Zoraptor

You invest because there's zero input costs since wind and sun is free, with the knowledge that if you don't have wind or sun you need something else or some way to store the power excess from the renewables. Coal/ nuclear/ gas all cost ongoing money to supply and in nuclear's gas remove the fuel required. Then you have the question of what is 'less faulty'. Everyone knows what the limitations of renewables are- solar needs sun, wind needs wind, hydro needs water and a gradient etc- and the 'reliable' back stop of natural gas option was itself unreliable in this case due to, well, needing natural gas. Coal needs coal and if you don't have a ready supply then is expensive when gas is right there, nuclear costs a massive amount for initial expense and tends to supply GW levels so if you don't have the habitual demand rapidly becomes a white elephant that can't make back its investment.

Everything from earthquakes to covid to winter storms to Erdogan personally claiming to have ordered that Russian jet to be shot down is obviously Fetullah Gulen's fault though, he doesn't need to actually blame him specifically any more. Stub your toe? Gulen. Weevils in your flour? Gulen. Rain on your wedding day? Gulen. Green lights when you're already late? Gulen. OTOH if Trump had somehow managed to wangle his way back to the presidency Erdogan would probably be claiming MAGA Shaman as Turkish due to Tengrism- while simultaneously courting the domestic Islamic vote.

Breaking news: the Capitol riots were influenced by Kurdish revolutionaries, according to world renowned geopolitical analyst Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Normally I'd hesitate to post anything Memri related since it's an Israeli psy-op that deliberately mistranslates a lot of the time to make people look more stupid or obnoxious than they are, but in this case it's what he actually said. The idea of MAGA types being influenced by massively left wing anarcho-collectivist Kurds is an interesting take, to say the least.

You're not saying the same thing. 1) 'Strain' on natgas supply was not the problem, it physically freezing and reducing supply was. Even if wind power had been at 100% nominal power- which no one should be relying on- it would not and could not make up that difference. Wind power only reduced first, it had no influence on natgas power dropping. They wouldn't have had Scotty shouting down the lines about not being able to give it more or his natgas plant'll blow cap'n, they'd know it can produce x MW of power- and you cannot run the turbines out of spec. 2) a,b are conflation, at best. You can make the exact reverse argument- renewables only 'failed' because the natgas electricity that was meant to balance loads failed to materialise- to blame natgas instead. Indeed, since it's well known that supply from wind and solar especially are intermittent natgas and other spot energies are fundamentally intended to smooth out and increase/ decrease (maintain) supply as renewables come on/offline; ie such an argument actually shows that it was natgas that failed. (c) is the ultimate reason for natgas electricity failing. They aren't grid infrastructure technically, the grid infrastructure isn't energy production but the lines and transformers that move the energy*. I'd suspect rather a lot of that failed too due to ice on lines and possibly even transformers freezing**. But that had nothing to do with renewables, since natgas was also effected, and it was the one that was meant to be able to step up output for balancing purposes. If natgas power had been maintained or risen the shortage could probably have been largely mitigated to relatively short lived rolling black outs, in general, and probably more general blackouts in rural areas as lines physically failed. *eg we have a ~600MW hydro power plant here that is unconnected to the grid as it produces power exclusively for an aluminium smelter. Which is great, since Comalco loves to threaten to shut down that smelter immediately before elections as an attempt to gouge better prices from its supplier. **which shouldn't happen if they have current since transforming generates a decent amount of heat (indeed, failure to remove the heat is a frequent cause of failure), but does happen if they're not supplied with power.

We should be fair to Boeing's incompetence, they managed to design a plane with a single fundamental problem- wanting to fly itself into the ground- and find multiple points of failure (attitude indicators, pitot tubes, software) that could manifest it, rather than just one; and paywalled one preventative measure. There are always single points of failure in an electrical grid unless you're designing with massive redundancy, and fundamentally even then you will still have a hard upper limit at some point at very least. Economically the push will always be to supply just enough power to meet demand because anything else is expensive and the power is potentially 'wasted', hence all the work on things like thermal storage (eg sodium 'batteries') for solar. Somewhere like New Zealand has a natural advantage due to having lots of hydro power for load balancing near instantly, but even here a problem with something like the HVDC line could see the North Island in trouble, despite there being 2 cables rather than one because those cables are high hundreds of km long and extremely expensive. A transformer/ cable issue (with redundant capacity in theory, point of failure was deferring maintenance on 2 cables which both failed) 23 years ago led to major power outages in Auckland for 5 weeks and the 2003 New York+ blackout was infamously caused by a load sharing failure cascade due to a software error. I certainly wouldn't blame people in general for not being prepared for something highly unusual, but I do think it has to be pointed out that by and large people don't die of exposure/ hypothermia when they have access to hot food/ drink, which a gas cooker does provide. Though of course you also have the problem of carbon monoxide poisoning if you overdo it.

