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JohnLocke

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Posts posted by JohnLocke

  1. 1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

    No, you see, it's my Eagle Freedom Patriot right to douse myself in gasoline and light myself in fire.  This is YOUR fault, for not developing cheap, easy, and effective therapies to keep people who are 50% covered in third degree burns out of the hospital.  That's what we REALLY need -- therapies to keep people with seared flesh out of the hospital.

    I gotta go with intentionally obtuse. Nobody is actually this obtuse.  The first part of my story is literally a cautionary tale about getting vaccinated, comparing the outcome of my son who was vaccinated vs. his friend who was not.  Yes, get the vaccine. It may save your life. I have.   We can two things at once though.  We may yet have a strain where vaccines are useless, or worse, counter productive. There is a thing called antibody dependent enhancement.  We should be preparing for that, and yeah, maybe even helping some of those who "deserve" what they get because they are unvaccinated.

    We have not been aggressive in pursuing at home treatments to keep you out of the hospital.  Let me give you one example. This is from the NIH website: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/therapies/immunomodulators/corticosteroids/

    Recommendation

    There is insufficient evidence for the Panel to recommend either for or against the use of inhaled budesonide for the treatment of COVID-19.

    This is based on 2 studies which show encouraging results: https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/tables/table-4b/

    Cliff notes: Evidence that budensonide may help keep you out of the hospital and/or from dying but study limitations preclude a firm conclusion.

     

    Now, here's my complaint.  The CDC and NIH have literally tens of thousands of employees. Do they actually have something more important to do then figure out whether a low cost readily available drug can help keep covid patients out of the hospital?   We are 18 months into this, and they can't/won't figure this out. Why? WTF? Is it really not a priority?

     

     

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  2. 8 minutes ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

    Do you fucking think people are not trying to find and/or develop treatment options?  

    Well, we are are 18 months into this, and your home treatment options are horse paste or nothing. Doesn't seem to be much of a focus.

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  3. 1 hour ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    Get fucked.  This whole post is disingenuous fucking bullshit.

     

    Just as sanctimonious as ever I see. I'm not anti-vax.  I was vaccinated early. The story I told illustrates quite clearly a case where the vaccines worked well.  But I don't believe the mutations are driven by the unvaccinated.  The choices are not horse paste or nothing.  We are capable of pursuing two paths at once.  It would be prudent to pursue treatment options. The lamda variant already exists, and is allegedly quite resistant to the vaccines. It would be best to prepare.  And we should quit killing people today with blood clots unnecessarily. Friend is a pediatric doctor and says they are seeing lots of them--in teenagers. Be aware. Or bury your head in the sand.  Your choice.

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  4. This is all incredibly frustrating.  I don't know what to believe. There doesn't seem to much science in the booster shots. It's just spitballing at this point.  We are basically 6 months in and the virus is mutating around the vaccines, and the answer is more of the same. I'm skeptical we can vaccinate our way out of this in the long term. Vaccines are working for now, but what we really need are treatments that work. You can see that the day may come where the vaccines don't work at all.  Hell, we need to use the treatments that we have that work.  My son (late 20's, vaccinated) got covid from an unvaccinated friend about the same age.  My son barely knew he had it, very mild symptoms, and he was vaccinated in December.  His friend is sick as a dog, runs 101 to 103 fever for 12 days, coughing, chills, the works.  I'm thinking he needs to be in the hospital, but no breathing problems, so they tell him to stay at home.  I'm asking about steroids and bloodthinners cuz I know when you are that sick with this shit, you are at high risk for a cytokin storm, and your blood turns to molasses.  Nope, just ibuprofin. Not even aspirin.  Sure enough, 2 days later he is in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism and a blood clot in his leg.  WTF?  I knew it was coming, why the hell doesn't the AMA?  (Kid is recovering nicely, thank goodness, but damn!)  I don't understand why there is so little focus on effective home treatments to keep you out of the hospital.

