world, yet their (heavily subsidized) EV sales account for like 99%+ of new car sales?

No, it "shared the load" and did so by supplying just over one-third of the needs of the state.

If you and I shared a project and I did 36% of the work and you did 64%, would you say that I "carried the load"? I think not.

It's great that Texas is shifting its generation sources, folding ever more solar, wind, and storage into the mix, but let's not heap false praise on wind, solar, and storage...

For you hard-core Microsoft users, what could that corporate monstrosity possibly do to you that would make you FINALLY say "they've finally crossed the line! I am done!"?

Microsoft started out (in the PC context) providing a good command line based OS called MS-DOS that mostly just did what a simple OS should: provides some basic functionality to allow applications to run with a bit of system abstraction so the same code could run on systems with varying hardware configurations and sparing developers from having to code everything to-the-metal.

When the Mac threatened to up-end their world, Microsoft provided a crappy (but in-color) alternative they called "Windows" which eventually grew-up to be what a modern OS should be (the aforementioned hardware abstraction, but now aided by drivers etc) and the support for multi-tasking with the OS managing the shared resources. With Windows 3.11 they finally finished the move to a modern OS by adding networking support.

Follow-on updates were generally nice gradual improvements most users CHOSE to upgrade to as people moved up to Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 2000 etc always getting better graphics, stability, support for new hardware and newer standards, etc.... until Windows XP, Up until this moment, nobody FORCED customers to do anything, they CHOSE to move to newer versions because the newer versions offered enough value to convince them to part with their money... it was a good value proposition. With XP Microsoft started requiring the OS to "phone home" to the Mothership (but only for installation). This was the moment Microsoft made it clear THEY were in control of your PC... since it had to phone home to authorize the install, this meant that at some future time (which did indeed arrive) they could shut off the authorizing systems and you would no longer be able to re-install that version which you had purchased and if you wanted to keep using your PC you would be FORCED to buy a newer version.

THIS was the dividing line in time. From this point on, Microsoft went full-on arrogant and presumed THEY own your PC and THEY can jerk you around.

With every subsequent release of Windows, Microsoft has FORCED people to upgrade, FORCED hardware obsolescence (driving countless tons of perfectly good electronics into landfills), FORCED software incompatibilities (new OS version -> new Microsoft app version -> new Microsoft app file formats...) and made the OS phone-home more invasive. When they started snooping on keystrokes and mouse movements, people got over the shock pretty quickly and continued using the newer versions like some sort of dysfunctional drug addicts encountering a new side-effect. Now with forced online accounts, "cloud" storage/backups (oooooh, it's so FLUFFY!) people are losing sensitivity to who has their data and where it's stored and who might access it....

Just where is the limit on how evil Microsoft can go before people say "nope. This far, but no further"???

I'm personally disgusted by how much of corporate America (and particularly governments and Medical facilities) have gone along with all of this to the point where HIPAA and even Constitutional rights are no longer in-force. When governments and medical facilities put your private and sensitive info into systems running Windows and constantly phoning home to the Microsoft Mothership and servers, just where is the guarantee of security and privacy? Just what redress is available if any of it is compromised, and will anybody even know if it is compromised? Do people at Microsoft or in government even acknowledge that such things ARE "compromises" when they become design features? Just how secure is YOUR data in a Microsoft cloud if a very powerful and important Microsoft customer (the US government? China's communist party?) demands Microsoft grant them access? Certainly Microsoft values those big customers more than it values YOU and possibly your small business. Are YOUR small business's intellectual property secrets safe and secure on a Windows PC tethered to the Microsoft Mothership and how do you know if Microsoft is accessing that info for its own use, or to sell/trade it to some more important [to THEM] entity like the Chinese or Indian government?

NONE of these things were possible on good old MS-DOS. All of these things are possible on Windows 11. When will people decide to break the habit, free themselves from the addiction, and get clean?

