About half of Missouri's electrical power comes from coal. The national trend is utilities ramping up on solar, wind and battery storage while relying less on coal, causing some coal plants to shut down. I wouldn't be surprised if this legislation to stop new solar is being pushed by the coal industry.
For $50 you can pick up a used mini PC with say, i5-6500T and 8GB ram, that'll be much faster than the Pi 5. And it'll be compatible with all Linux distros. Really the Pi 3 is good enough as an edge device where you want to hook up things to the GPIO pins.
Debian stable with KDE Plasma. Plasma is similar in feel to Win 10, but far more customizable. It's the first Linux desktop I've used that feels professional and polished.
Short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ6bojRSIw0
I think the sweet spot for ARM SBCs are smaller, less powerful and cheaper for headless IOT edge cases. I use a couple of them that way when I need LAN connectivity, either by ethernet or wifi, and things wired to GPIO pins. I don't need a powerful CPU or lots of RAM for that. The SBC makers are caught up in a horsepower race and I just shrug, it's not for me.
CATO gets it wrong too. Social Security is an insurance program. Employer and employee payments function as insurance premiums. Like most insurance policies if you don't qualify for a disbursement you don't get your premiums back (e.g., you die before 62). Unlike normal insurance, Soc Sec has no coverage limit, so if you live to 105 you can collect far more than you paid in.
Since Soc Sec is income insurance, I am opposed to the flat benefit concept. Higher incomes pay higher premiums so they should get higher payouts. We already have some benefit flattening now because Soc Sec benefits are partially taxable above $25K single/$32k married.
I think the sweet spot for EVs are for small, compact crossovers, hatchbacks and sedans, not large trucks or SUVs. Batteries don't scale up well. I have a Chevy Bolt EUV and it's great, the most economical vehicle I've ever owned, it's cheap to charge at home and there's virtually no maintenance. The new 2026 Bolt and the 2026 Nissan Leaf will both be just under $30k and will make great commuter cars or grocery getters.
"Used electric vehicle (EV) prices are currently lower than those of internal combustion engine (ICE) cars, with used EVs averaging about 8.3% cheaper than used gas-powered cars."
Late model used EVs can be good bargains.
FUD about battery life and having to spend over $10k to replace one was a large factor in EV depreciation. Some people assumed car battery life was like that of a cell phone or a laptop, perhaps 3 years. There is increasing evidence that EV batteries with good battery management systems will last 15+ years (see https://www.geotab.com/blog/ev-battery-health/). Once the general population understands an EV will outlast a gas car and needs less maintenance, resale value should improve.
Interesting, I have the opposite opinion. I'm considering switching from Windows to the KDE Plasma desktop and so far I'm impressed with it. Plasma is the first Linux desktop I've used that feels polished and professional. It is more customizable than Windows is. I'm looking to avoid Win 11 with its telemetry, background downloads, advertisements, OneDrive problems, etc.
On the MENSA IQ test GPT-Pro got 34 out 35 correct for an IQ of 148. Very good. Rumor has it the one question it missed had something to do with instances of "b" in "blueberry."
20 year old cars tend to be heavy polluters because they don't meet the latest emissions standards. Here in California the state will buy old cars and scrap them to get dirty emitters out of service. Also, nearly every day electrical generation is over 50% using solar, wind or hydro so EVs are cleaner here than any ICE vehicle by far.
That 1985 Toyota emits more GHG and NOx per mile than a new vehicle because it wasn't built to meet the latest US or Canadian emissions standards. Older vehicles emit more pollutants so in some US states the government will buy the car to have it scrapped, thus improving the overall fleet emissions statewide. In California there are owners who keep and maintain pre-1975 vehicles because they have little or no smog control systems, are easy to work on, and they are exempt from mandatory bi-annual smog testing.
Investigation might not be complete, they could add an espionage charge later. Depending on what US code section they charge him with it could be up to 10 yrs, 30 yrs or life.
It irks me so many physicists/cosmologists jump from the mathematical GR singularity at the center of a BH to "matter there has infinite density." That's highly unlikely, it's probably quark plasma.
Yes, and battery storage is why California got through a severe heat wave in July without rolling blackouts or major outages. There wasn't even a FlexAlert. Batteries time-shifted excess solar power from noon to the early evening, when air conditioning demand is at its highest.
Expanding universe and Big Bang Theory go hand-in-hand. There are multiple independent observations besides the red shift that make it nearly certain there had to be a BBT event to explain what we see. The universe is too hot, chaotic and clumpy for there not to have been a massive explosion to kick it all into motion. Since there is good confidence BBT happened, transitioning from that event to a steady-state non-expanding universe would require some sort of mechanism to slow then freeze the expansion. Not aware of any support for that model.
The DoE report on California is skewed by rural areas that suffer outages due to wildfires and winter storms. There have been no extended outages that effect large cities on the scale of Houston.
Not true about California. Outages in storms are highly localized. Some rural areas get power turned off but only when fire risk is extreme. There have been no large cities without power for a week like Houston.
Right, but California took aggressive action to stop market manipulation. That was 20+ years ago. In the last several years the state has increased generation capacity, greatly increased renewables, and improved grid reliability.
It's a real head-scratcher why Texas, with abundant oil, gas and wind energy resources, can't build and maintain a hardened and reliable grid to deliver that plentiful energy to themselves.
Enron is the poster child of how opening the energy grid to an unregulated free market makes it ripe for price rigging and manipulation. Enron was famous for trading strategies like "Fat Boy" and "Death Star" where they would do things like submit fake energy schedules to create the illusion of congestion on transmission rights they own to collect payments for relieving the congestion the next day, which wasn't actually going to happen. Energy markets need regulations and oversight to prevent bad actors from ripping off utilities, which ultimately get passed on to ratepayers via higher rates.