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  5. On 7/30/2021 at 7:52 PM, WhatTheBuck said:

    I definitely want to be cremated. I think the custom of burying a body in the earth is silly and a waste of land. Does a green burial involve a permanent plot with a gravestone? I’d rather be buried at sea. There was a time in my youth when I wanted to be cremated and, instead of my ashes feeding a tree, I wanted them to be mixed with soil and have someone grow a pot plant in it. Then, after it was harvested and dried, I imagined all my friends smoking it in remembrance of me. But that’s really not practical. 

    Well, that's one way to get a smoking hot body again....

  6. Despite contrary opinions, I think the Auburn fans are willing to sacrifice the Auburn-Georgia game, especially since it will be played every other year.  They are sick of playing a top 3 hardest schedule every year. They would not give up the Iron bowl.   The other option I've seen swaps Tennesse/Vanderbilt for Ole Miss/Miss State as a more traditional game for Bama and Auburn.  Ags will do anything to stay out of a division with Texas -OU, and nobody wants to see LSU get an easy pod anyway so putting A&M with LSU makes sense, and gives the Ags a bone.

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  7. A wealth tax is likely unconstitutional. But how hard would it be to implement a graduated lifetime capital gains tax? Not hard at all. But it will never happen, cuz both parties are in the pocket of the wealthy.

    Example. 1st million 15%

    2-5 million 20%

    5-10 million 30%

    over 10 million:  50%

    This would also take care of those hedge fund guys that get to claim their income is capital gains.  I'm all for sticking it to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

     

     

    • Like 1
  8. 18 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

    And I'm curious as to why you've always been worried about the deficit.

    There is plenty of reason to worry about the debt.  Back in the old days of capitalism, when the government borrowed 2 trillion dollars, they had to go out on the open market and sell treasury bonds.  This tended to make interest rates rise, and acted somewhat as a brake on excessive borrowing. Now that republicans and democrats have figured out how to skip this step by having the fed buy the bonds,  I don't see any brakes on spending.  This grand experiment can't end well. But it will be much harder on the poor and middle class, who won't have appreciating assets to counter balance rising prices. Wages will struggle to keep up. So far the rich are doing great in this environment. They will likely continue to do well as they can borrow at low rates and watch their assets increase in value.  If you set up an economic plan specifically to benefit the rich, you would be hard pressed to come up with anything better.  And yeah, Trump and the Republicans were horrible on the deficit. Now the democrats are in "Hold my beer" mode. Next up 2 trillion for infrastructure, then 2 trillion for the green new deal.

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  9. I'm not sure what covid relief has to do with rewarding blue states that were fiscally irresponsible pre-covid.   Not a good precedent.  It looks like the democrats have figured out how to get red states to pay for blue state public employee pensions. I don't get why any Texan is for this.

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  10. 1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

    There is a bogeyman being promoted that lack of constancy implies lack of predictability, and that's just not true.  We obviously have a baseline of total generated power below which we should not drop, and that should be accounted for, but just because sun and wind are not static sources doesn't mean we can't incorporate them into the overall infrastructure and reduce dependence on fossil fuels in the process.

    The problem with wind is the same as it has always been.  You have to back it up with fossil fuel plants since you can't rely on it. This always winds up increasing what the consumer pays for electricity.   It is about 1/4 of our energy production in Texas. We only count on it being 1/10 in a crisis, and in this one it was considerably less than that.  Wind energy is not cheap, especially in Texas with the production so far from the usage. If we had spent the money that we spent on wind on nuclear or coal, we would have weathered this event much better.  Even though the main problem was the natural gas pipelines.  Natural gas in great, but there is some reliability risk given that you can't store it.  You are always vulnerable to a supply disruption.  I would hope we would focus our efforts going forward on nuclear and coal. My bet would be we will continue on the same path of increasing our supply of wind energy and natural gas production. Solar does match up nicely with peak demand in Texas, and there is a place for it. Storage at this point is like trying to deploy desktop computers in 1970. We need to get there before we can even think about it.

  11. 6 hours ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    This is ABSOLUTELY right.

    And those of us who are supportive of green energy understand that at present, it does have constraints.  But those can be overcome in the next 5-10 years.  It just takes research and ingenuity, and that means big $$$ as the industry expands.  What the Trumptards and the GQP pedal is fear, plain and simple.

