Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7; it can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can’t be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.

To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the over ight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production, and reduce the need for peaker plants during the day.

That overnight demand can’t be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.

What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer.

Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.

Owner occupant credit/exemption. If you live in the home, you pay a much lower property tax than if you don’t live in the home.

This is used in Ohio as a “homestead exemption”. Elderly and disabled Ohioans pay a lower tax rate on their primary residence.

It is used in New York as the “STAR Credit”, to push part of the burden of school taxes from families to investors and businesses.

This is used in Montana as a Property Tax Rebate, where taxpayers can get some of their property taxes back on their primary residence. Montana has also been talking about implementing a “second home tax” which would increase the tax burden on properties that aren’t claimed as a primary residence.

A substantially similar program is used in Oakland as the Vacant Property Tax, which punishes landlords who hold property primarily for financial speculation rather than actual use.

These programs all operate in the same way I am describing. The only difference is that I would phase in a radical increase the effective tax on investors/landlords. I would increase the tax on investors and landlords of residential property so much that they find it more lucrative to switch their investment strategy to “lending” rather than “landlording”. Basically, the only rental arrangements that will continue to exist are 2-4 unit residences (where the landlord-owner lives in one of the units) and roommate agreements.

A “land contract” (sometimes called “contract for deed”) is a sort of “rent to own” agreement that is recorded with the county like a deed. For purposes of the tax exemption I am talking about, the occupant is considered an owner rather than a tenant.

A Land Contract is a type of seller-financing that is available to anyone, including the tenant on whom the landlord is already taking a financial risk. That former landlord is now collecting interest on a loan, rather than rent on a property.

being hit with a tax that basically kills any chance of renting out something.

That is exactly what should happen. It should be practically impossible for an owner to “rent” a property for enough to justify doing it. Landlords should be heavily pressured to convert tenants to buyers.

“Renting” should be confined to commercial activities, not residences. You want to rent out space for a shop, warehouse, office, factory, no problem. This is only for residential property that you are not living in. It should not be economically feasible to rent out such property as an investor, because that practice strips tenants of equity and is the leading factor driving people into poverty.

Go ahead and use your property to generate an income, but do it by charging interest on a loan, not rent.

The entire concept of rent needs to die in a fire. It is inherently exploitative. There is no way to redeem it.

Rent needs to be replaced with “private mortgages” or other approaches that return equity to the occupant.

Individuals that need the flexibility of temporary, short-term housing can use “land contracts” rather than exploitive rental agreements. Land Contracts have fixed payments for the life of the agreement: no annual rent hikes. The occupant is considered an “owner” rather than a “tenant”, but only begins gaining equity after three years. The occupant is free to walk away before three years, or renegotiate after.

How do we eliminate renting? We make it less lucrative than other investment options. We increase the tax rate on residential properties to be extremely high. But, we also create a tax exemption for owner-occupants, so your effective tax rate is actually lower on your own home. Landlords are forced to choose between a small return on a rental, or a larger return on a private mortgage or land contract.

With that simple change, landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert “tenants” into “buyers”, so they don’t have to pay the excess taxes.

Beyond renting, with this change, lenders are motivated to work with borrowers rather than resort to foreclosure. As soon as the bank initiates foreclosure proceedings, they are on the hook for the increased tax rate.

Maybe in Britland, but not in any country with civil rights and respectable free speech laws.

The Anarchist Cookbook isn’t isn’t illegal. Hell, the US government publishes TM 31-210, a field manual on improvised munitions that goes a lot further than the Cookbook ever did.

possession and sharing of its instruction manual is being charged as a terrorist offense.

Oi! You got a loisence for that PDF?!?

Nobody has a Xitter account.

They need to advertise a legitimate use for their service.

If they don’t have a threat from public wifi or other security concerns to remedy, then the only purpose for their service is to bypass region limits and block infringement notices. They would be considered complicit in such infringement.

That their service also hinders efforts to stop pirates needs to be an “unintended” and “unavoidable” side effect.

Meh, for less than the cost of any streaming service, a VPN subscription gets someone else to laugh at all those letters.

