Preview of @POTUS budget released today: “tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.” https://t.co/Qg8kNDFU2i
— Kristen Orthman (@KristenOrthman) March 11, 2024
Per the Associated Press:
President Joe Biden on Monday released a budget proposal aimed at getting voters’ attention: It would offer tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
Unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law, the proposal for fiscal 2025 is an election year blueprint about what the future could hold if Biden and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November. The president and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, and they provided the fine print on Monday.
If the Biden budget became law, deficits could be pruned $3 trillion over a decade. It would raise tax revenues by a total of $4.9 trillion over that period and use roughly $1.9 trillion to fund various programs, with the rest going to deficit reduction…
Under the proposal, the government would spend $7.3 trillion next fiscal year and borrow $1.8 trillion to cover the shortfall from tax receipts. Biden’s 188-page plan covers a decade’s worth of spending, taxes and debt.
Parents could get an increased child tax credit in 2025, as payments would return briefly to the 2021 level funded by Biden’s coronavirus pandemic relief package. Homebuyers could get a tax credit worth up to $10,000 and the plan includes $10 billion in down payment aid for first-generation buyers. Corporate taxes would jump upward, while billionaires would be charged a minimum tax of 25%.
Biden said in his State of the Union that Medicare should have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200 billion over 10 years. Aides said his budget does not specify how many drug prices would be subject to negotiations…
Meanwhile, Congress is still working on a budget for the current fiscal year. On Saturday, Biden signed into law a $460 billion package to avoid a shutdown of several federal agencies, but lawmakers are only about halfway through addressing spending for this fiscal year.
Repub Counter-argument:
Ron Johnson: “Inside the bubble, Republicans say, ‘we need to get a result, we need to effectively govern.’ To me, that’s almost code words for we got to do Democrat-lite. I think we’d be far better off if we never passed another piece of legislation.” pic.twitter.com/41c1sIaleG
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 11, 2024
So, on the same day President Biden released his budget — which includes tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, & higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations — Donald Trump just told CNBC he will cut social security & medicare. Biden & Trump are NOT the same. Period.
— Victor Shi (@Victorshi2020) March 11, 2024
Reminder, social media peeps — Sharing is caring:
Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now he knows he has to be a warrior. Efforts at bi-partisanship, reconciliation & mutual understanding have not contained Trumpist extremism. GOP capitulation shows that defeating it is the only option
My column-free access https://t.co/AKGShJVxyL— EJ Dionne (@EJDionne) March 10, 2024
E.J. Dionne, at the Washington Post — “Biden hoped to be a peacemaker. Now, he knows he must be a warrior”:
Two ideas about how to move the United States back to normal, less acrid politics have warred with each other ever since Donald Trump rode division and resentment to power. On one side were calls for big-hearted efforts at reconciliation and mutual understanding. On the other was an insistence that the extremist virus had to be contained before anything better was possible.
President Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday was about many things, especially a furious energy that countered talk about the limitations of his age. But above all, it marked the final collapse of the reconciliation strategy. It was an acknowledgment that sermons about putting aside our differences are out of touch with the country we have become…
A strategy of warfare requires tactical decisions. Rallying Democrats was the first priority of his speech, but Biden made two of his other top objectives obvious. He intends to fight hard for the kinds of Republicans and independents who rallied to Nikki Haley’s candidacy by making clear that he will stand up for Ukraine’s survival and stand strong against Vladimir Putin’s threats. His pointed contrast of Trump with Ronald Reagan reminded many Republicans of a heritage their soon-to-be nominee would squander by “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
Biden’s emphasis on reproductive rights, including in vitro fertilization, also appeals to a large share of middle-of-the-road and even moderately conservative suburbanites, particularly women, who see radicalism in the drive to upset the old status quo on abortion access…
Pundits frequently deride policy proposals as “laundry lists.” But offering detail about what government could do to ease the day-to-day problems of the non-affluent — from health care to child care to the curse of “junk fees” and “price gouging” — is popular with the many voters who long to escape the trenches of our cold civil war. It’s a vision of a politics that refocuses on the everyday. And Biden’s plea for tax fairness calls the bluff of a political adversary who is about as “populist” as the dues-paying members of Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster.
Still, there’s no way back to the normal skirmishes of democracy and the possibilities of civic friendship without first routing those who threaten democracy itself. They thrive only in a politics that sees domestic enemies everywhere and view groups they dislike as “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Biden finds his comfort zone in compromises over infrastructure bills and budgets. He’ll have to live the next eight months far from that happy place, doing battle against the forces of “resentment, revenge and retribution” that make the approach to public life he loves impossible.
On The Road – frosty – 3rd Annual National Park/COVID Challenge – Oregon – Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area – Falls
NotMax
Headline today: Budget.
Headline tomorrow: Impasse.
Baud
Ron Johnson is right for once. Historically, our voters get more depressed by inaction than their voters.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
I would like to repeat something different-church-lady said in the late night thread:
I WANT TO PUNCH DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME IN THE FACE. REPEATEDLY.
That is all.
Shalimar
I am not surprised to find that Ron Johnson thinks the job he spends 10s of millions to get every 6 years is completely useless.
satby
Since he doesn’t believe he and his party should do the job most people elected them to do, Ron Johnson should be retired in the next election he runs in. Nothing’s more wasteful than a government goldbricker.
Baud
@satby:
Their job is to defend white prerogatives.
Layer8Problem
I for one am totally down with ideas, concepts, and notions being punchable in their faces. We need to work on this.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I suspect one of the reasons so many liberals are down on Biden for “doing nothing”, regardless of anything he’s actually accomplished, is very simple: the ONE thing they really wanted him to do was put Donald Trump in jail. He hasn’t done that. Donald Trump is running around free, is the presumptive Republican nominee and has a decent chance of being elected President!
Now I’m agnostic as to whether Merrick Garland could have gone faster, but I do know the administration is aware that they’re building a case for a vast criminal conspiracy against a well-funded, famous, powerful white man, and when you do that, if you go hastily he’ll probably just get off scot free and turn the political tables on you. But that certainly doesn’t give us the catharsis we wanted.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Trump wouldn’t be in jail. The courts would probably allow him to stay out of jail while he appealed his convictions.
I also don’t believe that Trump in jail is the one thing that makes the difference. The one thing is always shifting to whatever we haven’t done yet.
PST
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
At present, our household consists of a dog and a retiree, neither of whom recognizes the existence of daylight saving time. We’re on solar time. The only clock that matters is the timer on the coffee maker, and by good fortune it’s off line, so it can be made to reject DST too by the simple expedient of doing nothing at all.
OzarkHillbilly
Hey Ron? If you’re serious about never passing another piece of legislation, the answer is quite obvious: Resign.
opiejeanne
@rikyrah: Good morning!
I’m rarely awake early enough to say it to you, and I should go back to sleep soon.
SteveinPHX
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: That’s one thing the cowboys here in AZ get right. They won’t mess with the clock.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Assuming conviction, he’ll get house arrest. I just hope he doesn’t get to pick the house, something like Junior Soprano’s house, not Marred a Lardo.
Layer8Problem
@Matt McIrvin:
If TFG had been somehow tried, convicted, and sentenced to life at Guantanamo by April 2020 with a magic ironclad prosecution faultlessly performed by the good Justice Department fairies, we’d have people saying “the fact that he wasn’t tossed in an oubliette at 12:15 p.m. on January 20th, 2020 shows the Biden Administration simply doesn’t care.”
ColoradoGuy
I think much of the rage is the realization that much, perhaps even most, of the justice system is a gigantic fraud, with at least four tiers of Justice.
*The ultra-wealthy not only never face justice, but they write the laws, and even the Supreme Court fabricates the law on the fly to get the outcomes they want. The Supreme Court has lost the fig-leaf of legal scholarship, and become an instrument of Leonard Leo, the Opus Dei wing of Catholicism, and a hidden billionaire class.
* The police, although nominally working class and represented by a very powerful union, are capable of becoming a local criminal gang defended by judges and prosecutors. Not in every town, but ask any Los Angeles resident what it feels like.
* Then there is the vast middle class, keenly aware they are only one mis-step away from collapsing into poverty, and only capable of paying for the lowest tier of legal representation. Their hard-won rights and citizenship are provisional, and can be withdrawn at any time for the slightest of infractions.
* And of course the working class and the poor, who are exploited at every turn, and are effectively an internal colony, without any rights, and subject to random terrorism by police and businesses.
Trump is a living, breathing reminder of the true nature of the system. Trained from an early age by Roy Cohn, he laughs at the rest of society, the psychopath who gets away with everything, not just once, but over and over again. No wonder he has become a cult leader.
Spanky
@OzarkHillbilly: He won’t have a house to pick, once they start getting seized.
Spanky
@Spanky: But I’d be happy if he went off to spend more time with Ivana.
(Edited for fat fingering.)
Baud
@Spanky:
Maybe Chubb has a house he can borrow.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Ask his voters if they’re happy with billionaires paying next to nothing in taxes. Ask them if they couldn’t use some more tax breaks.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I seem to remember that one of the Iran-Contra people served a sentence in a house on a military base. It’s possible I’m making that up?
Baud
@ColoradoGuy:
You’re not wrong, but as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that rage, for a lot of people, has become an excuse for inaction or worse, actively supporting the fascists.