     

    I've been hearing that for at least ten years.  I like cheap energy.  Wind is already more expensive.  Storage will add to that cost, even if we come up with technology that makes it feasible.  We now have a less reliable power mix, and we haven't even started to pay for insurance against this type of event happening again. Wind has been tried in a lot of places. The result is always higher prices to consumers and a less reliable grid.  And it's probably not a good idea to be 55% natural gas either.  We need more baseline nuclear. If France can do it, how hard can it be, really?

  12. 6 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    Because you are comparing apples and oranges.  First, both Louisiana and Oklahoma are magnitudes smaller in population than Texas.  Second, neither of those states have significant renewables (which is more expensive than conventional power production) nor do they have a renewable mandate, which Texas does.  Third, both Louisiana and Oklahoma are utility only states, which is a completely different model.

    Again, you need to look at Texas prices compared to prices in MISO, NYISO, and PJM if you want to get closer to an apples to apples comparison.

    And I think you are stupid because of how obtuse you are.  However, if you voted for Trump and support Trump, welp, that just speaks for itself.

    That's my issue with wind energy in a nutshell.  It's more expensive, and it's unreliable.  We have tried to keep rates low by going all in on natural gas (which is cheap now, but has it's own reliability issues as we are seeing).  We've also been skipping the insurance payments, so to speak, an increasingly risky proposition given our increasingly risky power mix. Now it will require a very expensive fix that we will all pay for.

  13. 15 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

     


    We’ve chosen profit for a very few over any good for literally everyone else. Pure late stage capitalism.

     

    What the hell are you talking about?  For the last 25 years, we have prioritized keeping rates low.  We've avoided the expensive option of a capacity market.  We have now had the black swan event that I'm sure will make us rethink this.  15 years ago our grid likely would have handled this.  Now it can't.  The main contributor was an inability to get natural gas, but having 10% of our overall capacity wiped out with frozen wind turbines was a kick in the butt too.  Nearly 80% of our power coming from wind and natural gas just makes the system less reliable.  What happened this week is completely unacceptable.  We've been out on this limb for a while, but Ercot always dodged the bullet and made it work. Now it has completely blown up in the most spectacular fashion possible. The net result is you and I and everyone else are going to pay significantly higher electricity rates in the future so we can guarantee this won't happen again.

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  14. 10 minutes ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

    Wrong.  Plants of all types are having instrumentation freezes.  Are you really this stupid?

    I don't know, you all seem to be documenting what I'm saying just fine.

     

    Meanwhile, >30 GW of fossil plants, mostly natural gas, went down.  From Hayden's article  (I'm pretty sure if there were any major issues with coal, it would be the number 1 highlight.)

    (From the Bloomberg article) That doesn’t mean that frozen turbines are playing no role in the energy crisis, which the grid operator has highlighted. Cody Moore, head of gas and power trading at Mercuria Energy America, noted that wind generation this week is down markedly this week from last week, possibly indicating that turbines are automatically shutting down due to ice.

    “We are seeing wind generation down 60% week-over-week,” said Matt Hoza, manager of energy analysis at BTU Analytics   (From the Bloomberg article.)

    And Kudos to Sidis. I look forward to seeing the real numbers.

  15. Believe what you want to believe, I really don't care.  Do you really expect an Ercot official to say "Well, shit, the problem is in our power mix. I think we overdid it on cutting back on coal and nuclear."   You notice that while the article noted that wind production was down 60% from last week, we got no such quantification on the "problems" with coal and nuclear"  Wind has gone to shit this week, and we can't get enough natural gas. Once again, it's not complicated.

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  16. 12 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

    I would agree that 15 years ago the infrastructure would be in much better shape. I don’t know how coal will help if the  plants aren’t working due to frozen instruments and other shit breaking. Maybe you meant dropping coal at everyone’s doorstep to burn in their fireplaces/back yards?

     

    This shit show has little  to do with what energy source is (not) turning turbines. 

    Nonsense.  Coal plants are working fine right now. So is nuclear.  The more you increase the production of your energy to unreliable sources, the more prone you become to outages. It's not complicated.  And here we are.

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