1. Who made it "the Gulf of Mexico"? Why did somebody arbitrarily naming it for Mexico (Mexico does NOT own it, and the US has more coastline with it) make it a fixed and unchangeable thing to you? It was actually refreshing to see Trump call this one out. There was never a good reason to call it the "Gulf of Mexico", and in this era where China is trying (on the global stage) to set a precedent that they can demand the world recognize their ownership of the body of international water traditionally called "The South China Sea" simply because the word "China" is in the title, Trump's action sets up a whataboutism for all those in the spineless international diplomacy arena (who would likely immediately fold in the face of China) to have to face. The fact that his challenging of a stupid old thing nobody had ever codified into law (thus leaving it as only a goofy tradition) has suddenly made people within whose heads he clearly resides go completely whacko was just a bonus.

2. Freedom Fries... ahhh yes, so after a few years you finally get the joke? Too bad so many on your side of the aisle spend so much time working themselves into a froth of outrage and are unable to see when the Bad Orange Man is just kidding around. He's not really that hard to understand; you guys used to not react this way back in the decades when he was a Democrat.

3. "extrajudicial murder"? Really wanna go there? Were you outraged when Bill Clinton distracted the nation during the Monica Lewinski affair by bombing an aspirin factory in Sudan? Were you fine with Obama droning an American citizen to death? The Council on Foreign Relations (hardly some pro-Trump outfit) says "The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians." I think that about does it for being hyper-freaked-out over ANY "extra-judicial murder[s]" by Trump.

4. "Hypernationalistic renaming of bodies of water"? Just what the hell is the difference between renaming something and hypernationalistically renaming it? And just why the hell is it OK to name it for the nation of Mexico, but some fundamental challenge to planetary norms to name it for America (which, by the way, is a term that not only applies to the USA, but also generically to "the Americas", which INCLUDES Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, etc). Why is it some freak-out thing to have somebody rename a thing (oooh, without an international committee at the UN!) but NOT the same problem when somebody names it in the first place without said international thingamajig? Do you have ANY evidence that renaming a body of water has EVER lead to either World War III or the re-instatement of the military draft in the history of the human race?

Oh, I get it. Orange Man Bad!!!! Mental illness is the new norm!

Seek professional help, there seems to be a real estate developer and former reality TV guy living in your head.

Is this a shocker to Gen Z or something because older folks are well aware that virtually all unofficial files which don't come from an official or trusted source are malware. How do you think we survived in a world where 99% of the material on our systems came from pirate bay?

Not the weather? Wasn't the issue at Fukushima that they built the reactor on the shoreline and an earthquake and tsunami surge flooded the facility?

But no, you think it was a failure to perform regular maintenance? Really?

https://world-nuclear.org/info...

"Is the dark side more powerful?"
"No. Quicker. Smoother. More seductive."

"LLMs are the path to the dark side.
Tokens lead to context. Context leads to Attention.
Attention leads to Hallucinations.
Hallucination leads to suffering."

"But what if we put up guardrails?"

"Quiet your mind you must.
No more will I teach you today."

throw some gas on it to put it out!

Yeah... that's the sort of thinking at play here: [1] Identify a problem and then [2] propose a "solution" that seems great to a simpleton but which would actually make things far worse. There's simply NO situation in which unionizing a set of workers makes quality and quantity and price get better for the consumer or average citizen. Unionized auto workers in the US famously produced higher car prices and lower quality cars. Unionized government workers produced the world's worst "consumer experience" which is why a visit to the DMV is considered and example of hell on Earth...

At the margins, unionization can produce improved worker conditions for SOME workers SOMETIMES. It generally helps the less-productive and less-capable workers stay employed and get higher pay than their work would justify as they ride on the coat-tails of the better employees who fall victim to the propaganda that they need to unionize and all "stick together". The primary problem is this: Unionization is simply incapable of defeating the basic economic laws. If economic conditions require a reduction of labor costs, then pay and benefit reductions or job losses are going to happen, no matter what a union says. If the labor cuts are not implemented, then the entity doing the employing will eventually fail and all the jobs will be lost. The only exception is government workers, where economics are not really at play because things like tax increases are available (a forced infusion of new funds). This is a big reason why so many formerly-great and iconic businesses who at one time unionized are no longer in existence or are now a shadow of their former selves. Ask the retirees of any unionized company who (long after retiring on their supposedly good benefits provided by those union contracts) how they felt when the benefits were reduced and their old unions agreed to it as part of some later negotiation...

