JohnLocke

I gotta go with intentionally obtuse. Nobody is actually this obtuse. The first part of my story is literally a cautionary tale about getting vaccinated, comparing the outcome of my son who was vaccinated vs. his friend who was not. Yes, get the vaccine. It may save your life. I have. We can two things at once though. We may yet have a strain where vaccines are useless, or worse, counter productive. There is a thing called antibody dependent enhancement. We should be preparing for that, and yeah, maybe even helping some of those who "deserve" what they get because they are unvaccinated. We have not been aggressive in pursuing at home treatments to keep you out of the hospital. Let me give you one example. This is from the NIH website: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/immunomodulators/corticosteroids/ Recommendation There is insufficient evidence for the Panel to recommend either for or against the use of inhaled budesonide for the treatment of COVID-19. This is based on 2 studies which show encouraging results: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/table-4b/ Cliff notes: Evidence that budensonide may help keep you out of the hospital and/or from dying but study limitations preclude a firm conclusion. Now, here's my complaint. The CDC and NIH have literally tens of thousands of employees. Do they actually have something more important to do then figure out whether a low cost readily available drug can help keep covid patients out of the hospital? We are 18 months into this, and they can't/won't figure this out. Why? WTF? Is it really not a priority?

Quit being intentionally obtuse. Son's friend got great treatment once he went to the hospital. IV industrial strength blood thinners, etc. What he didn't get was anything beforehand to keep him out of the hospital.

Well, we are are 18 months into this, and your home treatment options are horse paste or nothing. Doesn't seem to be much of a focus.

Just as sanctimonious as ever I see. I'm not anti-vax. I was vaccinated early. The story I told illustrates quite clearly a case where the vaccines worked well. But I don't believe the mutations are driven by the unvaccinated. The choices are not horse paste or nothing. We are capable of pursuing two paths at once. It would be prudent to pursue treatment options. The lamda variant already exists, and is allegedly quite resistant to the vaccines. It would be best to prepare. And we should quit killing people today with blood clots unnecessarily. Friend is a pediatric doctor and says they are seeing lots of them--in teenagers. Be aware. Or bury your head in the sand. Your choice.

This is all incredibly frustrating. I don't know what to believe. There doesn't seem to much science in the booster shots. It's just spitballing at this point. We are basically 6 months in and the virus is mutating around the vaccines, and the answer is more of the same. I'm skeptical we can vaccinate our way out of this in the long term. Vaccines are working for now, but what we really need are treatments that work. You can see that the day may come where the vaccines don't work at all. Hell, we need to use the treatments that we have that work. My son (late 20's, vaccinated) got covid from an unvaccinated friend about the same age. My son barely knew he had it, very mild symptoms, and he was vaccinated in December. His friend is sick as a dog, runs 101 to 103 fever for 12 days, coughing, chills, the works. I'm thinking he needs to be in the hospital, but no breathing problems, so they tell him to stay at home. I'm asking about steroids and bloodthinners cuz I know when you are that sick with this shit, you are at high risk for a cytokin storm, and your blood turns to molasses. Nope, just ibuprofin. Not even aspirin. Sure enough, 2 days later he is in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism and a blood clot in his leg. WTF? I knew it was coming, why the hell doesn't the AMA? (Kid is recovering nicely, thank goodness, but damn!) I don't understand why there is so little focus on effective home treatments to keep you out of the hospital.

Well, that's one way to get a smoking hot body again....

Bullet, just my opinion. I have lots of Auburn friends. It is a huge rivalry, but it's been getting old playing such a brutal schedule. Adding Texas and OU ain't gonna make it easier. The hate for Georgia is a 9 out of 10. The hate for Bama is at least an 11 out of 10.

Despite contrary opinions, I think the Auburn fans are willing to sacrifice the Auburn-Georgia game, especially since it will be played every other year. They are sick of playing a top 3 hardest schedule every year. They would not give up the Iron bowl. The other option I've seen swaps Tennesse/Vanderbilt for Ole Miss/Miss State as a more traditional game for Bama and Auburn. Ags will do anything to stay out of a division with Texas -OU, and nobody wants to see LSU get an easy pod anyway so putting A&M with LSU makes sense, and gives the Ags a bone.

This is the alignment that makes the most sense to me. It's the most competitively balanced.

Nothing to see here, move along. Jen Psaki says Hunter Biden has 'the right' to pursue new art career despite fears anonymous painting buyers will have undue influence after White House carved out deal to keep $500K sales secret. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9773819/Jen-Psaki-defends-White-House-plan-help-Hunter-Bidens-art-buyers-secret.html

A wealth tax is likely unconstitutional. But how hard would it be to implement a graduated lifetime capital gains tax? Not hard at all. But it will never happen, cuz both parties are in the pocket of the wealthy. Example. 1st million 15% 2-5 million 20% 5-10 million 30% over 10 million: 50% This would also take care of those hedge fund guys that get to claim their income is capital gains. I'm all for sticking it to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

A good simple reform would be to not allow hospitals to charge more than 25% more to anyone of their average insurance rate.