Good old Recep Tayyip Erdogan going a bit mental at everyone having completely asterisked up a hostage rescue operation*. It's everyone's fault apart from his, especially his domestic Kurdish political enemies and the US. Probably Gulen, Israel, Iraq, students, gays, Syrian refugees, Greece, Armenia and Iran too. Coincidentally Turkey's economy is going down the gurgler as the funny money fiscal policy and building bubble burst, and he's getting publicly bent over by China over vaccine supply and being forced to abandon support for the Uighurs, not exactly a great look for someone who has tried to make themself the poster child for pan Turkism (despite Erdogan being ethnic Georgian, not Turkic, himself). Ultimately that's the problem with using military adventurism to boost popularity artificially- it's temporary, so you have to do it semi constantly with diminishing returns; and if things don't work out as you want it has the reverse effect and you lose popularity. He'll probably try and ban the domestic Kurdish party soon, though overall that shouldn't have too much effect since HDP voters will 99% go for CHP over the pro Erdogan alternatives. *while the headline says the victims were civilians, as claimed by Turkey, they were definitely non civilian police and army personnel. And there are a lot of rumours that the hostages were not executed but died either in a drone strike or during fighting. After all they had been held long term without execution prior to this.

Since Kurzmann/ ST came up in the movies thread I feel compelled to say that the penultimate episode of Discovery S3 seems to have finally killed off my ability to watch. It sits there in my Netflix queue, forlorn and alone, waiting to disappear into the rubbish bin of half watched shows. I wonder how Clarice is. Surely not a generic procedural that might as well use the initialism Clarice Starling Investigates, surely not.

Dunno, most of the defensive 'requirements' in Kingmaker seemed pretty sensible to me. If you're fighting undead make sure you have death ward and restoration, if you're fighting stuff that poisons have poison resistance etc. It's way more of a all buffs all the time game compared to the BGs but then BG spells were largely cheese fests with different balance issues like the aforementioned summoning. And again, I'd suggest there's a lot of rose tinted on the Baldur's Gate side. BG2 Beholders and illithids? The liches with Imprisonment? All instant gameover or as good as if you fail a save, if you even got a save. It's just that everyone knows how to counter those because they're for a 20 year old game, so people go get the Shield of Reflection first etc. I'd criticise Kingmaker for being too... random in its macro level results (ie for difficult encounters I'd often lose terribly, then retry and win trivially next time using exactly the same tactics) for combat, but that was exactly the same in BG1/2 where often the combat was decided by who got off [mass status effect] spell first and who failed saves in the first 2 rounds. For higher levels, who gets the enemy mages via Breach or whatever. That's just how D&D type combat is, any encounter is trivial with a lucky throw or two, and most encounters can be difficult with the reverse. Kingmaker definitely suffered from a decent dollop of game system opaqueness though, no doubt about it. More generally, I rather liked most of the kingdom management aspects, though they should definitely be optional (as they are, by setting). It's definitely underdone on the matter of visible consequences/ results with a few exceptions though. The main mechanical complaint is that you can't abort a project involving the PC if something comes up, and the timings for the big events usually started events before their 'due' date which could lead to 2 weeks of pop ups telling you about drunk giants running amok or whatever. Otherwise my main complaint would be not enough options for all the positions, which is pretty minor.

I think you're regarding BG1 with a fair bit of the rose tinted there. You tend to forget all the the times you got wiped by kobolds in the Nashkel mines with their ludicrous crit dealing bows shooting your mages and thiefs or when you stumbled into an Ogre who gibbed everyone in 3 rounds just outside Candlekeep because it's been 23 years and you know what is coming. Or that literally every in game problem could be solved by, well, summoning allies, then summoning more allies and summoning more again. Kingmaker is a game where you absolutely should ignore any hard encounter and come back to it later. Unfortunately modern gaming has conditioned people to believe that that is bad design and you should be able to win everything first attempt and do everything in any order. That is of course why we have level scaling, it's also why you have games like Oblivion where you not only can win with a lvl 2 character but it's actively easier to do so with one. Give me unforgiving pull yourself up by your bootstraps you pathetic loser and git gud old school any day instead of the gaming equivalent of mummy delivering me chicken tendies and telling me how special I am for beating a daedric lord who's been level scaled down to gobbo class.