The solution (assuming there IS one) is NOT to unionize, but to change the laws and regulations applied in the marketplace that lead to the conditions that cause people to WANT to unionize. If we assume that the problems we seek to address are not a normal marketplace thing driven purely by natural and desirable market forces that we should find better ways of coping with, then those problems should be viewed as systemic and those require policy changes across the entire marketplace and NOT unionization which warps a segment of the marketplace in un-sustainable ways.

Americans are often goaded into thinking this is a good idea by people pointing to certain European countries where (they are told) unions have made a workers' paradise... but they're often mislead about the down-sides. Americans would not likely accept the low growth rates, high tax rates, and mountains of rules and regulations that would accompany copying that model, and it would not actually work anyway given that it's based in-part on an economic lie; those European economies have all floated on a subsidy from the American taxpayer for about 8 decades as American workers paid for much of the dense of Europe, and paid higher prices for thing like medications as the American consumer bore the weight of the R&D costs (which were held off of the prices paid across the Atlantic). As Margaret Thatcher once said, the problem is that sooner or later you run out of others' money.

How many of us are going to want to fly on planes piloted by people of this upcoming generation, cross over bridges designed by engineers who graduated using these brain crutches, and be operated upon by doctors who had an AI help them pass their exams and who can remember nothing of what they supposedly learned?

If people thought Orwell was painting a dark picture of the future, they ought to realize he was probably an amateur and things are likely going to be far worse, and in a way even he did not see coming...

This entire problem was launched with a lie. That lie was being pushed already in the 1980s and it was very effective with the CEOs of many companies who seemed eager prove the old communist prediction true (that capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which they (the capitalists) would be hanged.).

The lie was: "Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world's largest markets. " (the bold part).

When the Chinese started telling American CEOs that they (China) were the most populated nation on Earth and the yet the least already exploited as a consumer market, American execs went nuts; the ones who'd already achieved marketplace saturation in the West started projecting higher sales to investors based on the idea that there were massive numbers of Chinese consumers who would soon become customers. Lobbyists pushed politicians to drop obstacles to business with China and a bi-partisan drive lead the Bush41 admin to push for trade with China (Remember: Bush41 had been a US ambassador to China and had gone a bit native as many ambassadors do). When Bush left office, the supposedly opposite admin of Bill Clinton finished the political lift needed and got China admitted to the WTO. Older people here will remember, and younger ones can look up, the scandals of the 1990s when the Clintons and then Vice President Al Gore were found to be entangled with illegal Chinese money coming from oddball characters like "Jonnie Chung" and doing fund raising in Chinese monasteries (as though a bunch of Asian Monks were awash in cash...) as American businesses "accidentally" leaked American tech (including ballistic missile guidance tech (look up Hughes and Loral) to China. Every time somebody noticed the negative effects of the Jobs and tech going to China, it was treated as a surprising accident and politicians on both sides of the aisle, pushed by money from the same lobbyists, kept advancing policies to "increase trade" to supposedly help companies get access to those imaginary Chinese consumers (who, in actuality had no surplus cash to use to buy Western stuff). It was always hinted at (to the US voters) that the politicians were doing something to "crack down" with Democrats pretending to care about the job losses (as THEY pretended to be pro-worker) and Republicans pretending to be security-minded (as THEY pretended to be "defense hawks"). American companies eagerly exported their jobs to China to lower labor costs and improve profit margins (foolishly teaching China how the tech worked as a necessary step of course) all the while telling stock holders that the imaginary Chinese consumer market would soon provide an amazing boost in revenues.

The thing is, that long-promised massive Chinese consumer market was never there, and never going to be there. By the time the average Chinese citizen would have enough expendable income to spend buying stuff that was more than just the basic necessities, the Chinese "companies" which had geared-up to make all the Western stuff and now knew how to make it would be making those items themselves and the average Chinese person would buy from their own local vendors, while the benefits of scaled-up production would make the Western equivalent products (also made in China) too expensive in comparison.

There were people who saw this coming and warned the people of the Western countries, but they were generally shut-down and labelled "bigots" as a combination of Chinese operators and those drooling American executives who could see nothing but those supposedly eager future Chinese customers joined forces both in lobbying the politicians and in pushing messaging in the media. This problem has been a long time in the making and the "establishment" politicians of BOTH American parties are every bit as much to blame ad the greed heads in the corporate executive suites.

The kittys are not what they seem.