161–170 of 248 posts
I live in a suburb of the Bay Area where temperatures are usually in 70s and 80s. Suddenly it is going to be 100 for 5 day straight. I have never seen anything like this
What? This happens every year - always.
Where is all the load coming from? Aren't most of the office building (in the Bay Area) empty rightnow due to Covid?
I wonder if the climate control units in office buildings have even been switched off when not in use. I know that nobody turned off the one in our office when we were away from it for 6 weeks during the NZ lockdown. It’s not remotely managed and we are not allowed to touch it so someone from the company that owns the building would have had to go and do that, and then come back later to turn it on again. And maybe s…
even if they're on, there'll be much less for them to do. fewer people opening doors, fewer bodies producing heat, less non-HVAC electrical demand (much of which ends up as heat).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I have both seen and read, housing costs are the #1 cause of this. They have exploded in the last 25 years. The thing that blows my mind is that the COVID recession shows no sign of slowing down house price growth, though it has tempered rents in expensive markets. If housing still rises even now, something is totally insane.
Interest rates have crumbled over that same period. As interest rates go down, housing prices go up. The problem becomes the down payment goes up making it difficult for a lot of people to get the initial equity. People often forget that mortgages are essentially bonds. When you get a mortgage you are essentially selling the bond. As interest rates fall the bond gets more expensive which means the price of homes rise…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What makes California different than Texas? I don’t have a dog in the fight, I live on the east coast.
Texas generates more power than it needs (which is good because I seem to recall they also aren't tied to grids of neighboring states?). California doesn't. California banks on the probability that it can import power from Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Arizona, and that all those states won't have one big correlated, synchronized demand peak, which of course is just stochastic. Sometimes you get the worst case.
And despite whatever stereotypes you might have about Texas, it produces more power from renewable sources (beside hydro) than any other state in America, by a pretty fair margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_electri...
I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.
You'd think with the reduction in traffic there's all sorts of extra space and time for fixing old infrastructure.
https://thesource.metro.net/2020/06/15/metro-completes-decki...
I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.
> […] could be used to build and improve infrastructure. But what about Infrastructure Week? * https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/611389675/why-its-infrastruct... * https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/donald-trump-infrast... * https://theweek.com/articles/839005/all-infrastructure-weeks... /s > There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful. Well, at the federal level, there are two…
Changing anything for the benefit of the masses through electoral politics may never happen again or will be too slow. The last time two times the US had aligned executive and legislative branches were the first two years of the Obama and Trump regimes. So much changes between elections that there's no way we can fix it through electoral politics, and we must find another way.
We cannot vote our way out of the immediacy of a pandemic or a constitutional crisis or an environmental disaster. Voting is just too slow help the masses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, you can cherry pick certain statistics for any period. That doesn’t tell you anything. My point was, the US is not falling apart. Or if it is, it’s always been falling apart. The current situation is not unique.
Has any other President - Republican or Democrat - actively tried to make it less effective? Why are we pretending that the current administration is normal? This isn’t a difference on the margins about whether you believe in supply side or demand side economics. If you look back on Presidents or politicians on either side of the aisle. We have never seen anything like this during my lifetime (born in 74). I didn’t a…
We will certainly destroy ourselves by other means before "the deficit" affects us in the least. It never stopped us from buying more weaponry; now that there is obviously something else on which to spend money suddenly we should worry about it?
The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(
That's just your human brain succumbing to its recency bias. As someone who has been around for way too many decades, it was like this in the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's. And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt). And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.
Not only that, eugenics and Darwanism were popular in the U.S. at the time. Hell, we still forcibly sterilize people in the U.S. to this day.
I wish the massive financial bailout money could be used to build and improve infrastructure. There doesn't seem to be a lack of money but it never seem to do anything useful.
It seems like we might go into a depression... if only that had happened before and we could draw on those experiences instead of dithering and arguing while people can't pay their bills.
Dare to dream, am I right?
I live in a suburb of the Bay Area where temperatures are usually in 70s and 80s. Suddenly it is going to be 100 for 5 day straight. I have never seen anything like this
How long have you lived in the Bay Area? I just checked the forecast, and it's not Pacifica your talking about (thank goodness, that would be really awful). Inland from the ocean such heat waves do occur.