I’m dedicated to supporting the people who fight back, regardless of whatever emotions drive them.
catclub
Who is the ‘we’ that is better off doing nothing? – the GOP legislative caucus.
Party first, Putin next, USA last.
Kay
Washington Post has the transcript of the Hur interview with Biden. Shockingly, it appears Hur misrepresented the interview – Biden was fine.
No one got and read the transcript before “reporting” on it?!? Wow. Sloppy.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I’m not planning a trip to Wisconsin anytime soon. Maybe Omnes can do it and report back.
Generally, what people want diverges significantly from what drives their voting habits. All we can do is make reasonable efforts to persuade.
Matt McIrvin
@ColoradoGuy: There’s one other thing that stacks the deck against us: the Hack Gap. None of those systemic problems matter to Republicans as long as their guy is in power. But all of it DOES matter to Democrats, so we won’t be happy even with substantive wins while all that stands.
Baud
@Kay:
Narrative first, facts later.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed.
Kay
It’s like not reading a police report. They just took Hur’s word for it when Biden’s actual words were available? This has to be deliberate. No one is this bad at their job.
Baud
@Kay:
One positive is that we have excellent people in that committee.
ETA: Autocorrect is just deliberately screwing me over now.
Baud
@Kay:
Jesus.
ETA: Sounds like a story for page A43 of the NYT.
catclub
@Kay: Thanks! off to look.
OzarkHillbilly
@Spanky: Heh.
Betty
@Kay: It fits their narrative about Biden, but still shocking. This should be a good hearing. Thanks, Jordan, for the opportunity to talk about this. I am guessing Raskin has read the transcript.
Kay
My oldest son works in fintech as an engineer and I asked him recently if he was worried about AI and he said “no- the secret to my success is not technical knowlege, it’s that I read everything related to the project and no one else does”.
Checks out! :)
LiminalOwl
@rikyrah: Good morning!
Baud
@Kay:
The crypto guys are coming full bore for Dems.
Baud
@Kay:
How does that question even come up?
Layer8Problem
@Layer8Problem: Whoops, make that 2021. How fallible of me.
Kay
@Baud:
Still relying on that third grade “excellent” in reading, he is.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: The problem with the massive pivot to AI is that it doesn’t actually matter what AI can do; what matters is what venture capitalists THINK it can do.
It’s like the huge “pivot to video” that wrecked a bunch of social media platforms before they discovered the need for it was entirely based on one incorrect study. Only larger.
I believe there are legitimate uses for machine-learning technology, where you really do get some benefit from aping a pattern in some existing corpus of data. I also believe that 90% of the big flashy applications getting attention right now are not it, and that a lot of the VCs chasing it are either delusional, or just intentionally betting on longshots with the belief that the few who win will be kings of the world. But in the process, a lot of damage is going to be done because technology that already worked and people who were effective got booted in the pivot to the VCs’ flavor of the month.
TBone
@Baud:
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s interesting. He’s a natural skeptic and understands it much better than I do and is wary that it’s being oversold. But I think it’s true that people (can) bring a lot more value than narrow “technical knowlege”.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, … WhiteHouse.gov:
What does that mean?
DefenseNews.com (from March 6):
(Emphasis added.)
IOW, unless Congress passes and Biden signs the last of the FY24 budget before the deadline, there will be automatic Sequestration cuts in Defense and non-Defense discretionary spending starting on May 1.
The remaining CR ends on March 22. National Flood Insurance authorization expires on March 22.
FAA authorization expires on May 10. Other deadlines are helpfully listed here.
The routine stuff of government is important and still needs to happen. Johnson not wanting to do his job is effectively the same as voting to burn the place down.
Vote the monsters out!!1
Grr…,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: It could have been just small talk, not even part of the official interview. Which, if so is even more damning of Hur.
lowtechcyclist
@Betty:
I bet he’s not only read it, but has underlined and highlighted particularly relevant passages, and has made lots of notes in the margin.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@TBone: I was thinking about that when Biden said he’d codify Roe if he had enough Ds in Congress. I can imagine the Supreme Court declaring a law unconstitutional because reasons.
TBone
@Another Scott: hang on tight, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Kay
The NYTimes has now (belatedly) read the transcript too after “reporting” on a false depiction of it give to them by a political operative and smearing Biden for 2 weeks. Oh, well. Better to be first than correct!
SFAW
@Baud:
I blame the DST time change.
TBone
@Dorothy A. Winsor: we need to JUST WIN, BABY and fix that. It’ll be a long wait till then, so patience and perseverance are key.
Melancholy Jaques
@lowtechcyclist:
If it makes liberals angry, they are happy with it.
R-Jud
@Kay: I’m a marketing consultant who does lots of copywriting–supposedly among the most replaceable occupations thanks to AI–and I suddenly have lots of work “fixing” articles and whitepapers some executive tried to write using ChatGPT. Usually at rush rates. Good times!
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
That’s the way to do it. I predict he’ll have a long and successful career.
rusty
Given Hur has resigned his position so he isn’t bound by ethics rules when he testifies, I’m glad to have this out there to at least show his bias. Hopefully the Democrats can use it to undermine his testimony.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: SMH, as the kids say.
SFAW
@Matt McIrvin:
Maybe I’m too cynical for my own good, but I have never believed TFG will see the inside of a jail cell as a “guest of the state.” No matter how damning the evidence might be, there will always be one or more MAGAts on the jury.
But at least the evidence will make it into the public discussion — assuming the FTFTFNYT et al. report(s) things accurately.
[Sorry about that last phrase. I crack myself up sometimes.]
EarthWindFire
@Kay: Thanks for this. I looked at the article, and it’s still a hit job. Now it’s just a both sides one. Gift link below for anyone wanting to tear their hair out this morning.
https://wapo.st/3v7lCDa
Baud
@rusty:
Why was he still with the DOJ? What work was he doing?
Another Scott
🤡
(via Fritschner)
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
While we’re waiting, here’s some down and dirty 🎶 entertainment
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcMQWfMTfJ8
even better
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1DWiB7ZuLvI
Baud
@Another Scott:
Misspeaking is a clear sign of dementia. I would know. I do it all the time.
Too bad it wasn’t Biden that corrected him.
JMG
@rusty: He’s still bound by ethics rules in theory. More relevantly, he’s now bound by the lying to Congress statutes because he’s testifying under oath.
Baud
@SFAW:
I just try to avoid making predictions. Just do what’s right and let the chips fall where they may.
Matt McIrvin
@Layer8Problem: I’ve been seeing a bunch of people approvingly citing coup aftermaths in other countries, where they had the guy’s head on a pike (well, maybe metaphorically) within days of the attempt being reversed, and saying “see, this is how you do it”. But these tend to be places where rights of the accused don’t even exist to the limited and unequal extent they do here.
TBone
One more for the road. Ridin’ with Biden 🎶
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qEuV82GqQnE
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Liberals and leftists pining for the cathartic release of authoritarian tactics is nothing new.
ETA: as I’ve said before, God is the only perfect liberal. Everyone else has a lizard brain.
Jeffro
I’ve seen it in a couple of places, and it bears repeating whether it’s pundits, relatives, or the guy down the bar who says it: 2024 is NOT a repeat of 2020.
– J6
– Dobbs
-91 trumpov felony counts
-over half a billion in trumpov fines (so far)
NOT a re-run!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: There’s an old concept in psychology that my mother cited a lot in her work as a school psychologist–“identification with the aggressor”. That in conditions of stress or frustration, many people will instinctively jump to identifying with the most aggressive party in the situation, even if that person is bad and actively hurting them.
I thought about that a lot back in 2016, especially with the “leftists” who somehow ended up gravitating toward supporting Trump or at least not-not supporting him.. Shit everywhere is fucked up and bullshit, and this guy is clownishly aggressive and promising to blow up the system, so what the hell? Maybe we roll the dice.
Jeffro
I’m ‘down’ about it…I’m tired of living with the trumpist threat to our country, that’s for sure…but I’m not down on Biden about it.
Another Scott
@Jeffro: +1
And, TIFG is not in office and his appointed minions aren’t in positions of power supporting him behind the scenes.
It’s very, very different now.
Cheers,
Scott.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: like Stockholm Syndrome.
OzarkHillbilly
On Biden’s inability to recall the year Beau died w/o doing the math, I have to do the same with nearly everybody. Ma (2006), Pop (2010), my sister Peggy (95), my BiL Toby (98) etc etc etc. The only 2 for whom I can recall a specific day they died on is Ma (first day of Spring) and Pop (Memorial Day) so not even the exact dates. I can’t even remember what day my brother died and that was just 9 months ago (I think). Trauma affects everybody differently.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Same with my parents. Death dates are not birthdays. I don’t see a reason to remember the specific date.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro:
It’s not a repeat of 2020 that I’m really concerned about, it’s a repeat of 2016.
Marmot
@ColoradoGuy: This is more or less true. I don’t know if it’s the cause of “rage” among Dems and our voters or whatever, but when I see long posts here on legal minutiae, this is why they feel pointless.
I don’t mean to disparage Water Girl, though, and that’s how it comes off sometimes.
Kay
This is just not an impaired person. He’s making jokes on the fly. Which they would have known had they read the transcript prior to telling the country what was in it.
What a shame. They’ll once again get away with such sloppy work. There’s just no accountability mechanism at all in this work.
