Was there a point to that?

Hmmm. Unlike a totally serious AC like you.

Yet you don't bother explaining how I am supposedly misrepresenting you. You have never actually said what was supposedly creatively snipped by me to change the meaning of what you wrote and how it does so.

Sigh. And around and around we go. Once gain, the interpretations and claims I make are not the same s the actual quote. I did not alter the quote in any way that removed context or meaning. My interpretation does not have to agree with you. I honestly represented what you actually wrote.

If party A is the council and B is the President, and C is Congress, how can what you are saying there be consistent with your original claim that the board is "there to help the President provide a proposal to Congress" and that the board "...once the President make's [sic] the call..." is "obligated to help with that direction."

You don't seem to be able to keep what you are even claiming straight, so we keep going around and around pointlessly. Your original claim was essentially that the board should advise the President but that, once the President had made a decision, the board would then need to adjust their advice to Congress based on the President's direction. Now are you reversing that and saying I was right all along?

I do not keep omitting it, you're just flat out playing pretend at this point.

For the rest of that, you seem to be implying that the board directly proposes a budget to Congress? This is a new claim. You know that's not how it works, right?

In other words, you're a coward and an idiot.

I am not conflating it with budgetary spending. Leeway in how to spend money is simply one of the pieces of authority that Congress can delegate. As for your claim that, if the authority is to be limited, Congress seems to say so, do you think that Congress has to say so before the fact? They are totally empowered to take back any of their own authority they have delegated in the past because delegation does not mean that you give up authority. That's why it is called delegation and not a surrender or gift.

I don't think I'm the one with the reading comprehension issues if we've gotten this far down the thread and you're just getting here now.

This is quite obviously actually a case of the executive trying to usurp legislative authority. The widely disputed reasoning in a couple of recent Supreme Court cases from the shadow docket do not change that.

Quite simply not true. The function of the Executive is to carry out the laws enacted by Congress. The direction of the work product of the Executive is decided by Congress. The role of the executive is supposed to be to handle the practical aspects of heading in that direction.

As an example, take Kennedy's speech on how the US had to go to the moon. In it, he explicitly said:

"Let it be clear—and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make—let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action."

So, the President did ask Congress for a direction, and Congress approved it. But the direction of the work product of the executive - in that case, the Apollo program - was absolutely something that Congress not only had a say in, but had absolute control over. If they had voted not to go to the moon, the direction of the executive's work product would have been something else.

Just more abject nonsense from you. You make claims, but can't back them up in the slightest.

There were plenty of very credible reasons to doubt it and lots of motive for lying in the first place. I admit that maybe I am not giving teenage script kiddies who call themselves things like "Big Balls" and are affiliated with cybercrime groups and white supremacist organizations the benefit of the doubt. Must be my personal biases against complete unqualified people doing professional work.

That's a nice quote. Where did it come from?

While it is true that, if you divide things up by political party affiliation, 95% of Democrats have an unfavorable opinion of him, since 56% of the overall population has an unfavorable view of him and only 33% have a favorable view, it's clearly not just left wingers who don't like the guy. Considering that there is no other recorded incident in either Rebuplican or Democrat administrations of one cabinet member giving another cabinet member a black eye in recorded history other than the black eye that Musk originally claimed came from his toddler son, but turned out to be from Bessent, it does appear that there are Republicans who don't like the guy either. As it turns out, even outside of politics, a lot of people who end up around Musk, but are not forced into some sort of position of subservience to him end up really disliking him or at least having a hard time finding a way to like him.

Regarding Musk:

"...the man who has lost his mind..." "train wreck" "completely off the rails" --Donald Trump

"The principles of DOGE were very popular... Elon was not" --Scott Bessent

"Pathetic man-child" --Vivian Musk, one of his children.

"Spoilt Child" -- Errol Musk, his father. Of course Musk has said his father has done "almost every evil thing you can possibly think of"

"his gift is not empathy" --Kimball Musk, his brother

"terrified of his own cousin" is the way that a Twitter executive described James Musk, a cousin after finding him apparently sobbing.

"Jekyll-and-Hyde" -- Tosca Musk, his sister, describing his personality.

"Odd, odd Duck" -- Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff.

"I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he's not funny. Like, at all." most irritating person I've ever had to deal with." -- Anonymous senior officials

"...holding the children hostage..." -- Grimes, mother of some of his children.

All of the evidence seems to suggest that it doesn't take a "sad echo chamber" to find Musk unlikable, it just takes being around him.

While technically true it's not really meaningful here. What matters is the legal point of view.

From a cognitive point of view, yes. From a legal point of view, no. For example, for judges, dislike of a party in a trial is not a basis for recusal. They are expected to exercise professional detachment and impartiality. The same basic principle applies for juror selection. Dislike is a potential red flag and, ideally, a judge can get around the problem by simply selecting jurors who have no existing dislike for the party. When that is not possible though, the Judge is meant to judge whether or not the juror appears to be someone who can also exercise detachment and be impartial. They are also supposed to steer the jury instructions, allowed testimony, etc. in such a way that the jury is equipped to decide the trial, to the degree possible, based on the facts of the case at hand, not on their emotions.