There is plenty of reason to worry about the debt. Back in the old days of capitalism, when the government borrowed 2 trillion dollars, they had to go out on the open market and sell treasury bonds. This tended to make interest rates rise, and acted somewhat as a brake on excessive borrowing. Now that republicans and democrats have figured out how to skip this step by having the fed buy the bonds, I don't see any brakes on spending. This grand experiment can't end well. But it will be much harder on the poor and middle class, who won't have appreciating assets to counter balance rising prices. Wages will struggle to keep up. So far the rich are doing great in this environment. They will likely continue to do well as they can borrow at low rates and watch their assets increase in value. If you set up an economic plan specifically to benefit the rich, you would be hard pressed to come up with anything better. And yeah, Trump and the Republicans were horrible on the deficit. Now the democrats are in "Hold my beer" mode. Next up 2 trillion for infrastructure, then 2 trillion for the green new deal.

I'm not sure what covid relief has to do with rewarding blue states that were fiscally irresponsible pre-covid. Not a good precedent. It looks like the democrats have figured out how to get red states to pay for blue state public employee pensions. I don't get why any Texan is for this.

Lying dog-faced pony soldier...

The problem with wind is the same as it has always been. You have to back it up with fossil fuel plants since you can't rely on it. This always winds up increasing what the consumer pays for electricity. It is about 1/4 of our energy production in Texas. We only count on it being 1/10 in a crisis, and in this one it was considerably less than that. Wind energy is not cheap, especially in Texas with the production so far from the usage. If we had spent the money that we spent on wind on nuclear or coal, we would have weathered this event much better. Even though the main problem was the natural gas pipelines. Natural gas in great, but there is some reliability risk given that you can't store it. You are always vulnerable to a supply disruption. I would hope we would focus our efforts going forward on nuclear and coal. My bet would be we will continue on the same path of increasing our supply of wind energy and natural gas production. Solar does match up nicely with peak demand in Texas, and there is a place for it. Storage at this point is like trying to deploy desktop computers in 1970. We need to get there before we can even think about it.

I've been hearing that for at least ten years. I like cheap energy. Wind is already more expensive. Storage will add to that cost, even if we come up with technology that makes it feasible. We now have a less reliable power mix, and we haven't even started to pay for insurance against this type of event happening again. Wind has been tried in a lot of places. The result is always higher prices to consumers and a less reliable grid. And it's probably not a good idea to be 55% natural gas either. We need more baseline nuclear. If France can do it, how hard can it be, really?

That's my issue with wind energy in a nutshell. It's more expensive, and it's unreliable. We have tried to keep rates low by going all in on natural gas (which is cheap now, but has it's own reliability issues as we are seeing). We've also been skipping the insurance payments, so to speak, an increasingly risky proposition given our increasingly risky power mix. Now it will require a very expensive fix that we will all pay for.

What the hell are you talking about? For the last 25 years, we have prioritized keeping rates low. We've avoided the expensive option of a capacity market. We have now had the black swan event that I'm sure will make us rethink this. 15 years ago our grid likely would have handled this. Now it can't. The main contributor was an inability to get natural gas, but having 10% of our overall capacity wiped out with frozen wind turbines was a kick in the butt too. Nearly 80% of our power coming from wind and natural gas just makes the system less reliable. What happened this week is completely unacceptable. We've been out on this limb for a while, but Ercot always dodged the bullet and made it work. Now it has completely blown up in the most spectacular fashion possible. The net result is you and I and everyone else are going to pay significantly higher electricity rates in the future so we can guarantee this won't happen again.

I don't know, you all seem to be documenting what I'm saying just fine. Meanwhile, >30 GW of fossil plants, mostly natural gas, went down. From Hayden's article (I'm pretty sure if there were any major issues with coal, it would be the number 1 highlight.) (From the Bloomberg article) That doesn’t mean that frozen turbines are playing no role in the energy crisis, which the grid operator has highlighted. Cody Moore, head of gas and power trading at Mercuria Energy America, noted that wind generation this week is down markedly this week from last week, possibly indicating that turbines are automatically shutting down due to ice. “We are seeing wind generation down 60% week-over-week,” said Matt Hoza, manager of energy analysis at BTU Analytics (From the Bloomberg article.) And Kudos to Sidis. I look forward to seeing the real numbers.

Believe what you want to believe, I really don't care. Do you really expect an Ercot official to say "Well, shit, the problem is in our power mix. I think we overdid it on cutting back on coal and nuclear." You notice that while the article noted that wind production was down 60% from last week, we got no such quantification on the "problems" with coal and nuclear" Wind has gone to shit this week, and we can't get enough natural gas. Once again, it's not complicated.

Nonsense. Coal plants are working fine right now. So is nuclear. The more you increase the production of your energy to unreliable sources, the more prone you become to outages. It's not complicated. And here we are.

Wind energy is inherently unreliable. Natural gas, for all it's many advantageous, can face market disruptions like we are seeing now. Coal does not, and is the most reliable energy source in a crisis. This never would have happened to our grid 15 years ago.

https://babylonbee.com/news/people-who-moved-to-texas-from-california-finally-feeling-at-home-now-that-power-is-out

So, when do they change the name of Yale university? I mean, the guy was a slave trader.