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tokamak

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by tokamak

  1. NZ seems good at this
  2. Japan tried to onside kick the opening kickoff and New Zealand damn near returned it for a touchdown. This one could get ugly.
  3. wait did we just play for a tie on purpose? seems like kind of a bitch move at the end there
  4. @immamac so we're doing individual event threads?
  5. How are you watching USA? All I see on Peacock is Uruguay-Fiji right now. I don't know the first thing about rugby but I think Fiji is skullfucking Uruguay.
  6. I've been doing Sling the last few football seasons. It's $55/mo for everything, which gets you all the ESPNs and Fox Sports. Or if you're really cheap, you can pay $40 for one package or another and switch back and forth week to week depending on what channel has better games.
  7. USA vs France men's soccer at 2:00 pm central today Sorry boss, here goes my productivity for the month
  8. The Trump Campaign/GOP certainly know that the campaign finance stuff is bullshit. They’re not challenging it to win and prevent her from getting the money. It’s just to plant the seeds for the next conspiracy theory. Y’all should all know how this works by now.
  9. Wowzers
  10. “DEI” must be the new “woke”. Every damn thing is DEI all of a sudden.
  11. Is this the thread for speculation on running mate picks? NYT is pushing Andy Beshear, Mark Kelly, Roy Cooper, JB Pritzker, and Josh Shapiro.
  12. Maximo, the new Mexican place in West U. Love the concept, love the vibe, food was just ok though. Killer tequila list. I’d be open to trying it again but they really need to come correct the 2nd time. My wife said she thought it’s the Local Foods people.
  13. I was surprised that Gerry didn’t list Rogers among the flip targets. Seems like a guy we would stay on.
  14. Enphase's batteries specifically can be charged with a generator, according to their website. That would be a pretty nice setup if you could use a quiet little inverter generator to keep them topped up.
  15. So I had the bright idea of buying enough batteries (Tesla or otherwise) to last me through a full day at a time, and signing up for a "free nights" electricity plan and basically never paying for electricity. Added bonus would be the ability to strictly ration and make it through a few days in the event of an outage, or longer with the help of a small generator. I can't get the math to work out, though. At the peak of the summer, my house uses something in the range of 50-60 kWh per 24 hour period. So I'd need at least 3, probably 4 Tesla batteries. At roughly $9k a pop, it's way too expensive. I guess the batteries only make any sort of sense if you also have solar? Does anyone here have batteries without solar?
  16. LSU’s staff is full of recruiting badasses.
  17. I got sucked into watching The Matrix last night, even though I've probably seen it 20 times. It still holds up 25 years later (!). Truly one of the best action movies of all time.
  18. 6 weeks from diagnosis to death. Brutal…
  19. I'm wasting time on my lunch break so I just looked up the top 20 winningest MLB managers of all time. Out of those 20, regarding their playing careers, there are: 1 legit star (Joe Torre) 5 solid regulars (John McGraw, Dusty Baker, Casey Stengel, Lou Piniella, Mike Scioscia) 11 bums (Connie Mack, Tony La Russa, Bobby Cox, Sparky Anderson, Bucky Harris, Bruce Bochy, Walter Alston [1 career PA], Leo Durocher, Terry Francona, Gene Mauch, Bill McKechnie, 3 that never played in the majors (Joe McCarthy, Jim Leyland, Buck Showalter)
  20. This isn't the right thread for this, but why is it so common for soccer managers to have been great players (e.g., Henry, Vieira, Zidane, etc)? That seems pretty rare in the major American sports. Usually the successful managers in baseball, football, and basketball were more fringe-type players.
  21. A piece of that tip just got me O'Dell
  22. Freddie’s in my top 5 for sure
  23. You may have a point, but my wife works in the corporate world (a major public company that you've all heard of), and short-termism has begun to infect everything they do. Stategic thinking is completely out the window in the holy name of This Quarter. It's driving her so crazy that she's started looking for an exit.
  24. Ours sits pretty close to our house, but we don't have any windows that open on that side and we minimize the use of the door on that side of the house when it's running. My feeling has always been that as long as you're being somewhat sensible and not running the generator in a closed area (e.g., garage), you'll be fine.
  25. Centerpoint was woefully unprepared and disorganized, and trying to claim otherwise is absurd. They spend way less on tree trimming than neighboring utilities. Their infrastructure is visibly decrepit. If there have been any significant efforts to trim trees and harden infrastructure over the last few years, I certainly haven't witnessed it. The utility pole in my back yard (which caused an outage last week) looks like it is about 200 fucking years old. It's rotting and falling apart. The crew that came to fix it told me they had to go get a part, because they didn't have a replacement on their truck, because the original was so old and outdated. Centerpoint communicated virtually nothing for the first few days after the storm, and only after outcry and pressure began publishing any sort of outage map and restoration timeline estimates. Problem: the map and the timelines were utterly wrong and useless, even to this day. At no point did they provide widespread, accurate information. The map was even various shades of green, instead of red, to make it look better at a glance. People on Reddit had to manually edit it to even make it readable. They hid behind "safety" as an excuse for the first two days of slow response, when everyone with a brain knows that these are trained out of town linemen, and a 15 minute tailgate safety meeting is probable the norm. Social media is chock full of anecdotes, anonymous reports, and rumors about trucks sitting idle for lack of any direction on where to go, untrained CNP office staff on the ground trying to coordinate repair crews, and inefficient paper-based ticketing systems. I'm flabbergasted that anyone thinks CNP did fine here. All that said, I have a way different take on this that I've realized makes me an outlier here in Houston, in talking to my friends and neighbors. I'm not hardly mad at Centerpoint at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and a monopoly to boot. Its responsibility is maximizing returns for shareholders, not maximizing electricity uptime for Houstonians. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a snake not to bite. It's just what they do, that's their nature. Cutting down trees and upgrading infrastructure increases their costs. I'm sure they've done the math that it would cost more than the lost revenue from occasional outages. Are we really expecting that they would make improvements that benefit customers (who can't leave them) over shareholders, just out of the goodness of their hearts? The only remedies for a private company with a monopoly are competition, nationalization, or a ball-busting regulator that is immune to capture. None of those things is going to happen, either for practical or political reasons. Centerpoint has a PR disaster every few years, customers and politicians get Very, Very Mad and then....life moves on. I think a big part of Centerpoint's usefulness is as a PR shield for the people that actually have the power to change the situation. If you're mad at Centerpoint, I think you're mad at the wrong people.
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