In the long run, residential solar saves people money due to more subtle subsidies resulting from how residential electricity is billed for. It's going to be very cheap for the grid to supply electricity at the times when residential solar produces well and much more expensive when it doesn't, thanks to grid-scale solar being so much cheaper than other forms of generation and storage, but residential customers are charged for both just the same. This means that wealthier people who can afford to install rooftop solar and not draw from the grid during those times when wholesale electricity prices are low are effectively being subsidised by less wealthy people who don't have this option.

The trouble with that reasoning is that, at least in the short term, most of the benefits of these vaccinations come from the first dose. The second dose seems to provide a slight boost to effectiveness and probably improves long-term immunity, but based on what we currently know getting the first vaccine dose to as many people as possible is the number one priority. So the only reason to only count people who've been given both doses is for political reasons, to justify bad strategic decisions by certain countries.

Also, the clause requiring them to make their "best efforts" to supply the EU with a specific number of vaccine doses specifically only applied to the EU production facilities and not the UK ones, for some reason.

The Eastern and Western US grids have had other equally spectacular wide-scale failures whilst the Texas grid remained up - they just happened at different times (and from somewhat different causes, including ones tied directly to the extra complexity of running a large, heavily interconnected grid). Someone could just as easily point to those failures in isolation as proof the Texas grid is better. Also, as far as I can tell there was no grid collapse due to cold in 1989 and 2011, just rolling blackouts comparable to the ones California had last summer.

From what I can tell, there was no grid collapse in 2011. Texas came closer than they probably should've, and had to enact rolling blackouts, but they didn't encounter the kind of complete failure that they're experiencing now and that the other two American grids have suffered from.

I suspect a lot of European countries do. Even the Czech Republic, which everyone was pointing to during the spring as the European success story which showed all the other countries in Europe should've done better, has a death rate very similar to that of the UK.

That isn't all the WHO team has done. They've also just lent their support to the theory China's been pushing that Covid-19 didn't originate in China at all and was brought into the country on frozen food. This is even more implausible than the lab escape theory for a variety of reasons (formites don't seem to be a major source of Covid-19 transmission, the detections on frozen food all appear to have been caused by outbreaks at the facilities where it was detected rather than vice-versa, and there'd be a lot more places than China seeing their hospitals overwhelmed early on in the pandemic if it had originated elsewhere). The reason China is pushing it is entirely political - it allows them to move the blame from their own governments' screw-ups onto foreigners. I think this may have happened after the linked article was written though.

The WHO's previous Covid-19 mission to China also resulted them in regurgitating a bunch of Chinese government claims - the one that stood out to me was the claim, based on what appeared to be an utterly nonsensical argument from evidence indicating the exact opposite, that China had detected basically all the Covid-19 infections in Wuhan and therefore there were no undetected or asmyptomatic cases. Current estimates from Chinese scientists are that maybe 1 in 10 cases were actually detected. This misinformation hugely fucked with everyone else's response to Covid-19. They also lent their backing to the Chinese government's story about how they'd "beaten" Covid-19, which was really obviously designed as propaganda for domestic consumption and wasn't remotely plausible as a method of stopping it.

I think the way Mugshots.com screwed up is that the site owners posted the information to the website themselves. Section 230 only protects the site owner from being treated as the author of posts and all the legal consequences that come with that if they did not, in fact, author the posts. The successful sites are the ones which got this right.

That doesn't help when Carol's forum (or in this case sites like Ripoff Report) don't allow the original poster to remove things. If they won't remove the defamatory stuff posted by Bob, then suing him does nothing to end the harm caused by it, and Section 230 makes it impossible to get an injunction to force the sites to remove it. Naturally, the websites with business models revolving around charging to remove defamatory content understand this and don't allow the original posters to remove it, leaving the victims with no option except to pay up.

Yes it has, and the only surprising thing is that it's taken so long for the mainstream press to notice. One of the consequences of Section 230 as interpreted by the US courts is that it's impossible to get content removed from sites like Ripoff Report except by paying them money, no matter how defamatory and false - they won't remove it otherwise and Section 230 makes it impossible to get any kind of court injunction forcing them to do so. An entire industry of sites has sprung up that takes advantage of this by hosting reputation and career-destroying smears against people and businesses, getting them ranked highly in Google results, and then charging the victims money to remove them. I know Ripoff Report in particular brags about the fact that everyone who tried to get defamatory content removed through the courts rather than by paying them failed.

A few weeks? More like his entire term in office until he was replaced by Biden. Remember, amongst other things Biden campaigned on the (utterly false) claim that Trump's existing, more targetted travel restrictions actually made things worse. All the existing evidence seems to be that they spared the US for at least a month until it got screwed over by the fact that Covid had gotten out of control in Europe completely undetected. Somehow, I don't think the public or media perception would be improved by Trump closing off travel from countries which were reporting no cases, especially given the narrative that he was relying on travel bans because he was an evil right-winger who wanted to close off borders even though it wouldn't work.

There's only one country I actually know of that's doing widespread random surveillance testing: the UK. (Presumably some of the smaller countries are as well, but it just doesn't seem to be commonplace.) Despite this and unusually widespread testing for people with possible symptoms, there's still a perception that we're failing at testing compared to the rest of the world, probably for the same reason there's a perception the US is: a large chunk of the press absolutely hates our leader for reasons totally unrelated to Covid.

This isn't the result of the UK or London being stuck in the past compared to Europe though. These are (as far as anyone can tell) current EU standards for policing-related data exchange between EU members which were copy and pasted into the Brexit deal in order to give us continued access to that exchange of data. That is to say, the European Union has been mandating the use of insecure encryption technologies for years and the BBC is spinning this to instead support the mainstream narrative that the UK screwed up, Brexit is a disaster, and we should just have remained in the EU rather than letting our incompetent government do things like this.

In order to find Covid cases, you need to test people for Covid, and America has a lot more than 4% of the total Covid testing. Most of Africa in particular is a bit of a black hole in terms of testing and there are a lot of people living there, but even Europe has been kind of lacking outside of the UK and a few other, mostly smaller, countries.

Not just by Russians on Twitter. As I recall, the mainstream media used security vulnerabilities in voting machines that were no longer in use to undermine confidence in the 2016 election results. This is all so transparent it's unbelievable, especially given that prior to Trump winning the election voting machine security was last portrayed as a major issue back when Bush won.