RevRick
@Baud: Yes. Johnson quoted Buckley about “standing athwart history, screaming, ‘stop!’”, because the purpose is to preserve the unearned, unjust hierarchy, which placed wealthy, white men on top. In Buckley’s mind, God forbid women, minorities, average folk, or the poor catch a break.
Baud
@Kay:
Not just making jokes, but making hilarious jokes. That one’s really funny.
Jeffro
@Kay:
@Baud:
it’s a huge, huge advantage for the GOP to have a fully-operational noise machine/’puke funnel’ set up and ready to blast out whatever disinformation they want, at any time.
not only does it keep their side in line, it intimidates and restrains the mainstream media on a
dailyhourly basis. if they report on what the RWNJs are actually doing, they sound partisan. if they call out what Fox and the rest of the ‘funnel’ are doing, they also appear biased to many normies and/or low-info folks.So when Fox grabs Hur’s lies and runs with them…boom, there it is, sometimes for days or weeks before it is “corrected” in any way by the rest of the media.
It’s a real problem and other than lawsuits like Dominion’s, I don’t know how we counter it.
Scout211
Reposting for the morning crew, some good news out of Florida (or at least an improvement) :
In a settlement, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law is now “Don’t Say Gay in Classroom Instruction” law.
Baud
@Jeffro:
As long as the only thing that passes for liberal media is a couple of nightly talk shows on MSNBC, it’ll be an uphill climb.
trnc
I know it would have been hard to improve the SOTU, but I think this is something Biden could have educated people on while making wingnut heads explode. “TFG keeps saying he would put people in jail. That’s not how it works. Russia jails political opponents with sham trials. We don’t, etc, etc”
SFAW
@Baud:
Hilarious? How so? I mean Graham is still best buds with Sleepy Joe, and has been steadfast in his opposition to TFG.
Melancholy Jaques
@Jeffro:
I’d take a re-run of 2020. We won the White House, senate, and house.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: The moment that I knew that Trump was going to win was in one of the early Republican debates, when there were still like 15 of them screaming at each other. There was a question posed about anger…. one of the other candidates (can’t remember, might have been Jeb! or Kasich?) tried to pivot away. Offered some tepid response that was tonally weird. Like, all these fuckers had been up there slagging on Obama, and then all of a sudden there was this response, “No, I’m not angry, I’m upbeat about this challenge!” You know, some politician bullshit, trying not to scare the normies. The suburban white conservative women.
But then the question got posed to Trump, and he said something like, “I am angry, I am proud to carry the mantle of anger!”. He absolutely knew where the mood of the country was. He’s good at that and he is probably still good at it.
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: There are a bunch of mass layoffs happening in tech industry right now and AI is at least the pretext for a lot of them, so people are feeling it. If you’re in this part of the economy, it’s basically a recession.
And of course it’s not just AI causing it. Interest rates went up a while back, the weird tech mini-boom sparked by the pandemic and the subsequent recovery ended, VCs all got spooked that the party was over, and they’re pulling back and demanding bloodletting from startups–in an industry heavily dependent on their bets, it’s tough.
Meanwhile, AI is the shiny object they’ll still put money into, so everyone has to have some kind of AI play. If you’ve actually got one that makes sense, that’s great. If you don’t, well…
Eyeroller
@Jeffro: That’s all true but I’m not willing to give outlets like the FTFNYT that much benefit of the doubt. Despite what journalists say about fear of being called “liberal,” it’s pretty clear that they do what they do because it’s what their publishers want. Somebody here linked an essay by Dan Froomkin, reporting on and discussing a talk Pinch or Punch or Poke or whoever Sulzberger gave, and it was very illuminating.
Here it is: https://presswatchers.org/2024/03/why-is-new-york-times-campaign-coverage-so-bad-because-thats-what-the-publisher-wants/
The rest of the MSM slavishly follows the lead of the FTFNYT. FTFNYT political journalists are awarded for asking “hard questions” (as Pinch/Punch/Poke defines them) and getting out there first with a narrative. Not for actually working and trying to understand things or ferret out facts.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I noticed how the thing that Biden accomplished with the SOTU address was to convince his base, at least for a moment, that he’s mad too. Heard so many liberals asking “where has this Joe Biden been for the past three years?” They didn’t get the sense that he had the outrage they did.
The Republican pearl-clutching about it is hilarious. What, a Democrat can be mad? Oh no, he’s being partisan! This is supposed to be our thing!
MomSense
@Kay:
No, they are really that bad at their jobs. They fell for Barr’s lies about the Mueller Report and never went back and corrected their coverage even when the report came out and showed Barr to be a fucking liar.
Lapassionara
@Kay: I read (or tried to read) Marcy Wheeler’s critique of the Hur report. She says that Hur focused on one sentence of Biden’s, but claimed that sentence referred to a classified document found in Biden’s house (maybe garage), but the sentence did not refer to that document at all. Given her writing style, I’m not sure I grasped her argument, but I’m hoping that the Dems on the committee understand it. That one sentence is evidently the basis for Hur’s conclusion.
Eyeroller
@MomSense: They’re bad at what we think their job should be. They are not bad at the job their publshers and producers want them to do.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Biden is a funny guy, always has been, a very quick wit.
Jeffro
ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PERCENT!!!
that crap still makes me mad!
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’ve determined I’ll never really be a mainstream liberal, because I approach politics in a more business-like manner.
Marmot
@MomSense: Oh can I play? I’d like to add the dynamic duo of Ahmed Chalabi and Judith Miller, then go allll the way back to the ‘90s for a little ditty on how Repubs disparaged Wen Ho Li as a foreign spy.
All the news that fits preexisting conceptions of reality!
...now I try to be amused
@Matt McIrvin:
AI is the blockchain of today.
hueyplong
@Melancholy Jaques: Worth repeating often. Trump has to do better than 2020, not the same (because we win a “replay”), and nearly everything that has happened since 2020 trends toward his doing worse, not better.
The “Biden is old” meme has been used (and just about used up) a little early in the cycle to have been played intelligently. Now we’ve got “hey, age is a thing” floating around as Trump deteriorates before our eyes, and I wouldn’t want to be the advisor telling America’s greatest narcissist that he needs to stop holding lengthy rallies.
The Saudis will conspire with the Republicans to try to convince the public that sharply rising gas prices this summer are identical to the Great Depression. That will probably be the next thing. Might as well get in front of it and loudly prepare the public for impending treachery that constitutes reason #4389 not to vote for those awful people, who will deliberately harm you to grab an extra 2% in an election. People on all sides seem to love a conspiracy theory, so make them own the increase whether they do or not. (Gas prices nearly always go up in the summer.)
artem1s
I’ve never understood people’s focus on death day either. I don’t miss them only on the day they died. I miss them at random times based on some event or interaction or place or smell. It took me years before I could remember my father the way he was before the cancer invaded his body. I have no interest in dredging up memories of the day he died. It’s one day of a whole life – not the part I want to focus on. And time is relative. I imagine Joe lives with missing Beau every single day and that seems like an eternity and no time at all, all at the same time – the single day he died has nothing to do with how he experiences grief.
John S.
@Baud:
Exactly. My brother died a few weeks ago, and I already don’t know what date that was. Just that it was a Friday in the middle of February.
Knowing the date isn’t going to bring him back, and not knowing the date doesn’t imply anything. I know he’s gone and I don’t need a reminder of that.
ETA: What @artem1s said.
Eyeroller
@artem1s: From personal experience, it’s also often very traumatic.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Y.E.S.
Honestly, this is really my concern about Biden’s age. And I think, when you hear comments about Biden being old, it’s really about two things that are lumped together under the umbrella of age. I think that a lot of old Democrats are still living in a world in which the GOP wasn’t completely batshit crazy and their standard negotiating tactics do not work. And their skills, and their backslapping, feel like bygones of another era. Righteous anger is not a strategy, but it can underscore urgency and at least reassure people that their struggles and issues are seen.
I also think lots of old Democrats, especially the white dudes, have some of the typical issues around race and sex and all the other prejudices that are sadly common for people of that era. The tendency to be reflexively pro-Israel is due, in part, to deep-seated Islamophobia. I think a lot of older Dems have done some work on themselves to examine these prejudices, but they’re there.
Sandia Blanca
@Eyeroller: LOL at Pinch/Punch/Poke!
UncleEbeneezer
@Jeffro: Easy, do exactly what GOP voters would do. Point out that no charges were brought against Biden because he committed no crime. He was legally exonerated by a report from a rabid, Republican Trump supporter. There was no crime. Unlike Trump who illegally possessed, retained National Security documents and obstructed the investigation of with enough evidence for a Grand Jury to indict him on felonies.
If people on our side were smart, we’d emphasize that the Hur misrepresented Biden’s words and actions, painted him in the worst possible light but still found no crime.
But instead, we will spend the next few days whining about Merrick Garland, and thus making the GOP and Putin smile as we take the bait once again.
hueyplong
I have no concerns about Biden’s age, but that’s because I have no concerns about Harris.
It’s kind of funny how she went from mean-spirited Senate hearing questioner with a sharp needle and evil cop to hapless housefrau/babe in the woods about to be improvidently moved from the kitchen to the Oval Office.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Do you have evidence that it’s old guys concerned about Biden’s age? Online is not real life, but the age stuff I see online seems to be coming from young people.
Sandia Blanca
@Matt McIrvin: Another important difference from 2016 is the incumbency advantage.