Which the judge does their best to provide. What else exactly are you expecting?

Not going to bother with addressing that point by point. I am just going to say that clearly represents your own personal "bias" (if that's the term we're using). You may view everything as unfair to Musk because you are a fan, but that doesn't mean that it actually is unfair.

I'm certainly not insisting on it as a required system. Overall round trip efficiency is pretty low, but understand that this is meant to be part of a tiered energy system to complement renewables that significantly overproduce during one part of the year and underproduce during another, like solar power. The point is that you can take that excess and produce something stable that you can easily store in arbitrary amounts long-term. Not that the efficiency doesn't matter at all, but this can still be an inefficient process because it would be a third tier for storing excess power, with first tiers being batteries and second tier things like hydro storage, or underground pressure chambers, etc. With current methods, this is not likely to be a winning system. Other methods like electrolysis of water for hydrogen and making methane from it with ocean-derived CO2 and storing the methane seems like it would beat such a system. It is worthwhile to consider all the options though.

What are you even talking about? I didn't give any estimates for the aluminum system. How can estimates I didn't give be off by orders of magnitude. Also, you seem to be once again erroneously suggesting that I am talking about making aluminum to sell as ingots or something, which you just claimed that you understood was not the case. So confusing.

??? What? What are you even talking about? 2 to 4 days to reach room temperature? Even if you're not using heat pumps or anything like that, you literally said 10 kWh, you must be able to figure out that with a 4.5 kW heating element and virtually no heat loss, it will heat up to that 10 kWh in about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Also, a 60 gallon tank starting at room temperature will be storing 15 kWh of heat at about 77 degrees C.

Also, you're conflating the example of home water heaters with the massive municipal sized tanks I'm talking about holding millions of gallons. Even without much in the way of insulation those would hold their heat for a huge amount of time. Thanks to the square-cube ratio, the amount of insulation needed relative to volume is tiny.

Why specifically the example of California?

You seem to be missing the point.

You're still ignoring the transportation issues. Which is odd, because you made the same point yourself when you wrote:

and

You must see the logical problem with citing the cost factor of transportation in favor of desalination, but then reversing course when claiming that the world only has local fresh water shortages that can be solved by transporting water from places like Russia or Canada.

There seems to be a lot of irony in that claim.

As for your questions. Iran is the one currently demanding fees. However, the President of the US has made numerous statements insisting that the US is the one with the right to control the strait and that they should, either alone, or jointly with Iran, be charging fees for passage through the strait.

I'm curious what you think you're replying to with that? Your reply has no bearing on the actual comment you're replying to. Are you just a bot?

They were replying to me quoting Trump literally saying that he planned to do that. Even team up with Iran to do it.

So, you have to regularly drive a distance that's in the narrow range that's beyond what an EV can do, but under what an ICE can do on a single charge/fillup? OK. So it sounds like you would be best served by a PHEV (taking care of course that it's a legit PHEV that can actually drive on battery power without running the ICE engine to provide extra power to the wheels).

As for:

Whatever you might supposed to get from that, I don't see any rational way you get "screw them."

My understanding of it has more to do with the regulator screwing up. Aside from making serious miscalculations, they apparently failed to make use of available renewable power. In any case, there were a number of causes, but yeah, MacMann's take is cuckoo. If anything, when it comes to renewables, their problem was more under-reliance on renewables than over-reliance. Ultimately, it was a cascade type failure where issues on the grid kept causing producers to drop off the grid, making the overall problem worse.

In any case, it looks like one of the things they are planning to fix the problem for the future is installing a lot of battery backup, which is basically a win for renewables.

Some have, of course (Norway, Costa Rica, Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) but I will grant that those are mostly special cases with abundant sources of hydro and/or geothermal and/or wind.

Austria has managed to reach the 90%+ mark also, but I am not sure if it is consistent. Then there are countries like Brazil, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, and New Zealand that are nearly at the 90%+ mark and increasing. Chile, Canada, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands are not as close, but are well on their way there.

Basically, having the right natural resources and lots of land area per person helps, but the general trend is getting closer and closer to that 90%+ or even 95%+ mark. Out of the countries I listed, if you look at just the portion of them at the threshhold or above, the total population is over half a billion. At the current rate, it's going to be in the billions soon. We're also likely to see the same developing country game of technological leapfrog that happens with many technologies like cell phones, etc. As it is, 33% of the world's electricity is already from renewables. What are you going to be claiming when that increases by 50% (which will also be 50%, of course) and half the world's electrical power and increasing is renewables? 67%? What percent of the world's electricity generation (and what percentage of countries with 90%+ or 90%+ of their usage coming from renewables) would it actually take for you to reassess your position? Because increases like that are certainly coming.

I'm sorry, but what? You think your position that nuclear power is actually the best and lowest price, etc. and that the only problem is that it hasn't been allowed to spread its wings freely and unregulated and unprotested, without which some mass production principle would kick in and it would absolutely beat renewables, even with their continually dropping costs is not a "trust me, bro" attitude? Wow.