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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:30:18 GMT -8
I named my pet newt "Tiny".
Why "Tiny"? Because he's my newt.
Did You Ever Want to Ride a Mastodon?
In the wake of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, some users have been seeking alternative platforms. One of the biggest beneficiaries has been Mastodon. But what is it?
The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
On the surface Mastodon looks like Twitter - account users write posts (called "toots"), which can be replied to, liked and re-posted, and they can follow each other.
Under the bonnet, though, it works in a different way.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:31:51 GMT -8
What To Do If You Get Sand In Your Battery
The Vatajankoski power plant is home to the world's first commercial-scale sand battery. Fully enclosed in a 7m (23ft)-high steel container, the battery consists of 100 tonnes of low-grade builders' sand, two district heating pipes and a fan. The sand becomes a battery after it is heated up to 600C using electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels in Finland, brought by Vatajankoski, the owners of the power plant.
The renewable energy powers a resistance heater which heats up the air inside the sand. Inside the battery, this hot air is circulated by a fan around the sand through heat exchange pipes.
Thick insulation surrounds the sand, keeping the temperature inside the battery at 600C (1,112F), even when it is freezing outside. "We don't want to lose any heat; the average winter temperature is below 0C (32F) in Kankanpää," says Ville Kivioja, lead scientist at Polar Night Energy, who monitors the battery's performance online.
The battery stores 8 MWh of thermal energy when full. When energy demand rises, the battery discharges about 200 kW of power through the heat-exchange pipes: that's enough to provide heating and hot water for about 100 homes and a public swimming pool in Kankaanpää, supplementing power from the grid. The battery is charged overnight when the electricity prices are lower.
It's a low-maintenance system, says Kivioja. The company uses cheap, low-quality sand that's been rejected by builders instead of high quality river-sand which is used in vast quantities for construction, leading to a global shortage.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:39:12 GMT -8
Nations Meeting In Egypt Are Seeing a Mirage
The past eight years are on track to be the hottest ever recorded, a United Nations report finds, as UN chief Antonio Guterres warns that the planet is sending “a distress signal”.
The UN’s weather and climate body released its annual state of the global climate report on Sunday with yet another warning that the target to limit temperature increases to 1.5C (2.7F) was “barely within reach”.
The acceleration of heat waves, glacier melts and torrential rains has led to a rise in natural disasters, the World Meteorological Organization said as the UN’s COP27 climate summit opened in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
“As COP27 gets under way, our planet is sending a distress signal,” said Guterres, who described the report as “a chronicle of climate chaos”.
Representatives from nearly 200 states gathered in Egypt will discuss how to keep the rise in temperatures to 1.5C, as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a goal some scientists say is now unattainable.
Earth has warmed more than 1.1C since the late 19th century with roughly half of that increase occurring in the past 30 years, the report showed.
As The Economist Says, "Goodbye 1.5°C"
To accept that the world’s average temperature might rise by more than 1.5°C, declared the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands in 2015, would be to sign the “death warrant” of small, low-lying countries such as his. To widespread surprise, the grandees who met in Paris that year, at a climate conference like the one starting in Egypt next week, accepted his argument. They enshrined the goal of limiting global warming to about 1.5°C in the Paris agreement, which sought to co-ordinate national efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases.
No one remembered to tell the firing squad, however. The same countries that piously signed the Paris agreement have not cut their emissions enough to meet its targets; in fact global emissions are still growing. The world is already about 1.2°C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times. Given the lasting impact of greenhouse gases already emitted, and the impossibility of stopping emissions overnight, there is no way Earth can now avoid a temperature rise of more than 1.5°C. There is still hope that the overshoot may not be too big, and may be only temporary, but even these consoling possibilities are becoming ever less likely.
The consequences of the world’s failure to curb emissions are catastrophic, and not just for coral atolls in the Pacific. Climate-related disasters are proliferating, from Pakistan, much of which was inundated by this summer’s unusually intense monsoon, to Florida, which in September endured its deadliest hurricane since 1935. Even less lethal distortions of the weather, such as this summer’s extraordinary heatwave in Europe, do enormous economic damage, impeding transport, wrecking infrastructure and sapping productivity.
The response to all this should be a dose of realism. Many activists are reluctant to admit that 1.5°C is a lost cause. But failing to do so prolongs the mistakes made in Paris, where the world’s governments adopted a Herculean goal without any plausible plan for reaching it. The delegates gathering in Egypt should be chastened by failure, not lulled by false hope. They need to be more pragmatic, and face up to some hard truths.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:40:20 GMT -8
Two Can Play the Electricity Game
Ukrainian forces have targeted three power lines in the Kherson region, the Russian-installed administration says, cutting off water and electricity supplies.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:42:25 GMT -8
It Doesn't Matter How Enthusiastic You Are If You Vote
The final national NBC News poll of the 2022 midterms finds a highly competitive campaign landscape ahead of Election Day. While Democrats have pulled even with Republicans in enthusiasm, President Joe Biden remains unpopular, and voters express deep dissatisfaction about the state of the country.
Forty-eight percent of likely voters say they prefer a Democratic-controlled Congress as the outcome of Tuesday’s elections, while 47% prefer a Republican-controlled Congress.
That’s a reversal from October, when 48% preferred a GOP-controlled Congress versus 47% who wanted Democrats in charge, although the shift is well within the poll’s margin of error.
Among all registered voters, congressional preference is tied at 47%-47% — essentially unchanged from last month, when Democrats held a narrow 1-point edge, 47%-46%.