Starfish
@Kay: There are some academics pushing back on it.
There is the famous “stochastic parrot” paper that explains that the AI is not really saying something. It just looks like it is saying things. It is putting together phrases that it may have seen before, or phrases like ones it has seen before.
That is part of why it is so hard to edit. It says nothing for paragraphs! You know it is saying nothing. I know it is saying nothing, and it is not quite clear how we fix it.
frosty
@OzarkHillbilly: I’d have to look it up but my Dad died the day after his 80th birthday (or before); my Mom died a week (or so) before TFG was elected and my grandma died sometime in the week before my brother’s wedding. Is that good enough?
ETA: On doing the math, anything that crosses the year 2000 I have to count out on my fingers. “Lessee, 1985 was (95, 05, 15 25, no just 9) 39 years ago.”
Baud
@Sandia Blanca:
And Biden isn’t a chick.
catclub
@Melancholy Jaques: It is surprising how many people in the US will go to bat for the billionaires because they think THEY are presently just slightly embarassed billionaires, and would not want to overtax their future selves.
catclub
@Starfish: The example I came across was asking ChatGPT to come up with ideas for a grant proposal. It came up with a lot, very fast.
Really helps when you need to get a start on that grant proposal.
Now, how much would one pay for that? I do not know. But possibly over $0.
OzarkHillbilly
@frosty: There is one death date I can recall off the top of my head and that is of my cousin (and very close friend) Bob’s. He was in a head on collision over the July 4th wkend and was burned over 90% of his body. He got the infection that finally killed him on my 21st b-day and died 2 days later on his fiancee’s b-day.
But that was an unusual case.
Sean
@hueyplong:
Trump doesn’t really have to do better than 2020 if Biden loses disaffected protest voters to third party loons or to staying home, and that only has to happen in about 6 crucial swing states. It isn’t that crazy of a scenario. Biden would probably still win the popular vote while Trump eked out another electoral college win. There ARE disaffected voters that we know to exist on a number of fronts, we just don’t know if they’ll come home in November. Many probably will, but it gives Trump an opening.
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: I have never questioned that Biden is mad too and that he understands the urgency of several situations. I must have been listening to somebody different than everyone else, because I think his speeches have been filled with urgency, passion and fire, for his entire term. His SOTU had a little extra spice for an election year, but otherwise I don’t feel like this is some new version of Biden, it’s who he’s been and how he’s been talking, all along. He’s always shown complete contempt for Trump and MAGA, which is why I love him, and I would argue is one of the big reasons he secured the nomination in 2020. While so many other candidates were busy arguing about the tiny details of Medicare For All/Green New Deal and trying to exaggerate differences with their opponents, Biden’s campaign was essentially “Fuck Trump. Fuck MAGA. Vote for me.” He’s now expanding that to add Putin, The GOP and to some extent SCOTUS, but the fire has always been there, imo.
Sean
@frosty: My mom died when I was in the 5th grade, and that’s all I can tell you time-wise. I couldn’t tell you the year, day or the month definitively. It was end of November or early December.
It was a trauma so great, and always has been, the date hardly mattered to me.
WaterGirl
@OzarkHillbilly: it seems to me that Hur’s reason for that question is very clear. He wanted to throw Biden off his game for the interview.
Suzanne
@Baud: No, I think it’s mostly younger people who complain that Biden is old, but old is being used as a proxy more for “out of touch”.
Matt McIrvin
@Sandia Blanca: It seemed like Hillary Clinton, as an in-party candidate and a former member of the administration, effectively got all the down sides of incumbency but not the advantages of an actual incumbent.
(The most amazing thing to me was the way they successfully pinned the Iraq War on her, as if she’d been President during the George W. Bush administration too!)
WaterGirl
@R-Jud: same as it ever was, even with artificial intelligence. You can have it fast. You can have it cheap. You can have it good. Pick two.
Patricia Kyler
@Baud: So Senator Johnson is admitting that Republicans can’t govern. How do you get elected and not pass any legislation? What are you doing for your constituents then?
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Once again, chick.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Stupid whippersnappers.
Matt McIrvin
@…now I try to be amused: Except that with blockchain there’s no there there–no actual product besides an arbitrary thing you can play trading games with.
AI (as we know it today) *does* do something. The question is just whether it’s good for anything, whether those uses are good, what social damage will happen as a side effect. People in creative fields basically see it as a vehicle for legal copyright violation by big corporations against them.
That’s in part because of the tendency to equate “AI” with “throw ChatGPT/DALL-E at it”, these catchall models that have just been trained on the whole Internet. Which I suspect is about the worst way to use it, but it’s easy.
WaterGirl
@Marmot: Not to worry!
A few people here are petty and pissy and passive aggressive, and I know it when I see it.
But coming from you I just see it as a difference of opinion.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: And yet I can’t forget my parents’ death dates, much as I might like to.
25th anniversary of my dad’s, just last month.
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
Everyone is different. I’m really not good at remembering birthdays either.
mrmoshpotato
Oh, so Ron basically wants to stop doing his job. I see.
Resign Ron.
Matt McIrvin
@mrmoshpotato: That sentiment goes back to Barry Goldwater, when he said he had no interest in streamlining or optimizing government because he wanted to reduce its size. The opposition to governing is baked in.
rikyrah
@Kay: Was the transcript available when he ‘ released’ his report on President Biden?
UncleEbeneezer
@Sean: Yup. My Mom died in 2012, the week of my wedding. I had to catch a red-eye to SC, visit her in the hospital, aid in the decision to pull the plug, bury her and then zip back to CA and get married that weekend. I always struggle to remember the actual date because it was all such a blur. To be fair, I also always forget whether my Anniversary was on the 30th or 31st of August, even though it was unquestionably the best, most important day of my life.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: It started with the very online left BS supporters in the 2020 primaries. They tried both the Sleepy Joe and Senile Joe memes along with Tara Reade BS. And no it was not just some obscure Twitter handles but people like Chris Hayes, Ryan Grim and BS spokesperson Briahna Joy Gray etc. They still haven’t gotten over Biden’s primary wins in 2020.
Most normie Ds like Biden and are not too fond of the Red Roses as witnessed again by the California senate primary
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I heard somewhere that Biden’s SOTU actually didn’t poll as well as the SOTU speech usually does, that it was one of the weakest-polled ones in history. I suspect that’s just the consequence of growing one-sided polarization: if you lean Republican you *must not* approve of it, and that’s more true than it used to be.
But it’s also well-known that the State of the Union, however well-approved, does not usually move the needle on public opinion. So using it as a base-stoking measure and a way of just neutralizing the “is he senile??” attack was probably the right move.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: Yep, same thing happened with crypto. Crypto is one of the least useful applications of blockchain but the most hyped. IIRC IBM was trying to tout blockchain for things like inventory tracking and it got drowned out by crypto bullshit.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Whoa. Back up there half a mo, chief. We can have it good?
Assumes facts not in evidence.
//
Suzanne
@UncleEbeneezer: Biden has a glad-hand-y way about him that sometimes I find frustrating. I recognize that it is key to his effectiveness, and therefore I remind myself of that. But seeing old Dems refer to Republicans as “my friend” instead of “traitor” or “idiot”…… not always the tone that would feel good to see, you know?
mrmoshpotato
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
LMAO! Thanks for the morning laugh.
Matt McIrvin
@catclub: There’s a cost question for large language models that is going to come up. These AI systems, at least today, are actually very computationally expensive and energy-expensive; they’re the gas guzzlers of computing. They seem cheap-to-free right now because VCs are heavily subsidizing them, as they always do in the early stages of a technology where they want people to get locked in. But eventually there’s going to be some form of commercial enshittification. The uses that survive *that* (if any) are going to be the viable ones.
JMG
@Matt McIrvin: The SOTU drew more Republican hate watchers than usual (Fox News’s broadcast led the ratings for all networks), so it figures the (very inexact) instant polls on the speech were less positive than usual.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
But even that would require legislation.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie: I think there’s a difference in that your average person on the street can’t for the life of them see what cryptocurrency is good for (but they assume it’s because they’re dumb, not because they’re correctly perceiving that there isn’t anything).
But anyone can fire up one of these public LLMs, type in a prompt, and see that it can write them a story or paint a picture in any style they specify on any topic. That’s immediately impressive!
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
You’re not super excited about this year’s Rethuglican convention?
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: For research purposes also the information they bring up is not complete. At best its a good first pass at a literature review. But you need to go over the stuff yourself.
TBone
Word on the street is another opportunity for our Dem stars to shine today 💙
Ksmiami
@WaterGirl: I’m just mean and aggressive, but not pissy or passive aggressive…
TBone
So this happened. Hunter isn’t taking it lying down either.
https://crooksandliars.com/2024/03/hunter-biden-strikes-back-prosecutors
MomSense
@UncleEbeneezer:
Just like Biden is simultaneously a doddering old dementia victim and a scheming all powerful president who is systematically destroying the very foundations of our country.
I’m so sick of dealing with the GOP idiots and con artists.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
An older Indian Muslim woman I know is very excited about Modi and the progress India has been making under him. I was taken aback.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: People are really impressed by their ability to generate code, but it seems to me like the code usually requires a LOT of work before it really does what you want. And that’s the hard part of software engineering anyway. If the horror of the blank screen is kicking your ass, it can get you past that, but it’s just the first step.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Not to get all jargony, but I believe the industry shorthand for that is TIM: the Theory of Infinite Monkeys.