Would still be too slow to use Stadia without lag.

Shoot a man on 5th Avenue, I could. Be fired, I would not be. While true, if you reversed the positions and looked at liberals who compare conservatives to nazis they certainly don't get fired for it. If they did the unemployment rate in the US would skyrocket.

As Elerond mentioned, the cost of administration of benefits is ludicrous. Cut that out and there's a big saving. Last time I checked it literally literally cost more to investigate benefit fraud here than was saved by detecting it, for example. You do have to have the investigations as you there would be more fraud if there was no chance of being caught, but still, nett loss per investigation suggests better alternatives should be looked at.

"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie game about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad" Be interesting to see if the game starts with some neanderthal from the 82nd using a .50 cal for crowd control, somehow I doubt it.

Not really news, I haven't seen anything that wasn't general knowledge at the time or soon after. I know a lot of people regarded him as a bit of a girl power male feminist, but to be honest he had some pretty... odd stuff going on even without retrospect- Angel stalking Buffy when she was 13, the Spike S6 thing, a lot of Xander's stuff, Wesley's slave girl in the closet not to mention that the whole premise of Dollhouse was extraordinarily creepy. Lots of fetishisation going on there. That Buffy in particular was a toxic set was a pretty open secret even before Emma Caulfield asked for Anya to be killed off. For the most recent stuff, while I don't doubt that Whedon was an utter knob to Charisma Carpenter the decision to fire her was ultimately because WB mandated that James Marsters be brought in for Angel S5 along with another budget cut, and Cordelia was the only character that could be written out to make way for him.

Yeah, though we might not want too many similarities to Spanish Flu since its first major mutation caused most of its death toll, albeit indirectly.

The Watership Down movie was renowned for giving kids nightmares, the TV series is renowned for giving them to adults.

2 days into the trial and I'm approaching the point where I wish those Trumpists had gone full Gaiseric on not just the Capitol, but Washington in general. If the CIA ever gets sick of blasting Nickleback on repeat at people at its black sites they could get an even better effect with these speeches.

Pretty sure you can blame the BBC for that at least.

Just do what Vancouver (?) did and slap a tax on unoccupied houses which makes it economic to have tenants instead of rely solely on house price inflation. Good lord, these impeachment speeches are interminable. Cicero these guys most definitely are not.

The big issue with Venezuela's oil industry is that its oil is heavy and sour and intrinsically lower value/ hard to process, and the US embargoed items essential for maintenance. Chavez sacking some workers makes a lovely narrative, since it was 'commie' Chavez sacking brave striking workers, but if that was the case it took a very long time and plummeting prices to have an effect. It's a very 90s Iraq dichotomy, if you argue that people are in poverty because of sanctions then the argument is that sanctions have no effect and it's all Saddam/ Maduro's/ their economic system's fault and if they just left everything would be rosy, like it is in Iraq, Honduras, Kosovo or Libya currently; OTOH if you're arguing that sanctions have no effect and the people implementing them are incompetent then suddenly all the economic troubles have their root in sanctions. They key thing is, of course, to switch between the two in the same interview and get Madeleine Albright to say for posterity that 500k dead kids from sanctions is perfectly acceptable on camera. Their main problem is that they can only produce oil very inefficiently because they cannot replace specialist parts, and customers at full price are hard to find because the US will sanction those dealing with them. Then, people wonder why Iran wants nuclear power...

True, and that's why the better options would be better, but there would also be less selective pressure for those mutations- and typically the selective pressure is against more severe symptoms as the aim of the virus is to spread, and the best way to spread is for its host to be walking around coughing rather than dead. IIRC while the SA variant is more likely to spread it appears to be somewhat less dangerous on a per case basis as it does so.

The overall infection rate doesn't matter too much though. Said it before, but if sars-cov-2 were reduced to causing 'common cold' like symptoms as its cousins do then no one would be worrying about it overly; and a 50-80% reduction in severe cases means 50-80% less hospitalisations and deaths which is the most important measure of its effect. You'd still want to use a better vaccine if it were available though, and AZ's vaccine was already relatively low efficiency.

South Africa has paused the rollout of its AstraZeneca vaccines due to low effectiveness against mild/ moderate covid. Most of the vaccines aren't as effective against mild covid, but have very good effectiveness at preventing severe cases, so it isn't necessarily as bad a finding as it looks.

No mention of SimpLord69? Not a well researched article. I think those guys just like the stock. $GME

Since there was some discussion about whether food prices had risen a week or so ago. The answer from the UN at least is that yes, they have been.