mullingitover (u/mullingitover)

mullingitover commented on Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/... · Posted by u/Matrixik

JoeAltmaier · 3 days ago

$33 per MWh for solar. What is it for coal or natural gas? Maybe half that?

mullingitover · 3 days ago

It's already cheaper to demolish an existing coal plant that's already paid for and replace it with solar + battery. Solar and battery brand new buildout, plus their maintenance overhead, dominates coal even when you only count coal's maintenance cost.

People have it in their heads that this is some bleeding heart, don't ruin the planet thing, but it's plain economics. Non-renewable energy is simply inferior, and will only become more so.

mullingitover commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis

roenxi · 3 days ago

Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.

And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...

[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.

mullingitover · 3 days ago

> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.

I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.

This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.

mullingitover commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis

Alupis · 3 days ago

There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.

It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.

mullingitover · 3 days ago

> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.

Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]

> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.

"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]

> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/12/trump-economy-inflation-aff...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-dr...

mullingitover commented on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence whitehouse.gov/presidenti... · Posted by u/andsoitis

lesuorac · 3 days ago

Can you guys just read stuff before talking?

> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.

The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.

mullingitover · 3 days ago

I think the message between the lines is what's important, and it goes like this:

"We in the executive branch have an agreement with the Supreme Court allowing us to bypass congress and enact edicts. We will do this by sending the Justice Department any state law that gets in the way of our donors, sending the layup to our Republican Supreme Court, who will dunk on the States for us and nullify their law."

We don't have to go through the motions of pretending we still live in a constitutional republic, it's okay to talk frankly about reality as it exists.

mullingitover commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jMyles · 5 days ago

...let's get our facts straight here. I hope we can agree on this nutshell:

* During phase III of the Pfizer trial, there was an unblinding event which was not initially disclosed. At first, it appeared that it might only have been a few dozen participants, but later disclosures showed that it was more serious.

* The BMJ learned of this - again, only knowing about a few dozen patients - from the regional director of the contractor carrying out one of the arms of the trial, who was fired the same day she reported the unblinding to the FDA (as required by law). This disclosure included photographs of documents, in the study area, with unblinding information on them.

* The BMJ published what was, in retrospect, an extremely cautious report, even though by that time it was becoming clear that the problem went even beyond mass unblinding and into falsified data, so much so that the contractor's quality control check team were overwhelmed trying to catch up in the days between Jackson's termination and the publication of the report.

* In response, Facebook added an inane "fact check", calling the BMJ a "news blog", and which got several of the above facts wrong. In fact, the "fact check" didn't actually make any coherent assertions about the actual content of the article at all. It seemed its primary function was to add an insinuation of doubt, via scary red boxes, about the BMJ report, without any critique of the substance or merits.

* Three days later, Facebook went further - preventing the story from being shared at all, and adding warnings to users commenting on the article (in places where it had already been shared) that they risked having their accounts degraded or terminated for spreading misinformation.

* All the while, board members of Pfizer (one of who was a former FDA commissioner) were permitted to deny these assertions and smear the whistleblowers (in what, in retrospect, turns out to have been actual misinformation) with no "fact checks" or prohibitions on sharing.

* Months later, Facebook acknowledged that they took these actions at the urging of the White House.

...I don't think it's the least bit far-fetched to call this "censorship".

mullingitover · 5 days ago

Facebook 'reduced distribution,' they didn't block. And again, your original claim was that social media somehow blocked scientific debate, which is categorically false. All these claims are hand-waving away the fact that this was published in the BMJ from the outset.

Facebook could throw all their servers in a wood chipper today and it would have zero effect on scientific debate in the world.

mullingitover commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jMyles · 5 days ago

> None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced.

...a literal nobel laureate, a literal Einstein scholar, and literally the author of the most cited paper in the history of open publishing were all censored.

Multiple scholars of the Hoover Institution. The director of Oxford Center for EBM. An author of the most widely-assigned textbook in preventative epidemiology. Two editors-in-chief of BMJ publications. Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook! The British Journal of Medicine was censored from Facebook dude!

Tenured professors form Yale, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Harvard, and Standard (several from Stanford in particular) had their work either totally removed or subject to shadowban-style censorship.

What can you possibly be talking about? I'm broadly anti-credentialist, but I can't fathom not noticing what happened: The world's foremost experts were silenced; we all watched it happen.

Let's not mince words here: there was a _thunderous_ chorus of the world's top experts opining against lockdowns. And social media depicted something entirely different, and entirely false. It wasn't like... close. Lockdowns never gained anything resembling mainstream support in the actual real world of epidemiology.