// :)
Tony G
“I think we’d be far better off if we never passed another piece of legislation.” Good lord. As awful as Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes were, at least they had an ideology. The contemporary GOP are just nihilists. Their only objective is to destroy the United States.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I have used AI to generate helpful code. I think that’s neat.
Jackie
@Baud:
I only do because I take flowers to their respective niches those days. But I still have to mark the calendar for the dates.
Matt McIrvin
@Tony G: They also want all legislation to have a sunset provision. Put the two together, and yee haw! Time to get out the shootin’ iron and party!
NotMax
@Baud
See: Deep Thought.
“42? We’re going to get lynched aren’t we?”
;)
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: People rarely talk shit about their co-workers. Especially when they want/need them to cooperate on stuff. Would the emotional satisfaction of hearing Biden call Republicans “idiots” been worth potentially tanking some of the big, Bi-Partisan bills that Biden has been able to sign into law? We can call Republicans assholes, traitors, idiots, all we want. That’s our job. I’m fine with Biden letting us do that for him. I know damn well that he agrees.
Tony G
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, anarchists. Like all anarchists (and most libertarians) they’re dumb enough to believe that their private army will be stronger than all the other ones.
Tony G
@Matt McIrvin: I’m having flashbacks to anarchists who I knew when I was a youth in the seventies. Some of the dumbest people on the planet. (They probably became Republicans in the eighties.)
@Matt McIrvin:
rikyrah
@artem1s:
I know the month and year that my father died.
Same for my mother.
the Date has faded for me.
Soprano2
@Kay: It fit with the narrative of the stories they’ve been writing for the past year, so they didn’t feel the need to actually read it. It’s journalistic malpractice. By now you’d think they would realize that the Trumpies lie over and over again, so they wouldn’t just take their word for anything. At this point it’s got to be deliberate.
Jackie
@Matt McIrvin: Polarizing the SOTU is why the post polls didn’t move much; several news sources concur with that.
Look what happened to the very conservative Sen. Langford for merely mouthing the words “I agree” when Biden was discussing the rejected border bill: getting caught on camera for three seconds was enough for the OK GQP to censor him.
Polarization is real.
Paul in KY
@Baud: Probably an upper caste lady with money.
Bill Arnold
@Starfish:
This is true (the generated output looks like real information, but is not, except by accident, with methods to make such accidents more probable), but that is true for much of human discourse, in my experience. And a stochastic parrot that can outperform humans is … a parrot that can outperform (or perform as well as) humans.
Quantum Many-Body Physics Calculations with Large Language Models (arxiv, 5 Mar 2024)
lowtechcyclist
@NotMax:
How many roads must a man walk down?
Soprano2
@OzarkHillbilly: With me it depends. For my sister, that date is etched in my memory forever. Same with my dad and my mom. I can tell you what month my grandparents died (except my father’s father, that was when I was 8), but not the exact day. I’ll never forget the day and year my sister died, there are a lot of things where I say it was before or after she died because so much in my life changed because of that. Interesting, my stepson died on May 30th 2022.
catclub
This also applies pretty well to a 1 carat diamond ring.
WaterGirl
@Ksmiami: I agree with that statement. :-)
coin operated
I remember the day my mom died…it was on my son’s birthday.
I do not remember the day my son died…FB memories of his wake reminded me last week.
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin:
Also the Metaverse. Amazing that the media can memoryhole Facebook and associated companies spending tens of billions to mimic a 20 year old tech (Second Life) – and failing!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
Exactly. Biden’s got a lifetime of effective experience in the Senate. Yeah, “how the game is played” has changed drastically since he first went in but his presidency keeps showing he’s changed with the times while keeping that interpersonal connection facade of the Senate.
sdhays
@Matt McIrvin: I read an article, I think from the Washington Post, just this weekend that said between AI and crypto “mining”, we are completely unprepared for supplying the now-projected energy demands of new data centers springing up across the country. Massive investments in new power sources and power distribution are required by the end of the decade, which isn’t that far away when you’re talking about massive infrastructure investment.
If I were dictator, I’d just ban crypto “mining” since it has absolutely no value and at least that aspect would be mostly taken care of. Let the crypto idiots find something else to use as a proxy for
lighting real money on fireconverting real money into fake money. I’m not sure what to do about AI.West of the Rockies
@OzarkHillbilly:
I recall my parents’ deaths the same way: Good Friday, Easter Sunday. I don’t recall the actual calendar days because those holidays shift every year.
NotMax
@Fair Economist
The Metaverse shall never be complete without including underpasses, sparrows and curtain rods.
:)
Miss Bianca
@Jackie: censure, not censor. (I will die on this hill if I have to, but I’d rather not. In any case, modern GOP censuring might as well be censoring – the object is to shut down dissent, for sure.)
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: I remember my parents’ exact death dates, but not my sister’s or my eldest brother’s – I’m not sure why that is.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@sdhays:
The WaPo piece was interesting. They never mentioned the ability of residential solar to help with this. It’s not gonna solve it but would help. But as I’ve yelled before, utilities are making expansion of residential solar difficult.
Like you, if I were king, crypto would be gone tomorrow.
The piece talked about how 5-6 states have delayed closure of coal plants because of the lack of replacement capacity in the face of expanded demand. We keep telling the ‘Lectricity Uber Alles folks here that all those nice things they’re getting the state to mandate going forward are gonna need power and where is that gonna come from? When you show them the pie charts of power sourcing and how it ain’t pretty in terms of fossil fuel dependence, they revert to platitudes about the need to convert and that “the market” will fill the need. But when you point out “the market” typically reverts to the easiest and cheapest approach, which is still fossil fuel dependence, they revert to “reasons” as justification.
Jackie
@Miss Bianca: Thank you for that! Spell correct didn’t bust me so I thought I was good🤦🏼♀️
We need auto grammar check, but I’m not sure that have would helped in this instance.
censure censure censure – hopefully that ensures censure is now etched in my brain! 😁
Baud
@Miss Bianca:
Just don’t expect us to remember the date.
Fair Economist
I don’t remember any exact death dates. I remember the approximate date my father died, but not whether it’s the 22nd or the 20th. I remember the month and year one grandmother died, but only the year for the other (now almost forty years ago.)
It’s a trope that men forget what’s arguably the most important day in their lives, their anniversary. The simple truth is that most people are bad with dates, and the vast majority of the time it doesn’t really matter. Remembering the exact day my father died won’t bring him back. It just doesn’t matter.
cain
@catclub:
It’s one of the weird things about this whole rush to AI. For the life of me for say a hardware company I don’t know what the revenue model looks like. My employer is all in, but abandoning the lucrative high performance computing which has high margins on hardware and going with this without understanding fully what the revenue stream is and what the projections are – is a mistake.
Josie
@artem1s:
Thank you. This is so beautifully stated. I lost my husband and some years later my oldest son. Dates are meaningless because that pain lasts forever.
PST
@Starfish:
I used to have to edit human beings who wrote like that. I would get “editor’s block” looking at a big page of nothing meaningful to our task and not knowing where to begin.
NotMax
@comrade scotts agenda of rage
Surely that won’t include Colecoin?
“Coming soon in a denomination code named Tie Dye Tokens.”
:)
Baud
Betty C hasn’t commented in a couple of days. Hope everything is going ok with her hospital stay.
Miss Bianca
@Baud: LOL! Nor should you!
Fair Economist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
That’s not true anymore. Solar and wind are now cheaper than *existing* coal plants – you *make* money by tearing down coal plants, and replacing them with solar. For new power, they’re now cheaper than gas.
Construction proves this: new power in 2024 is 93% renewable. Gas is 4%. There’s no coal at all.
(The last 3% is some of those insanely over budget and behind schedule nuclear plants getting finished. Not gonna be much more of that.)
SFAW
@Baud:
Do you have a lawn, which you can tell them to get offa?
Not that you would, of course.
Baud
@SFAW:
Do weeds count as lawn?
Kay
@Lapassionara:
Lol. I wanted to like her, I really did but to me reading her is like hiking thru a thicket. “Where is the path?” I’m thinking, blackberry bushes snagging my hair…
SFAW
@NotMax:
It’s a scam. Loomcoin, on the other hand …
[NB: This will only make sense to jackals who frequent LGM.]
Baud
@Kay:
She should ask AI to make her writing more concise.
SFAW
@Baud:
That depends: are you using it to mean you’re growing weed, but you have so much that it deserves to be plural?
NotMax
@Fair Economist
“A bitcoin in every pot and a Mr. Fusion in every home.”
cain
@Baud:
For the most part a lot of the boomer generation and some Gen X love Modi because for their entire formulative years they’ve been told that India is the greatest country, lot of promise etc. They’ve been wanting that respect from the rest of the world. So, they think Modi is showing India’s greatness – some might say yes, he is problematic, but he’s showing results.
Superficially, yes, you see a lot of stuff like the successful launch, the bold moves on various things with Pakistan etc.
Modi still does some disturbing shit like doing the religious ceremony for the Ram temple – like he’s both a Hindu religious leader and the country’s civil leader.
The man gives me offputting vibes but I can’t deny that the country is seemingly doing well according to the general temperature of Indians living there.
Redshift
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
You’re saying folks here say that? Who?
