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Brisketexan

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Brisketexan last won the day on July 2

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  1. ASR (aquifer storage and recovery) is absolutely part of the mix for water supply in the state water plan. Availability of water isn't our issue, believe it or not. The issue is the COST of available water. People want two kinds of water: 1) lots of it, and 2) cheap. Turns out, you can only have one or the other, not both. I worked with an old water engineer who had a great way of putting it: "Shit, water is free, it falls from the sky. It's the catching it, holding it, treating it, and transporting it that costs so much damned money." We can build more reservoirs, build very expensive transport pipelines, do expensive ASR and desalination, all that stuff. It costs lots and lots of moolah (we've discussed transport pipelines here before -- people think and ask "how much could it be?" not realizing that the answer is "a metric fuckton of dollars, that's how much" is the truth). So, we can do all the stuff Clever suggests and more. You're just gonna get a bill for it. Which you'll scream about. So, very little of it will actually ever get done.
  2. Man, I ALMOST ordered that, but I went with the steak pane' (sort of a milanesa/CFS approach with gravy, with a biscuit and scrambled eggs). My wife got the quiche florentine, and it was the best quiche we've ever tried. I also started with the special watermelon gazpacho, which was outstanding. BUT, last time I went, I got the croque madame and it was meh -- a bit on the dry side. Will be hard pressed to order something other than the quiche or something with scrambled eggs next time we go.
  3. I dunno - I would THINK that maybe you get more even heat distribution and thickening throughout the egg mix (up the cooking column) as opposed to just on the pan bottom? I also dunno. I'll try it, and see what happens and describe it when it does. Expect me to use the terms "viscous" and "thick" a lot, and y'all try not to get all turned on by it.
  4. Dude. That's already happening, and it's irreversible. Remember how European countries got too lackadaisical and too dependent on cheap Russian gas, then Russia made it plain that it's an unreliable, maniacal, dangerous trading partner? And those countries did a shitload to disentangle themselves as much as possible from the Russian gas trade? Yeah. Those lessons also apply to the US and everything we trade in. The more dependent you are on trade with the US, the more vulnerable you are to American malevolence and batshittery, which we have max-full levels of these days. The smart strategy is disentanglement to the extent possible. Other countries may not be geniuses, but they're smart enough to have figured that out. The US is going to find itself at a long-term trade disadvantage, entirely of our own making. It's too late to stop it. We've demonstrated that we are dangerous and untrustworthy. Not because Trump is our president, but because we ELECTED him to be our president, and a sizable percentage of our population SUPPORTS this idiocy. We are too dangerous and untrustworthy to be treated as a trusted trading partner, so we won't be any longer.
  5. Man, that's some rainbows and unicorns walking through a field of wildflowers stuff. Sigh.
  6. This goes into the "shit I'm going to cook this weekend" file: Thomas Keller's scrambled eggs. I make very, very good scrambled eggs. Like, people we have over for brunch rave about them. Not complicated: low heat, eggs well-whisked, cooked in lots of butter. Fluffy, delicious. BUT....yesterday, we had brunch at Bouchon in Vegas, and my plate had scrambled eggs that were the best I've ever had. The only thing different is the addition of creme fraiche right before the eggs set, but holy shit....what a difference. Ingredients: 4 eggs 1 tsp. kosher salt 2 Tbs. unsalted butter 1 1/2 Tbs. crème fraîche Directions: In a small bowl, beat the eggs with the salt until they are homogenous. Heat a 2-quart (2-l) saucier over medium-low heat and add the butter. When the butter has melted, strain the beaten eggs through a sieve into the pan. Cook, continually whisking the eggs, until they thicken yet are still very creamy and not completely set. Whisk in the crème fraîche and cook for a few seconds longer. Spoon the eggs onto warm serving plates and serve immediately. Serves 2. I'll see if I can pull it off this weekend and will report. But jesus, such a simple thing, and they were so good.
  7. You used that term with respect to doctors. Dude. You and I both know that docs are often idiot savants with dunning kruger: smart about exactly one thing, but they then extrapolate that to believing they're geniuses about EVERYTHING: medical issues outside of their field of expertise and experience, issues entirely outside medical field, etc. What do those assholes think they are, lawyers? I respect and have genuine empathy for your experience, and yes, this doc's timing and language were shit. But in the end, what makes me most ragey is 1) stacks of dead Texans created by a culture and governance that leads to body counts (El Paso, Uvalde, Uri, Kerrville) that either didn't need to happen at all or didn't need to be that large, and 2) the knowledge, with dead-solid certainty, that we're going to continue with more of the same. We will demonize "the other," we will denigrate anything and everything that might help the common good as evil communism ripped from the pages of Obama's Kenyan birth certificate file, and more shit like this - and deaths - will follow. "How dare we politicize" this from the exact same crowd that attacked California and its officials while an uncontrollable fire was still raging pisses me off (then, layer on the fact that the "failures" they tried to point to were nonsensical -- there was no massive spigot of magical water that could or would have gone to Pacific Palisades, for example). Every disaster needs real, open, failure analysis after-the-fact. What went wrong, what could have gone better. Sometimes, the answer is "well, this thing here and there could have been done better, but in the end, this outcome was largely unavoidable." Other times, the answer is "the flood/winter storm would have happened no matter what, but several things could have been done to reduce the hell out of the body count." Not only will we not get that, we won't change our approach in general to, you know, maybe plan for such things in advance.