David Katz, Michael Levitt, Carl Henegan, Monica Ghandi, Scott Atlas, Vinay Prasad, Eran Bendavid, Sunetra Gupta, John fucking Ioannidis (my personal favorite author of medical science for over a decade prior to COVID19, and arguably the most accomplished medical scientist of our generation)... I can go on and on and on. How on earth are you conducting your "smell test"?!

All the most impressive minds of our age were cast aside so some second-stringers from suburban Virginia, who had been collecting a paycheck from NIH and CDC but not doing anything resembling continuing education at their alma maters, could babble nonsense about interdiction and hold aloft the Imperial study which they obviously didn't understand (and which all of us who read it knew it was destined to retracted from the word go).

There were a tiny few serious academics who endorsed lockdowns. And some were genuine experts who simply got it wrong. I respect Carl Bergstrom and Marc Lipsitch enormously, and I give them credit for sticking their head above the parapet - I think they genuinely believed in horizontal interdiction and, although they were absolutely wrong, I don't think they were intentional being propagandistic.

And I don't think they went out intending to be amplified as they were. I only wish their other work were amplified as much as when it was convenient for the lockdown narrative.

...but it's simply, totally false that accomplished academics and experts weren't censored. I can't even approach that with a straight face.

mullingitover · 5 days ago

> Literally the BMJ itself had articles removed from Facebook!

These people got their stuff published in the British Medical Journal, so nobody in the scientific community had the slightest problem seeing it.

Facebook posted a fact check where the story was shared pointing out some problems with it. They didn’t “censor” anything. It was frankly entirely reasonable and the BMJ should have done better in the first place. Facebook did “combat bad speech with more speech”, the thing you’re supposed to do, and the cranks absolutely lost their minds.

In any case, the danger is over now and we can rest easy knowing that Facebook won’t lift a finger to prevent millions from being misled about vaccines causing autism. They’ll sell ads alongside the posts! phew

mullingitover commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jMyles · 5 days ago

You've written this with a certain sardonic tone, seemingly in efforts to show the person to whom you're responding that their view necessarily leads to the particular brand of anarchism you're espousing.

And I must say, I find your argument and phraseology very convincing. I agree with everything you've said here; states are not imbued with any particular magic. They simply convince people to do things that, if people weren't filled with the mindset of exceptions that seem to come when engaging in public services, they'd never ever do.

I have a degree in political science, and I wish that the reading material required to get that degree displayed more of the technique you've used here.

mullingitover · 5 days ago

I mean, it's good prose but it's just sort of hand-waving away all the history of how we ended up with modern states. States solve a lot of problems, they're not perfect but I'm pretty passionate about not living in walled cities because there are hordes of raiders who go around enslaving everyone.

mullingitover commented on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri reuters.com/world/us/rubi... · Posted by u/italophil

anigbrowl · 6 days ago

While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead.

As far back as I can recall, this is a politician who has railed against 'political correctness'.

mullingitover · 5 days ago

It's incredibly generous to so many future plaintiffs to have this overt hostility to the very concept of accessibility and fairness and put in writing, so many times and in so many ways.

mullingitover commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

jMyles · 5 days ago

I think you may have misunderstood my comment - or perhaps misunderstood the consequences of the censorship regime.

If anything, it seemed like the denialism was amplified by the censorship. What fell by the wayside were the serious, rigorous dialogue that had previously been the best thinking on epidemiology and public health.

I was a moderator and frequent contributor to /r/ebola during the 2014 outbreak; during that time I reached out and began to form relationships with (and respect spectrums for) various epidemiologists and academic departments. And it was really hard during the COVID19 pandemic to watch people like John Ioannidis, David Katz, Sunetra Gupta, Michael Levitt, etc. be totally cut out of the conversation while a group of second-stringers who were willing to toe the corporate line took their place.

Was it your experience that the censorship worked to _stem_ denialism? It seemed to me that it made it much louder and much worse, muddying the water of genuine discussion and research.

mullingitover · 5 days ago

The idea that real, serious scientific debate was stymied by social media platform policies doesn't pass the smell test for me. Facebook/twitter/et al were making good faith efforts to stop the flood of downright harmful misinformation, and government didn't force them to do it. None of even the most questionable scientists were ever silenced. Those folks had the right wing press broadcasting their worst ideas to the world, the didn't even need social media when they could get on Fox News every day of the week.

It was the final attempt of social media even trying to be something more than a cancer. Now? Every social media platform (especially Facebook and twitter) would have zero problems being the driver of modern day pogroms, complete with running betting markets on the outcomes, if it would keep their share prices up.

mullingitover commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

chistev · 6 days ago

Break up the federal government?

mullingitover · 5 days ago

> In an effort to curtail the organization’s outsized influence, Facebook announced Monday that it would be implementing new steps to ensure the breakup of the U.S. government before it becomes too powerful. [1]

I'm old enough to remember when The Onion didn't just report the news.

[1] https://theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s...