This isn’t a “but nobody is thinking about this!” gotcha. In all of the sources I read about decarbonization, the need for vastly more electricity production (along with grid improvements) has been a serious topic for years. And the power industry already isn’t anything like a free market, so nobody is answering it with “platitudes” about “the market.” It isn’t a solved problem yet, but it isn’t an ignored one.
stinger
@JMG:
To which I would add, Biden’s campaign broke records for contributions during and just after his SOTU. Pollsters are reaching fewer people than ever, no matter their methodology. And in any case, they can only get people to “say” something. Political donations — that’s a measure of what people DO.
Baud
@cain:
I think Biden is trying to sell the same story hear, without all the hate to go along with it, but it’s hard when even many libs aren’t willing to accept it.
Right wingers always promote themselves, no matter how bad things are, but it sounds like Modi at least has real things he can point to.
Kay
@Baud:
I saw an AI contract (for a sale) that another lawyer showed me and thought it was super cool but I asked him some questions about the terms and he hadn’t thought any of it through. Great.
Given how bad we all are at reading and thinking is it really wise to outsource the one part everyone is actually doing, which is writing? This will be bad. We know that, right? :)
scav
@Baud: Thrilling thing about weeds — their definition is entirely under our control. If it’s not bothering you, it’s not a weed. Reach for a different definition, and most of that green mown shit on golf-courses are weeds, being non-native exotics.
rikyrah
@Suzanne:
It’s part of his Superpowers..LOL
As someone who is decidedly NOT people-friendly, I do watch JoeyB in awe. I just don’t like people that much…LOL
CarolPW
@West of the Rockies:
I got married on the day after Thanksgiving, and that is when we celebrated every year. I have no idea what the date was though.
Sister Golden Bear
@Matt McIrvin:
Yep. Where there’s value is in non-flashy things like Amazon using LLM AI to summarize reviews into a single paragraph.
Or at my last job, where it was being implemented as part of help systems for people troubleshooting a SaaS platform. Specifically, the AI seeing if it could refer someone to resources to solve common problems on their own, without having to open a ticket with the help desk and having to wait for someone to get back to them. Likewise, helping someone find the appropriate training classes to develop a skill they needed
I’ll note that in both the Amazon example and the one I mentioned, both were using internal data, albeit the LLMs themselves probably were on bootlegged work in general to mimic human writing.
Marcopolo
Okay, been reading snippets of Biden’s special counsel deposition & takeaways from the hearing today. The tl;dr is Biden is funny as eff (paraphrasing: let me tell you, never give a good eulogy; do that and everyone will ask you for one), has more anecdotes rolling around inside his head than he could probably tell during the rest of his life (did you know he knows his way around an archery range? that he once represented a man who’d lost a testicle & part of his penis?), and has a better memory than like 99% of humanity.
i do not think Gym Jordan is getting the hearing he wanted
NotMax
@rikyrah
Come sit
byin the next room from me.:)
Redshift
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah, I remain skeptical that most AI promises are anything but hype. In particular, a lot of them are “yes, it’s not perfect and can have factual errors, but it does a lot of the time-consuming work and then a human can clean it up.” The big problem with that is that finding errors in a text you weren’t involved in researching or writing is a task humans are generally really bad at. “We can solve it by doing the easy parts and leaving the hard parts to people for whom they’re also hard parts but we’ve made it harder” isn’t much of a “solution.”
The optimism about coding is similar — “it can write a program to do X in seconds!” Do you know how little of my job is writing new programs from scratch? It’s mostly extending and modifying code, and occasionally rewriting it to improve it. All of those are way more work if I’m starting with a bunch of code that nobody understands because nobody wrote it.
matt
I think it’s great that Ron Johnson recognizes that the best he can do is to be basically a podcaster who votes ‘no’ on everything.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: There’s some point at which the intermittency of wind and solar becomes a problem without some kind of efficient grid-scale storage, which is why I’m a bit skeptical about how far this can go.
BUT… they used to think that limit was something like 2 or 3 percent of total power generation before the grid died screaming, and it’s clearly not that.
matt
@Matt McIrvin: If Biden had done the normal mealy-mouthed mainstream Democrat ‘kitchen table issues’ nonconfrontational speech I think the outcome would have been far worse.
Sister Golden Bear
@Kay:
VCs are always looking for the latest shiny new thing, and CEOs are always looking to layoff employees — because if they don’t understand what someone does, it must be easy amirite. //
A big part of my job isn’t the problem solving, it’s the question finding. I.e. figuring what are the right questions to ask. Another big part is listening and building consensus among the various teams and stakeholders involved in my projects, both towards reaching agreement on what the project goals should be, and the design solutions to achieving those should be. Can’t do that with a push of a button.
Jackie
Oh for pity sakes! (Head banging desk)
Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) sent out a self-pitying fundraising plea after her State of the Union rebuttal made her a national laughingstock:
I couldn’t read this without hearing her fundy-speaking voice and the sorrowful Tears of an Angel 🤢🤮
Citizen Alan
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Agreed. It’s weird to me. DST used to not affect me very much. But this is my first one in Pacific Time, and I still feel out of sorts. This is the 3rd day in a row that I have woken up nearly an hour before my alarm went off and I couldn’t get back to sleep. And then, once I get to work, I suddenly have trouble staying awake. Last night, I fell asleep in the middle of my Discord D&D game!
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear:
When Bard or ChatGPT or Bing gives crap AI results in some specialized area, it’s still hard to know how much of that is the result of the one-size-fits-all “we trained a bot on the whole public Internet” approach. I suspect it’s a lot. It’s good enough to impress the hell out of people who have never seen a chatbot like this before. At some point we’re going to move beyond that, and then we fall off the first peak of ye olde Gartner Hype Cycle.
NotMax
@Redshift
Sounds like a sales pitch for automated phone trees. Which are rightfully despised.
;)
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
If you mow them (or someone mows them for you), then yes.
Matt
Anyone who’s still voting for Republicans in 2024 is garbage, full-stop.
Anyone who’s still insisting that there are “reachable” voters in that camp is either a moron or a crypto-fascist.
Marcopolo
@Matt McIrvin: So the stories I read about the in-real-time focus groups where they had the dials to show agree/disagree all pretty much said the participants gave Biden high marks for a very good speech. I’ve also seen one of the Nate’s talk about one post speech internet poll where they sent texts to folks for their response which indicated a meh response to the speech. Take your pick, I guess, but (inside my bubble) everyone I know thought it was pretty good & several of my friends said the felt a sense of relief (I guess over the age/cognition thing) after seeing/hearing it.
Sister Golden Bear
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m definitely feeling it after getting laid at the end of January.
Plus the current mini-recession comes after a quarter million people got laid of in tech last year. It’s brutal.
Especially with the ageism in the Valley, I’m seeing age peers, who can afford to do so, dropping out of the industry to pursue other (often creative) careers. Unfortunately, I’m not in that position.
NotMax
Jackie
“I spewed more sh*t than an incontinent pachyderm for you.”
//
Gin & Tonic
@Sister Golden Bear:
I’m thinking you should have waited for Balloon-Juice After Dark for this bit of news.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: Batteries will change this equation, both installed in large arrays and in homes and businesses. Batteries for stationary uses can be made with cheaper materials because weight doesn’t matter as much as for vehicles.
Matt McIrvin
@UncleEbeneezer: Since 2020 was yet another cycle in which Democrats were being brought in as Mr. Fixit after a public Republican disaster, and people were scared and distraught, Biden had to project stability and competence.
Right now, he’s walking a tightrope. The Democrats are nominally the “in” party (they have the White House, which is all the average person really sees) they can’t rail about how the world sucks. But a lot of what his base is mad about is Republicans acting like they own the place anyway, and he can’t sound complacent about that either.
Kristine
@NotMax: “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over.”
Marcopolo
@Jackie: Hah! C’mon, you had to know this was coming. I told a friend a few days ago, maybe just after the SNL parody, that Britt would wind up playing “I’m the victim of a mainstream media hit job” card. It’s in the MAGA playbook.
Hell, it’s the same thing Nancy Mace is doing right now.
So sad & pathetic. Just makes me laugh.
Citizen Alan
@UncleEbeneezer: I know when my mom died b/c it was exactly two weeks after I got back from NYC after finishing my LLM. I honestly can’t remember when my dad died except I’m pretty sure it was 2014 and I think in the early fall. For that matter, I remember my birthday is August 8, 1969, but I have to stop and do math to remember how old I am.
Ruckus
@Baud:
The one thing is that not everyone in this country wants a country where every human is equal and has an equal chance to be whatever. IOW racism, old white fartism, while it may not be the level it was not all that long ago, is still a very, very real concept with a lot of people in this country. There is a part of this population that thinks that the old south plantation life (or whatever it’s current day equivalent is), is still a valid concept. It’s not. And it’s not just the old south that holds that view and it screws a large segment of our population. It’s not as bad as it was 50-60 yrs ago for sure. It’s also not near as good as it should be, in this day and age. Or should have been long before old farts were born.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt:
That’s so five years ago – now they’d be an AI-fascist. ;-)
Uncle Cosmo
Speaking only for myself: I very clearly recall the exact dates of the death of my father, mother, and much-lamented nephew&godson. Which occurred 26, 8.5, and 7.5 years ago, respectively.
