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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Even though it was like 100 miles off shore, the Tampa Bay area had an 8 foot storm surge with Helene that killed 12 people and ruined tens of thousands of homes and businesses. There are piles of debris everywhere along the coast that are going to become projectiles in hurricane force winds of they can’t be picked up in time. Almost the entire western coast of Florida saw significant impact from Helene











  • Couple things…why would your dad be mad at you for not finishing a sculpting degree? Is it because he’d feel like he’d wasted money on your completed schooling or because he really wants you to he a sculptor? If the former, pouring more money into this degree would be the wrong course for him too.

    Remember you’re studying in order to be employed after graduation. What do you think you want to do for work? Are there realistic and achievable jobs in that field?




  • Texas is solidly in the lower half of US states for residential energy costs. You probably read about some people who bought into a “wholesale” energy provider who got fucked during the winter storm in 2021, but that situation involved a very small number of people who made a bad choice and does not generalize to the whole state.

    I honestly think the inverse of what you’re saying is true…Texas invested billions in the 2000s in transmission capacity between West Texas and where everyone lives in Central and East Texas, opening up West Texas to wind and solar development. Texas is now #1 in wind generating capacity and #2 in solar, after California.

    All that mess that happened in 2021 was due to corruption within the Texas Railroad Commission, which had the power to force natural gas electric generating facilities to winterize but did not do so. When the temperature dropped to 4°, the natural gas plants froze and went offline almost all at once, causing an immediate drop in power supply necessitating severe and immediate power cuts statewide to protect the grid from failure. Circuits were reenergized slowly over the following few days, but it stayed really cold for really long. I had personally never been through weather even remotely like that in my 35 years in Texas.

    All the other outages you’ve heard about in Texas were mechanical outages, localized areas where power lines were damaged by weather, like Austin in the '23 ice storm or Houston after Hurricane Beryl this past July. People on here generalize these to “Texas’s grid is failing again!”, but every state and every nation faces the same challenges with weather-related mechanical outages.


  • There are so many differences between this strike and the railroad strike you seem blissfully ignorant about. E g., a railroad strike would’ve halted all domestic and international trade within the US at the height of this last inflationary period, immediately having a negative impact on literally every American’s life, whereas this dockworkers’ strike only affected overseas imports/exports, leaving all domestic and North American trade intact and not immediately disrupting literally every American’s life.

    Either way, the Biden Admin kept pressure on railroad owners for a contract in line with the railroad workers’ demands, and they won it.