  8. Fucking this. And I can guarantee you that Doctor will face more consequences, and is more likely to change, than ANY of our leadership/power structures/culture. We will continue to charge full speed-ahead down the "fuck the common good, always and all the time" path, against all evidence and reasoning to the contrary. And we will not just not punish leadership for their decisions that lead to suffering and death, we'll REWARD them with re-election. A doctor who made a shitty comment will suffer consequences (and she should). Elected officials who decided not to install flood warning systems because "treasonous communism" will suffer zero consequences, and will actually be rewarded for their decision.
  9. This. While the full story is complicated, parts of it are pretty simple. Society as a whole had a great increase in opportunity post-WWII. For around 30 years, almost all of that expanded opportunity was provided to white males (women weren't in play, minorities were kept as second-class at best). So, relatively mediocre white dude could get a college degree and get a job that provided a path to a good life, even prosperity. Then, the economic opportunity stagnated and even contracted some. AND.....mediocre white guys had competition for those good jobs. Smart, well-educated women jumped in the pool. Smart, well-educated minorities jumped in the pool. Used to be, there were 100,000 good jobs out there, and 95,000 went to white dudes. Now, there are 90,000 good jobs out there, and 40,000 go to women, and 20,000 go to minorities.....leaving 30,000 jobs for white dudes (yeah, the numbers are totally made up to illustrate the point). These numbers aren't exact proportions, the point is that a pool of good jobs and prosperity that used to be 95% for white dudes is now a much smaller percentage for white dudes. And.....having lost a historical advantage that was NEVER rightly theirs to begin with (sorry, it wasn't exactly fair to have largely frozen black men out of the professional world for over a fucking century after we ended slavery)....white dudes are PISSED. They want it all back. And, if they can't have it....better to destroy it, so nobody else can have it.
  10. You can't ensure that "disasters never happen." You CAN ensure that areas and communities are 1) properly warned, and 2) as well prepared as they can be for when they happen. Katrina: warning was good. Preparation was shit. Levees were shit, in large part due to local corruption, due to entrenched power structures that existed for generations (sound familiar? Leadership getting locked in place, with no changes or challenges, is usually bad news). Helene: better warnings would have been good. Shit, I recall Inka and I looking at the forecast rainfall, and commenting 24-48 hours beforehand "that shit is going to be really bad in the mountains." California wildfires, Maui fires: wildfires are often really tough. Step 1 in many cases is "avoid building a lot of structures in areas that really, really want to burn," but that ship has usually sailed. Having resources available, with a game plan to use them, is key. In both of those cases, weather conditions were such that the resources at hand either couldn't be deployed or were just overwhelmed. Interestingly, just last week, I spent an hour watching California respond to a local wildfire in an area of hills and canyons. It was a spectacle. They fucking know what they are doing, and they pour resources onto a fire early, to make sure it doesn't get bigger. Truly, it was pro squad level work. So, believe it or not, for wildfire fighting, I'd say "learn from California," and even then, we know there's only so much they can do. Texas Winter Storm outage disaster: who should you vote for? Maybe people who didn't purposefully design a grid set up to fail, starting with SB-7 in 1997 and continuing for decades. The Uri outage was a predictable, natural result of policy choices made by our leadership. And not much meaningful has been done to change that state of affairs. Kerrville floods: read the meeting minutes of Kerr County rejecting flood warning systems. We'll learn plenty more, but that's a pretty good start. Disasters are inevitable. The full measure of human and economic costs of same often are not inevitable. Things are better when you act instead of react. Shit, in the current environment, if we didn't already have the Highland Lakes system built (which prevents Austin from being hammered by river floods), there is a 0% chance they would be built today. Because fuck doing something that provides benefit to the public.
  11. Yeah....I expect that a lot of the bodies are never going to be found. And others, or parts of others, will be found months or years from now at random times and places. Just gruesome, shitty stuff. Nature is a mean bitch, and she gives no fucks.
  12. This true fact is what convinces me that our society is beyond saving. We have glorified and sanctified a culture that doesn't just eschew any belief or action in furtherance of the common good: we have turned such things into hallmarks of pure evil. See, e.g., Kerr County officials and their constituents not just refusing, but RAILING AGAINST, flood warning measures and funding because the funding arose under "treasonous, communist" administrations of Obama and Biden. We do everything we can to AVOID taking measures that would help the public at large, and then....we suffer the consequences. And we have seen what happens in the aftermath. Stonewalling, denial of responsibility by those who directly acted (or failed to act) to prevent tragedy....and then nothing done to meaningfully change things to prevent future tragedy. So, yeah....calling out our total and complete social and political failure is not just okay, it's fucking imperative. If you care about a single one of the lives lost, then you should make it your mission to ensure that not another life, not a single one, is unnecessarily lost due to the same causes: demonization of the common good. Instead, we know -- with 100% certainty -- we'll get more of the same. And what is more of the same? The political leadership that has set policy, and driven the tone of society and our policies, for over a generation....will deny and avoid ALL responsibility, will continue down the same path, and will ensure that we get another Uvalde, Mystic, Uri power failure, etc.....in the coming months/years. So, none of y'all who are upset about that gal's comments need to worry your pretty little heads about it another second. All will be well, there will be no true accountability, no true consequences for those who made choices that cost lives, and no meaningful changes on either the micro or macro level will happen.
  13. I never had it till I married into a super white girl family. A spread of celery sticks stuffed with that, and the counterpart jar of pimento cheese spread, was a standard part of the Xmas day pre-dinner spread. And I kinda dig it.
  14. Correct. He appeals to people with intelligence and human decency. In other words, the most irrelevant constituency of the current era. He might as well appeal to left-handed Slovenian pearl merchants.
  15. Yep. ElonEnterprises are flying high, they are unstoppable. Reminds me of this memento I found when going through my dad’s stuff. He kept this as a wry nod to history. And then a coupla years later…well, we all saw it happen.
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