According to the article linked, Trump wants the new CEO to make less than $500k/year. Yet, according to this article from 2019, the CFO, COO, general council & chief nuclear officer are all making well over that. Who the hell is going to take the CEO job?
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2019/nov/15/...
It is likely they will hire people who will only use the jobs as a stepping stone to private industry. They will take the low pay of government to prove their abilities, then jump to the private sector.
So long as it doesn’t become a revolving door project with workers influenced by private companies by promises of future employment, then I think the whole practice is fine.
>They will take the low pay of government to prove their abilities, then jump to the private sector.
So the job of running a $10 billion dollar per year company that manages nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and supplies power to millions of people is done by someone who hasn't yet proven they likely have the capability to do so?
This isn't a summer internship at the State Department.
Trump acknowledged that he was made aware of the issue
after seeing a television ad ... that aired in prime time
on Fox News.
...
The ad, Lynn said, had an “audience of one,” aiming to
persuade Trump to stop the TVA from outsourcing much of
its information technology division.
I wonder how many other Trump administration policy decisions can be linked back to an ad buy on Fox News...
This is nothing new. Take a political ad out on a major network it certain to get attention from any administration - even if just to look into the premise.
Only napkin math. The typical sources of climate change denial don't see biomass as a threat (Because it is tiny, growing slowly, and augments fossil fuels, not replaces them), so they don't fund any research to attack it.
The proponents of it probably know that its numbers don't look great, so they don't push for research that thoroughly audits it.
It's also difficult to thoroughly audit the carbon costs of a complex supply chain that has to move tens and hundreds of millions tonnes of lumber - when the costs greatly vary based on how the lumber was sourced.
It depends on the region, the age of the school, the wealth and demographics of the community. The poorer the area, its more likely the schools are overcrowded concrete boxes built in the 60s-80s.
US Schooling is very inconsistent and varies a huge amount by municipality.
That’s why I say realistically. You could do a $50 billion blitz campaign to promote/provide masks, and you could increase usage, but the holdouts now are the ones that are difficult to convince.
Schools are a particular problem. Getting kids to consistently and correctly wear masks is hard. Getting kids to follow social distancing rules is hard too.
Bringing a bunch of poorly compliant people together to sit in the same room with 25 other people is gonna be a big challenge.
I personally am a fan of gravity batteries but the amount of scammy companies operating in the space is dragging the entire field down. The energy density of weights is really low so manufacturing a weight is absolutely uneconomical. What you want to do is take material from a landscape. Usually this means pumping water up a hill but you can also carve out a hydraulic cylinder out of the landscape and use water to lift it. [0] It has absolutely insane scaling potential. Energy capacity grows like so: r^4. Doubling the radius increases energy capacity 16 fold. Energy storage up to 1.6TWh is definitively possible.
Of course this is so ambitious that it might never get built but I can definitively tell you that a crane system like this would be barely economical [1] because weights are really expensive but it's a good attempt and can be refined further.
And finally here is an example of a scam concept: [2]
Digging shafts is unaffordable unless you reuse old mine shafts which would reduce the number of shafts in the picture to just a single one.
If you can only have one weight per generator that means the system doesn't scale. The power density of lifting a 1000 ton rock 100m high is pathetic. It's just 270kWh. The cost of the concrete is negligible in this scenario but you won't find a generator that is cheap enough to compete with a conventional battery.
However, to stay realistic. Gravity batteries are about as likely to happen as everyone suddenly switching to nuclear power. The odds aren't great.
> > One of the challenges of doing that nowadays is we have a president who thinks cultural genocide of Uighur muslims is 'absolutely the right thing to do' and that Tienanmen square massacre was also the right thing to do.
> Fake news much? See the 2020 Uyghur Rights Act [1]. I have no idea where you came up with this.
This claim originates in John Bolton's book [1] Make of it what you will. Personally it seems pretty consistent.
> At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.
Bolton is consistent. He has consistently been a warmongering villain. Like many other USA "international security experts" he has never shied away from lying in pursuit of his terrible goals. I'm not eager to believe a story from him that only Trump or Xi could contradict, if they even cared to do so.
But sure, Trump could have said it. He could say anything at any time. As he sees it, he got elected by promising to bully minorities. In office, he has bullied minorities. It's not surprising that during negotiations he would attempt to find common ground through shared appreciation of commonplace governmental activities.
That's not true at all. This sounds a lot like the random anti BLM propaganda you see on facebook.
The core tenants of BLM are that CURRENTLY black communities are policed in a radically different way than white communities. BLM activists want everyone to have a just and fair policing.
The assertion in that article is that all BLM activists and the whole movement are black separatist and racists because a "media commentator" taunted Tucker Carlson? That article also does not mention that she lost her job as a result of that interview (cancellation works both ways).