I very clearly recall the circumstances but not the exact date of the death of my last living grandparent, 55 years ago: Our family was out of town for the wedding of one of her many grandsons, and that morning his mother found her mother had passed during the night, at the age of 83. (The wedding went ahead, but at the reception the bride’s family was somewhat taken aback by the lack of enthusiasm on the groom’s side. IIUC no one had told them what had happened.)
scav
@Jackie: And they’ve still got the misconception that women, real actual women, look, act and are whatever the hell that idiot was channeling.
Sister Golden Bear
@frosty: I can’t the remember the exact day my father died, albeit that was decades ago. But I’ll always remember the date of my mother’s death because it happened on my birthday. However, obviously that’s an unusual thing.
Jay C
@Marcopolo:
Well, one wouldn’t know it from glancing at FTFNYT’s page: bland headlines and half-assed bothsidery in the updates…
Though they DO point out that the GOP are likely looking to try to mine the hearing for soundbites to use in the campaign: it’s likely they’ll get* something out of Hur and his BS report, but no: probably – as usual with these circuses – not the “bombshell” they’re hoping for.
And just as an aside: I know dumping on Merrick Garland is a cheap online thrill in the blogosphere, but his allowing Hur’s Report to go out apparently unreviewed – and certainly unedited – is gross political (and managerial) malpractice: I hope he’s gone in Biden’s second term (if not sooner)…
*or, more probably, manufacture
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
There is a pattern already happening of dumbass executives firing their creative department, replacing them with AI, the AI fails to do the job, and the company goes and tries to hire back the people they just fired en masse. While being snotty assholes about it, of course.
Jeffro
I read this while picturing Scarlet Johannsen (from last Saturday’s SNL) with the melodramatic back of her palm to her forehead. =)
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I’m not really seeing that happening at scale though. But maybe that’s just because we’re not yet at the point where it MUST happen.
Jeffro
@Marcopolo:
Exactly. People point out their ridiculousness, shamelessness, lack of character, poor judgement …and instead of learning from it, they just double down. No wonder they all end up in such a dark place.
Citizen Alan
@Tony G: Every time I hear the word “anarchist,” I think of two things. One is an essay by Edna St. Vincent Millay called “Fear” about the Saccho-Vanzetti affair. She makes it very clear that anarchism is a childish, painfully naive political theory that ignores literally everything about human nature, but that has nothing to do with Saccho and Vanzetti being executed basically for being Italians.
The other thing I think of is, of course, Rik Mayall from The Young Ones, who was easily the most idiotic of the characters even as he stamped around in his army boots screaming “FASCIST!” at everything he didn’t like.
hueyplong
@Jay C: Even I can write the GOP’s response to that. “The Biden Family used strong-arm tactics to censor all references to Joe Biden’s obvious mental deterioration and likely forced the decision not to prosecute.” Then today’s hearing would be a “success” because it would “reveal” [“Stunning Revelation”] the Deep State’s “thumb on the scale of prosecutorial justice.”
Better to stick with the criticism of allowing Hur near the case at all.
And from what I’ve seen on sites so far today, there are plenty of really good cherry-picked snippets for our side as well.
NotMax
@Kristine
Meet the Mark IIa.
:)
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: Well, those plane doors didn’t need those bolts anyhow. same ol same ol.
MisterForkbeard
@OzarkHillbilly: My fiancee died when I was in college. I have to do the math to remember what year that was.
This is a horseshit attack from people with no morals. Biden would have been fully justified in punching Hur in the face for making the inference.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear: Things feel a little less boom-and-bust on the East Coast but it’s still tighter than it used to be. One difference from a year ago is that companies are not as unwilling as they were in Q1 2023 to spend money on anything.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Kos has a live blog of the Hur hearing if you don’t want to watch (which I don’t)
Sister Golden Bear
@Frankensteinbeck: We saw the same pattern in my field when execs used the pandemic layoffs as an excuse to layoff all the
expensivesenior-level people, only to find out that the junior-level people didn’t have the necessary experience to do everything.Then the following year there was rush to hire back senior-level people. And yeah, they were snotty assholes when doing that.
It’s a cycle that repeats itself every few years.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: If you do not hear about large scale battery projects being built and put into operation it’s because you are not looking. If I just look up “clean energy news” I see plenty, including projects in Hawaii, California, Australia and Portugal. Industry-related sites have more reporting.
Batteries are lagging behind renewable generation by a few years, but they will catch up because the technology is developed. And advances in materials technology will make for greater efficiencies.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
I started working for my dad at 12 ys old. I worked and owned the business longer than he did, a lot longer. Twenty three yrs ago he was sitting up in his hospital bed, me sitting next to him with my arm around him when he died. My sisters were sitting next to the bed and didn’t believe me when I told them he passed. He had Alzheimers and couldn’t talk for his last 10 yrs, didn’t even try for the last 5. But when that life ends, if you are holding on when it does, you will know 100% that it’s gone. It’s there, and one second later it’s not. And when it goes, at least in this case, it just quietly slips away, one second there, the next, it’s not.
Life is very often better than the alternative but sometimes and for everyone, eventually there comes a time, like it or not, that it’s gone. I had a cousin who made 6 months, and a mother who made it to within a day of 95 yrs. It’s different for all of us, and yet at the same time, very similar as well. As someone close to 3/4 of a century, I’ve seen this up close on more than one occasion. It doesn’t change.
NotMax
@scav
Bolts, shmolts.
“Once it goes up who cares where it comes down? That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun.”
//
Sister Golden Bear
@Geminid: I’ll note that batteries are also not the only solution. California has been using dual reservoir systems for close to a century to do energy banking. Water from the upper reservoir powers generators during the day, and then late at night, when electrical demand is low, water is pumped back from the lower reservoir to the upper one.
There’s also work being done to do the equivalent with heavy weights at a large scale.
Not as efficient as battery storage, but potentially a cheap way to solve the peaking issue.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: There should be some good highlights later on, maybe here. Raskin, Goldman and the other Dems ought to be ready for Mr. Hur. Daniel Goldman should be especially good; he spent most of his professional career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney , and it shows.
Roberto el oso
The GOP is certainly putting together a powerhouse platform this time around. Just say no to helping working/middle class families ; just say no to women ; just say no to Ukraine ; just say no to books in libraries ; just say no to Taylor Swift ; just say no to ice cream ; just say no to recreational sex. What’s not to love?
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
But even that would require legislation.
Or failure. They are OK with either, but failure doesn’t require them to do anything….
Ruckus
@MomSense:
I’m so sick of dealing with the GOP idiots and con artists.
But that’s all they’ve got left!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Geminid: So far, Hur is mostly saying, “I refer you to my report.” He won’t go beyond it
ETA: Also, it’s possible I’m failing to get a joke, but I think Hageman (R Wyoming) is asking about Hilary Clinton’s emails.
Matt McIrvin
@Sister Golden Bear: I’m skeptical about the “heavy weights” approaches–gravity is a weak force and it’s just real hard to get the numbers you need. Pumped storage, on the other hand, is a time-tested mature technology, but it just requires some geographical luck of the draw.
Roberto el oso
@Sister Golden Bear: I’ve always been bad with dates, birthdays, etc. The only reason I remember the death dates of my dad, my mom, and both my sisters is because I had the misfortune of being the one who had to deal with the aftermath (funerals, pensions, Social Security, and so on, and of course the sheaves of death certificates required for every little thing).
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: What can I say he has an excellent PR department. Is she Bohra Muslim by any chance? They are a small but a wealthy community in western India and Modi has made overtures to them since he was the CM of Gujarat
ETA: Just like the Rs, BJP’s policies favor the haves. But a Muslim rooting for Modi is like a black person rooting for the Rs
His handlers are trying to make the PM into some God like figure. Its a fucking cult. Here is one photo that has been making the rounds. So you can see what I mean.
zhena gogolia
@Roberto el oso: And they still might win.
Geminid
@Sister Golden Bear: There is a pumped storage system in Bath County, Virginia. Vepco built it back in the 1970s, concurrently with their four nuclear reactors. They fill the upper reservoir up at night and generate power during times of higher usage. That way they can operate the nuclear power plants at a constant rate.
There are other pumped storage plants being considered all over the world but they might not be built because batteries could be cheaper and less disruptive. It’s tougher to get permits for a pair of dams and reservoirs.
Also, the EU and other places have plans for hydrogen. Ten years from now, the natural gas thermal generation plants that pick up the slack in California presently may be fired with hydrogen produced with excess wind and solar generation. Portions of the Infrastructure and IRA bills are intended to get this sector running.
Soprano2
@Jackie: Oh for pity’s sake, we’re laughing at the ridiculous, affected delivery of her speech and calling out her implied lie about the girl who was trafficked. She should pull up her big girl pants and own up to what she did. I still think if she had done that same speech (without the lie about the trafficked girl) in her normal voice, it would have been pretty good. They always find a way to fuck it up. I personally think they should do away with the response, there’s no point to it.
Captain C
@Matt McIrvin:
Wouldn’t streamlining and/or optimizing government help reduce its size? This sounds like bullshit to justify their (‘conservatives’) opposition to government doing anything for anyone except themselves.
hueyplong
@Soprano2: You seem to be violating the adage about not interrupting enemies when they’re making mistakes.
catclub
@Fair Economist: Heard this morning about counties that are being forced by the State of Illinois to accept wind and solar installations.
