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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Why? What should people know about Texas power grid upgrades?

    Best I can see right now is ERCOT and others saying lots of upgrades have been made, but not specifics. I can see ERCOT and the legislature going back and forth on a “market overhaul” that no one can quite agree on yet and which favors more on-demand sources (natural gas and such). Can you point to where people should read about upgrades?

    I think there is a bad title here, but that’s not the title at the link. I don’t know where this title came from. OP? The link is a pretty straight forward reporting of this recently released EIA report and doesn’t seem to contain much of the author’s opinion (apart from being on a renewable biased website).







  • This article doesn’t actually mention the values of the temperatures (probably to cover relieve themselves of the responsibility of those details) so I’ll go to their first link, the theHill.com one. They don’t directly give a value in their text either…

    Reading that, the exact same thing is happening as that twitter screenshot thread with the map of the southern US color coded for temperatures.

    Basically, wet bulb globe temperature is being conflated with wet bulb temperature. Globe is in the sun, the other is not. The thehill.com source uses a chart and description for globe, doesn’t mention the word globe anywhere, then says you can’t survive more than 35C with a link to a study. That 35C/88F is the limit for a wet bulb temperature, not wet bulb globe temperature. Obviously measuring something in the sun is going to give a higher number than in the shade. You can’t say “it’s this temperature” referencing wet bulb globe and also say “you couldn’t survive that temperature” using the “survivability” limit of wet bulb without any sort of qualification/clarification as to the distinction. Obviously it’s hotter in the sun. If that same temperature is reached in the shade it’s that much hotter in the sun.

    Sure, we’re all facing extreme climate apocalypse, but this is annoying that the terms are being used as the same thing, and I’d argue detrimental to the cause. When these things are incorrect, it’s just more ammunition for deniers and doubters to point at to justify their continued intentional ignorance.






  • I sort of cringe (more of a nose wrinkle really) at OP’s “it’s known in some circles to be bad” You see beliefs and correlative evidence constantly misrepresented as proof and truth in food and medical science (reporting and discussion).

    I get it. The body is a hugely complicated system, it’s hard to figure these things out. What does even figuring them out mean with the amount of complicating factors of this affects that which affects this which causes this.

    I’m open to the idea that lobbying and such means Aspartame (and other industrial food products) has really been pushed through.

    It’s also obviously been studied quite a bit and it’s hard to believe all the studies saying it’s safe at recommended levels are bunk or fraudulent.

    This news was on another instance where the discussion included that the IARC carcinogen classifications do not take into account exposure/dosage. A whole bunch of things can be carcinogenic depending on exposure. Haven’t we all read how the rats that got cancer from saccharine had epic doses? It was just magnitudes more than a human would consume.

    If an observational study won’t cut it (I see you, @xthedeerlordx, and appreciate your comment and explanation), how does one prove the causation? Don’t you need randomized controlled trials which would be extremely onerous controlling for various factors and basically making the (ideally large number of) participants live in a lab for whatever amount of time the study takes to really prove causation? I’d genuinely like to know. It seems like for a lot of things correlation after correlation after correlation is the best we’re going to get.


  • An analysis of student records by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative activist group representing Asian American students in the lawsuit against Harvard, found that the institution, on average, rated Asian American applicants lower in personality and likability ratings than others.<

    I didn’t see that approach coming, but I guess I should have. Conservatives have always argued that affirmative action was racist, but racist against white folks. Now they’ve found a non-white group that they could argue was discriminated against based on race.