While there may be black separatists who support BLM, BLM is not a black separatist movement. Ultimately any black separatists will be frustrated by BLM's goals of an inclusive and just society.
Also, National Review is about as unbiased as Daily Kos, and has other ideological goals when discrediting BLM.
Hate crimes spring to mind. People tell lies about minority groups, give themselves permission structures to justify violence, and vigilantes take it upon themselves to "fix" the problem with violence.
A lot of people have been murdered on as a result of hate speech. Emit Till, Michael Donald, James Byrd are a few.
Also, the Rwandan Genocide, historical Pogroms, lynchings, arguably the holocaust.
It's pretty hard to get humans to murder their neightbors without inciting speech.
> It's pretty hard to get humans to murder their neightbors without inciting speech.
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. En masse, with coordination? Maybe, but speech is mostly about coordination at that stage.
Would you say that everybody ever saying something untruthful or hatefull about the GOP is responsible for some lunatic storming the base ball practice of some GOP members of Congress with a gun and shooting at them?
Speech is certainly involved in the actual act of a pogrom, but it's not the driving force (unless your definition of speech gets really vague and everything ever said since the beginning of time is part of "the speech"). You don't have pogroms without previous animosity. Somebody saying something might spark the fire, but the wood has been there all along, soaked in gasoline.
> You don't have pogroms without previous animosity. Somebody saying something might spark the fire, but the wood has been there all along, soaked in gasoline.
That presumes the victimized communities have done anything to warrant violence. In the case of anti-jewish pogroms the inciting factor was often speech by newspapers and officials. How should we account for anti-semitic newspapers that made a good business of concocting lies about the crimes done by Jewish people in the community?
Consider the Kishinev pogrom where "the Bessarabetz paper insinuated that children had been murdered by the Jewish community for the purpose of using their blood in the preparation of matzo for Passover"[1].
> That presumes the victimized communities have done anything to warrant violence.
No, it doesn't at all. It says that there is animosity, but not why it's there or whether it's valid or not. You might hate your neighbor because he's more successful than you, makes you feel inadequate with his good deeds, because he's literally Hitler or because he just so happens to look like somebody that wronged you. The fact that you hate him says nothing about whether that's justified. But your hate makes you susceptible to all kinds of suggestions for terrible actions against your neighbor. All it takes is for somebody to suggest burning down his house, or telling your that he has attacked another victim (or posted the wrong thing on Twitter to stay on topic!)
> In the case of anti-jewish pogroms to inciting factor is speech by newspapers and officials.
Doubtful. We'd have to look at the very first pogroms. If you're looking at the last 150 years, you're closing your eyes to the fact that pogroms against Jews were recurring events and anti-semitism was always around.
That's a problem, because you'll be surprised how these peaceful neighbors can turn into violent murderers practically over night. When you consider that they weren't peaceful neighbors right up until they became murderers, but that there was just a light cover over the hate for a while, there are much fewer unexplainable actions.
The rumors are the spark that I mentioned. The long-existing anti-semitism is the wood pile that is ready to be set ablaze.
> The rumors are the spark that I mentioned. The long-existing anti-semitism is the wood pile that is ready to be set ablaze.
Which arrives at the question, how does anti-semitism propagate through societies? It doesn't spring from nothing. What are the mechanisms that keeps the idea alive? Are all societies susceptible? Someone must be doing the work of keeping that wood pile dry and ready to catch light.
That's what I meant with regards to "speech" becoming very vague and stretching over long periods of time, making the individual expression rather insignificant and the concept very fuzzy and hard to tell apart from culture, tradition and history. Like a rain drop in a storm where all those drops combined are causing the flood, but to pin it on an individual rain drop and say "this one is responsible" is hard.
> Are all societies susceptible?
Given that we've seen some level of exterminatory warfare all over the place in history (I'm sure there's huge amounts that we don't know about because the victims have been annihilated), and it's not unheard of among other mammals as well, my money is on yes.
That some small nations did not wage war against their much larger and much stronger neighbors is not a counter example: the fact that chickens don't hunt wolves doesn't mean they're not predators, they'll happily eat worms, and will eat a mouse if they can catch it.
With those assumptions, it seems fair to state that, given enough time, any sufficiently large group of humans will commit an atrocity against an internal or external minority.
Shouldn't then societies try to structure themselves against this tendency?
I don't know how you'd structure a society against hate. We can't seem to even come together over political ideas within cultures, where everything else is very similar, so I don't have a lot of hope for situations where the similarities are few and far between.
We haven't tried adding empathogens to the water supply, maybe that's a good way to do it.
