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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • frezik@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzKnow thy enemy
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    22 hours ago

    Water/wind/solar is cheaper now, and it’s not even close. It’s electrifying communities that never had any sort of electrification before since they can buy a few panels and bypass the (often corrupt) power utility in the country. The intermittency is a problem, but it’s still better than not having it at all.

    So yes, it looks like they’ll skip carbon-based energy entirely. This is similar to what’s happened with landlines in these regions; they skipped straight to cell phones.

    That said, you know where 95% of new coal power plants are being built? China.



  • Should? Perhaps. An awful lot of powers of the President should be scaled back.

    I’m not sure this one can without big changes to the system.

    When the raid that killed Bin Laden was announced, Obama simply decided to do that. The operation was classified right up to the moment Obama sent that message.




  • In many ways, the Clinton Administration is when Democrats started giving up the Overton Window to Republicans. The trend of “self-regulating industries” went into full swing with things like the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Not Reagan or the first Bush. Clinton.

    FISA, the court that rubber stamps warrents for wire tapping, became a rubber stamping operation under Clinton. I’d have to dig it up, but there’s actually an ancient freerepublic.org thread where they hope Bush undoes this. Instead, Bush ignored it completely while freerepublic.org cheered him on.

    This is all to say that when Nader said both sides are the same, there were a lot of people on the left who agreed.

    Bush then takes less then a year to show how utterly wrong that was, and it didn’t even start with 9/11.





  • He was more conservative than he let on.

    https://jacobin.com/2021/10/norm-macdonald-anti-politics-anti-comedy-snl-subversion-stand-up

    Notable figures of the online right did the very same thing, some of them claiming Norm Macdonald as one of their own. While they may have overstated their case, it can nonetheless be difficult to square appreciation for Macdonald’s comedy with his ambiguously conservative politics.

    In an era when right-wing comedians claim to be “truth tellers” smashing liberal taboos to get laughs, Norm Macdonald considered himself no such thing. “I guess there came a time, and I missed it, when revealing everything started to be considered art,” he said in 2018. “But I’d always learned that concealing everything was art.” Macdonald didn’t enjoy political comedy and on stage spared his audience his personal opinions on political matters: “Let’s not get into this shit, man,” he told Marc Maron in 2011 when the topic of politics was broached, “I can see people not laughing now.”

    Macdonald’s concealment was a smart call by a canny performer, but it was also a deference to his audience and their enjoyment, and perhaps we should see that as a kind of generosity. And without understanding the extent of this self-concealment — something many of the obituaries missed — we don’t fully appreciate Macdonald’s life, art, and politics.