Yet what has changed in the poll is that Democrats have caught up to Republicans in election interest. An identical 73% of Democrats and Republicans express high interest, registering either a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
In October’s NBC News poll, Republicans held a 9-point advantage in high voter interest, 78% to 69%, after Democrats had previously closed the enthusiasm gap following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:43:24 GMT -8
Who Won the Week?
Brazil, as voters restore man-of-the-people Lula da Silva to the presidency, booting dictator wannabe Jair Bolsonaro from office. The rainforest survives and "Brazil is back!"
U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi, for issuing a tough restraining order against pea-brained MAGAt goons from intimidating voters at ballot drop-boxes in Arizona
President Biden: delivers red-alert speech on MAGA threat to democracy; 261,000 new jobs in October; frees $4.5 billion for heating assistance; sends more Putin-busting aid to Ukraine
Quick-thinking San Francisco 911 dispatcher Heather Grimes, who likely saved Paul Pelosi’s life when she got a cryptic call from him and sent police to stop the MAGA terrorist intruder
The Labor Department, for determining that the Ithaca, NY Starbucks should be reopened after management illegally retaliated against the newly-unionized store's employees
Ukraine, for holding fast against Putin's continued terrorist actions, making major gains in Kherson, and destroying/damaging several vessels in Russia's prized Black Sea fleet
The Democratic candidates and their supporters workin' non-stop to keep the MAGA barbarians on the other side of the gate, and all the early voters doing the same
The corporations (GM, Pfizer, Audi, many others) and tidal wave of tweeters revolting against weirdo Elon Musk and his new toy Twitter
Houston Astro Cristian Javier, for pitching the first World Series no-hitter in 66 years (and only the second one in World Series history)
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:45:24 GMT -8
Basically, No One Knows What Will Happen Tuesday. "Election Analysis" Is REALLY Reading Tea Leaves
Here's One Reason Why
Many stalwarts of political polling over the last decade — Monmouth University, Quinnipiac University, ABC/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, New York Times/Siena College, Marist College — have conducted far fewer surveys, especially in the battleground states, than they have in recent years. In some cases, these pollsters have conducted no recent polls at all.
And on the flip side, there has been a wave of polls by firms like the Trafalgar Group, Rasmussen Reports, Insider Advantage and others that have tended to produce much more Republican-friendly results than the traditional pollsters. None adhere to industry standards for transparency or data collection. In some states, nearly all of the recent polls were conducted by Republican-leaning firms.
Using only: Siena, Hart, Quinnipiac, Monmouth, Marist, YouGov (CBS), Beacon Shaw, Marquette, Selzer, Suffolk and Ipsos from the last 3 weeks, we get the following for competitive races:
PA: D+4.3 (5 polls) AZ: D+4.0 (3 polls) GA: D+3.0 (4 polls) NV: even (3 polls) NC: even (1 poll) OH: R+0.5 (2 polls) WI: R+2.0 (3 polls)
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:47:04 GMT -8
I'll Still Be Glued to My TV Tuesday Night
But “election night” no longer exists and states can get rid of it. Today it’s more like election month. Early voting begins in some states in early October and continues into November and absentee voting has skyrocketed. Some of these trends are the direct result of COVID which shut the country down in 2020, leading election officials in many states to come up with ways to hold an election that didn’t involve standing in line inside a polling place and possibly contracting the virus. For the first time in history, only 30% of voters cast their ballots on Election Day in 2020.
The second reason election night no longer exists is that most states have laws which forbid counting the early votes before Election Day. That is understandable—imagine the unfair impact reporting an early vote winner might have on subsequent voters. So, most states forbid counting these early votes until Election Day itself. This was never much of a problem when the early vote counted for a small portion of the overall vote. But in 2020, in addition to the large increase in early voting, early voting itself became politicized. These two factors combined to make the Election Day vote a very poor predictor of the election outcome.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:53:48 GMT -8
Ron DeathSentence Is Better Than "Ron DeSanctimonious”
Donald Trump loves to cook up dunning nicknames for his biggest enemies — which apparently now include Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who might give Trump a run for his money in the next presidential primary.
Trump mocked him as “Ron DeSanctimonious” in a rally speech Saturday in Pennsylvania, where the former president touted poll numbers — but did not provide the source of the figures — with his possible matchups in a 2024 run for the Oval Office.
The nickname was not entirely original. (Previous Guy Gets Everything by Stealing) Longtime Trump ally and GOP political operative Roger Stone just last month warned “Ron DeSanctimonious” in a post on Telegram that it would be “treachery” if he ran against Trump for the GOP presidential nomination. Stone called DeSantis an “ingrate,” who he claimed owes his position to Trump’s support.
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Post by mhbruin on Nov 6, 2022 8:57:47 GMT -8
Socialism: a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
President Joe Biden lashed out during a speech Saturday in Illinois at protesters labeling his policies “socialism” as “idiots.”
He then pointed out that Republicans are out to gut vital social service programs like Social Security that are so American that the nation has had it for 87 years.
Biden blasted the signs brandished by protesters saying “socialism sucks” outside an elementary school auditorium in Joliet where he spoke.
“I love those signs when I came in — socialism. Give me a break, what idiots,” he said to laughter and applause.
He then launched an attack on Republican plans to dismantle bedrock programs like Social Security and Medicare that Americans, including the protesters, likely rely on.
“Social security and Medicare are more than government programs; they’re a promise. ... Work hard and contribute and when the time comes, things will be easier for you,” he said in his speech. “It’s a rock-solid guarantee, an iron-clad commitment. Generations of Americans have counted on it, and it works.”
Public Utilities Are Socialist. They Do a Much Better Job Than Enron and Most Private Energy Producers.
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