Which is a change from cities in red states being forbidden to have city broadband which competed with utility broadband.
In both cases, the US Constitution says that the states will win and the cities will lose.
Texas happens to be the #1 wind power location, so those are getting permitted. Community broadband in Austin, not so much.
Soprano2
@Sister Golden Bear: I saw an article that talked about this cycle, and said the companies that were most successful figured out ways to not lay people off when there was a down cycle, because it was actually cheaper in the long run to keep employees during a downturn than it was to lay them off and then hire them back later. That makes sense, if you’ve had people all along you don’t have to get new people up to speed. In 2008-2010 when the economy was so bad and our sales tax revenue was flat or even falling, I appreciated that our city manager did everything he could to not lay people off. We might not have gotten any raises for two years, but no employees lost their jobs either.
Kelly
@Matt McIrvin: I read a pumped storage study of the PNW the Corps of Engineers did in the early 1970’s. The 5 most promising sites were adjacent to existing reservoirs and totaled to about a Grand Coulee Dam worth of peaking power. There was no interest in the projects at the time. I suspect the Corps was mainly looking for work as they had exploited all good hydro sites in the PNW around then. One of the really good sites is at Detroit, Oregon. A downside to the pumped storage project is Detroit reservoir level at full pool would drop 16 feet if the the pumped reservoir was filled.
RaflW
Ron Johnson saying he wants to do zero work and still get paid. Of course. To a Republican, a Senate seat (or more so, a House seat) is just wingnut welfare.
Soprano2
@Ruckus: I live in terror of the day my husband can no longer communicate with me. I know it doesn’t happen to everyone that has dementia, but it does happen a lot.
catclub
@Roberto el oso: Trump is now adding: just say no to Social security and medicare! Unbeatable platform.
Soprano2
@hueyplong: I’m sure it’s resonating on the right, though, because they see themselves as constant victims of everything. In their minds everyone and everything is out to get them.
jimmiraybob
@Sister Golden Bear:
Missouri has this type of dual-reservoir power station at the Taum Sauk pumped storage plant in the St. Francois mountains (built 1950s).
It’s a beautiful Ozark location that can be accessed from the Johnson Shut Ins State Park on the Black River (East Fork). It is surrounded by lots of hiking and crystal clear streams via the Ozark Trail system. Fun picnicking and splish-splashing at the shut ins too.
In 2005 the upper reservoir failed resulting in a huge scour down Taum Sauk Mountain that revealed a large section of geolog. It’s been rebuilt and the flood scar is healing.
Why yes, I am bragging.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvin: Pumping water back up requires work against gravity, resulting in a (re)gain of gravitational potential energy. The water is the weight. Are you saying that other forms of lifting weight aren’t as efficient? I’d buy that, since with a water reservoir there’s a handy source of a lot of weight that can be lifted efficiently.
artem1s
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
They already have, numerous times. Obergefell v. Hodges held that an Ohio constitutional amendment that
“prohibited the recognition of same-sex marriage, as well as any “legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage” in the state of Ohio.”
This amendment not only prohibited same sex marriage but it also made it illegal to extend any benefits of marriage to civil unions. In other words a company in Ohio couldn’t extend health care benefits to the partners or children of unmarried couples. Partners couldn’t set up deeds to transfer property upon death unless they were legally married under Ohio law.
Governor DeWine (R-Heartless Asshole) refused to allow someone to have his name put on his same sex partner’s death certificate as his spouse (they were not married in Ohio) because that benefit of being recognized legally as an inheritor was illegal in the state of Ohio based on that amendment.
SCOTUS’ job is to turn over laws that are unconstitutional – because ‘reasons’ sometimes depends on your perspective.
hueyplong
@Soprano2: Yes, lots of longstanding strategic “rules” are inapplicable when dealing with a political party that has evolved into a cult.
catclub
like illegally locking down Kashmir.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I don’t know what branch of Islam she practices.
RaflW
I don’t even understand what this is trying to mean: “Representative Tom Tiffany, Republican of Wisconsin, accuses Hur of being part of a ‘praetorian guard’ that protects ‘the swamp’ and ‘elites.’ ”
Tiffany is, for starters, probably in the bottom 10% of Republicans in terms of intelligence (an already low bar!). But why is he mad at Hur? He delivered a potent, if egregiously false, attack on Biden.
It’s all just nonsensical word salad from GOPers now.
Geminid
@Eyeroller: I read of a project that where developers took an abandoned mineshaft, rigged a hundred+ ton weight, wound it up and then used it to run a generator as iit descend to the bottom. I think it was a pilot project.
Frankensteinbeck
@Soprano2:
Alas, MBAs want to lay people off. Their holy grail is zero labor costs. They’re hunting for an excuse, not reacting to circumstances.
Baud
@RaflW:
Not watching, but I assume she’s complaining about not prosecuting.
Frankensteinbeck
@RaflW:
Because Hur didn’t arrest Joe Biden. Anything less is failure.
catclub
The key reason that pumped hydro storage can be cheap is that the topography has already been constructed by geological history. So there are a limited number of locations where it can work.
There are lots of ideas being considered. and for many, getting the cost down and increasing the reliability ( to 50 years or so)
are the hurdles to overcome. I am impressed by the system of pulling an inflated balloon down in a well or other deep water. Now make it last 50 years!
catclub
except for Trump not laying a finger on Hillary when he had the power to. No blame for that at all from them. And he had clearly promised he would. Hur made no promise.
Geminid
@RaflW: Sounds like Republicans don’t think Hur delivered the goods. They thought they had a weapon in Hur’s disparagement of Biden’s mental acuity, but the State of the Union address took the temper out of that one.
Paul in KY
@Jackie: Hopefully ScarJo can give that one a try too!
Paul in KY
@Paul in KY: Just saw I mentioned ‘high caste’ and now have grokked that this lady was Muslim. Need more coffee…
Paul in KY
@Soprano2: My dad never lost his ability to communicate. It was just that his ‘conversational themes’ reduced over time until he had only one.
Uncle Cosmo
And yet gravity is exactly the same force involved in pumped storage. The only difference is that the weight transferred up or down in the terrestrial gravity well (±mgh, depending on direction of transfer) is in liquid form. C’mon, man!
(In fact, using the equivalent weight in solid form would be at least as efficient as pumped water, and more efficient if the reservoir isn’t covered: The H2O pumped up there last night to store the energy has a distressing tendency to evaporate and thus be unavailable to return its mgh on its way down the next day…)
ETA: Eyeroller at #270 supra beat me to it. ::rolls eyes::
Paul in KY
@Geminid: How did they wind it up? Using all the generator power?
Edit: Or maybe you can only run it once.
Uncle Cosmo
@RaflW: It’s Breakshit at Tiffany’s time…
Eyeroller
@Uncle Cosmo: I shudder to think of what one might use for weight that would weigh as much as thousands of acre-feet of water. Of course I doubt that an entire reservoir could be emptied and refilled in a short cycle, so we aren’t talking about the full capacity.
Matt McIrvin
@Uncle Cosmo:
Exactly. The schemes I’ve seen involve lifting a bunch of weights with a crane. How many towers and cranes would it take to lift a number of concrete blocks or lead weights with a mass equal to all the water in a lake? It’s a lot. If you work out what the best way is to do this kind of thing it basically just takes you back to pumped storage.
Fair Economist
@Matt McIrvin: If there were no further improvements, the end state would be something like basically all solar in the day, sending energy between regions to deal with local intermittency, and a mix of wind and gas at night. Pretty much all the existing gas plants would continue to operate, but they’d run a lot less.
As batteries improve, gas gets replaced by batteries. There’s also some exciting possibilities with pumped hydro to artificial reservoirs. Enormous potential capacity and indefinite storage.
Eyeroller
@Matt McIrvinBut that’s a technical issue, not a physical one. As you know, the underlying physics is the same.
Ruckus
@Roberto el oso:
Sorry about that but welcome to the crowd. I had to deal with dad’s stuff, which was actually easy, but then it gets a bit worse, I was sitting with dad in hospital, in his bed, with my arm around his shoulder when he passed. It was, rather oddly a very settling moment, his suffering was done and he got to see his kids before he passed. Mom on the other hand, saw none of us, that was her wish and one of us was gone before her. She didn’t want anyone to see her go and even though she was the oldest, she went after all her siblings. It is what it is, we’re born, we live, we die. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it really isn’t either. It’s life, all the good times, pitfalls, pratfalls, shit and horrors are there. It starts, it is, it ends. As of last year, I’m the last one left, other than extended family and I’m now the oldest in that.
No One You Know
@schrodingers_cat: True. The problem there is that I’m smarter about what I pick up in the first place, so less garbage. AI is fast because it’s stupid, not because it’s better. I find the work I do to identify what matters and why is easier for me when I’m doing the selecting, noticing my choices and decisions. Sorting the Internet filled with poorly researched opinions collected from unknown sources, not so much.
No One You Know
@Matt McIrvin: Onboarding with easy problems to introduce hard ones is how hard problems become solvable. You learn on the more available material from exploring it. Instructional designer bread- and- butter, but not an AI capability, so far as I can tell.
Geminid
@Paul in KY: The idea is to wind the weight up when there is excess power and then let it turn the generator when electricity is needed, then wind it up again. I think this was a “proof of concept” project and advances in battery storage will make this option obsolete before it’s even implemented.