Hmm. Seems like combat aircraft never get hit in the engines, nose, cockpit, or aft fuselage. We could save some weight by stripping the armor out of those areas…

We have incentivized night time consumption. Base load generation (nuclear, coal) can’t ramp up and down fast enough to match the daily demand curve. They can’t produce more than the minimum overnight demand, but they have keep producing that around the clock. To minimize the need for “peaker” plants during the day, they want the overnight demand to be as high as possible.

So they put steel mills, aluminum smelters, and other heavy industry on overnight shifts by offering them extraordinarily cheap power.

That incentivized overnight load needs to be shifted to daytime, so it can be met with solar and wind. Moving forward, we need to minimize overnight demand.

Because it is not cost effective. Simple as that.

The problem is that we don’t have enough demand shaping to shift night time loads to day time, and we don’t have enough storage to shift production to overnight. The result is that daytime generation is regularly going into negative rates (you have to pay to put power on the grid, which melts the returns on your investment into solar.

As far as problems go, it’s a good one to have, as it will eventually result in lower prices for daytime generation.

SCOTUS response to Mexico:

Can’t give a general answer, but we can look to history. Consider the Castrati: removing the testicles before puberty prevented a boy’s voice from changing, giving them a high singing voice in adulthood.

A few Nazis and KKK apologists convinced a shit-ton of marketers, influencers, Karens, and other predatory users to leave.

On balance, Nazis and Klukkers didn’t make it any worse than it was.

I agree with everything except the “got even worse” part. It was always a steaming turd.

The reality is that Xitter isn’t actually any shittier than Twitter was. It’s not any better, of course. But it’s certainly not any worse.

It takes hours to days to start, stop, or change nuclear and coal generation rates. You can’t just turn it on and off as needed. If you need coal or nuclear to meet overnight demand, you have to leave it running during the day as well. If you need 2MW of power overnight and 5MW during the day, you can only add 3MW of solar generation before you are putting too much power on the grid. If your solar puts out 5MW, you have to find out something to do with the extra 2MW that your nuclear plant needs to output continuously.

If you size your solar plants to produce 3MW in the middle of winter, then in summer they are putting out about 9MW. What can you do with the 6MW excess?

There is no single solution to manage every issue, but the single most important is “demand shaping”. We need to reduce demands that can only be met with baseload generation. We need to move that demand to peak solar production times. We need to increase daytime demand to incentivize greater investment into solar. We need east/west transmission lines across every continent, shifting power from wherever the sun is up to wherever the sun is down.

Storage has to be a very distant second. Every 1 MW we time shift from night to day takes 2MW of load off the grid.

Number 2 is not inherently true. We can incentivize time-of-use, and push it to time-of-generation. Not with all loads, of course, but with a lot of them, and a lot of very heavy loads.

Our old nuclear/coal model pushes a lot of these loads overnight to reduce daytime demand and “level the curve”. Steel mills and aluminum smelters often operate overnight and shutdown during the day, because that is what nuclear and coal needed.

With solar and wind becoming predominant, we need to reverse those overnight, “off peak” incentives, and push consumption to daytime hours.

The concept is known as “demand shaping”. It is an underutilized method of matching production and consumption, but it is essential if solar and wind are to become our primary source of power.

If you already know what is wrong and just need a doctor’s note (and maybe antibiotics), go to the clinic. While their staff are significantly more skilled knowledgeable than the general public, their policies limit them to only simple diagnostics and treatments. Your medical knowledge is certainly less than that of the Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants that staff these clinics, but likely exceeds the scope of practice they are limited to by their employer. If you don’t know what the problem is, the clinic is going to refer you to your PCP or urgent care anyway, so you should only visit the clinic to appease HR or get access to basic prescription medications.

If something is bothering you, but you can tolerate it for a couple weeks, schedule an appointment with primary care.

If you don’t know what’s wrong, or you need something more than a note and a prescription, and you can transport yourself, go to urgent care.

The only time you should go to the ER voluntarily is if urgent care sends you there. Any other trip to the ER should be because someone dragged you there without giving you a choice.