I'll just pass on what a family counselor told my wife and I once: "If you're worrying about whether you're doing a good job of parenting, you probably are."
The last time I taught was after a several year break. Accommodations took me a bit by surprise. However, the administration staff at the community college made it straightforward to deal with. There was only one instance where I had to put together two versions of an exam.
The last time I was a college student was my most recent time in graduate school. No accommodations were made for that. After the second time I had to write several pages longhand in a blue book, I was tempted to ask, "What if I had my wife's arthritis and couldn't write longhand for two hours?"
Idle curiosity, and I haven't seen it anywhere, which local police organization was responsible? Small town police department? Sheriff's office? How many officers would they normally have available?
First point, anything I'm talking about here is in the Western Interconnect, which comes with a different set of opportunities and constraints than the rest of the country.
There's more than one way to provide reliable power. The traditional way is dispatchable power sources. An alternative is to have many intermittent sources with independent outage patterns and enough bulk transmission capacity. (Example: it is rare for the wind to not blow in both the Columbia River gorge area and the South Pass outflow area at the same time.) Two very different sets of statistics apply, two very different management approaches. Both can fail. Texas's Feb 2021 experience demonstrated that they didn't understand their particular statistics (or all of the system failure modes). In round numbers, the WI states got 43% of their 2023 power from renewable sources. 20 years ago most regulators and utilities said it was impossible to coordinate that much renewable power, the grid would collapse. The WI is building (ground has been broken on) multiple long-distance bulk transmission projects. I'll certainly admit the management is lagging, but it is making progress.
LF4: Yes, Vogtle 3 and 4 are in operation, and are producing by far the most expensive electricity that goes into Georgia Power's mix. A few years ago, the South Carolina PSC approved cancellation of the Summer 2 and 3 reactors because everyone had agreed it was cheaper to eat the sunk construction costs and buy power from alternate sources. The UAMPS small modular reactor project has been cancelled. Even with the federal DOE providing the land, and covering the costs to get the NRC up to speed so it could issue a license, the price of the electricity was going to be more than the price from alternate regional sources. The Gates/Buffett molten-salt reactor project that's to be built in Wyoming has been pretty secretive. There are rumors, though, that the electricity will be expensive enough to be non-competitive for sale to utilities, but will now serve as a guaranteed, fixed-cost source for cloud/AI server farms.
And yet... Biden's reputation has never been that he's a stand-up comic class comeback guy. None of the names that might replace him -- Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Warren, Booker -- have called for him to step down. Nor the majority leader in the Senate, nor the minority leader in the House. None of the NATO leaders who just spent a few days with him said that they don't think he has what it takes. His whole cabinet appears to be standing with him.
All of that said, if George Clooney had filed the paperwork and said, "Joe hasn't got it, I declare that I'm running for the Democratic nomination, and will pour all of my personal fortune into it, and to hell with the party rules," I might buy that there's someone who's not Biden that has a better chance. But Clooney didn't name names, did he?
No, and I've told a lot of people that the ability to come up with a clever 90-second soundbite to a random question in real-time is not a core competency for being a good president.
Re #2... I'm waiting to see a proposal that doesn't violate the party's rules and can block a candidate who shows up with a huge super-majority of bound delegates from winning on the first ballot. A number of Republican AG's have indicated they are prepared to go to court if the party attempts to block bound delegates from their state from voting for the primary winner, at least for the first or first few rounds. Also complicated by the fact that we are six weeks from the opening of the convention -- five weeks from the voting if they do the conference call thing -- and none of the leading "candidates" other than Harris have filed the FEC paperwork.
The Democratic National Party has spent decades jiggering their rules so that #2 can't happen unless the candidate withdraws.
Polling numbers be damned. If anyone but Harris replaces Biden, they start from scratch. Suppose a ton of people get together and arrange to nominate a Whitmer/Newsom ticket at the end of August. As of today, neither of those two are registered with the FEC as running for President. They can't collect money for a presidential campaign. They don't have a 50-state campaign organization. There are severe limits on how much the Biden/Harris campaign can donate to them in the form of leases, phone lines, reserved advertising slots, etc.
Running for President is big business. Logistics matter. Which means long-term planning and organization matter. A lot.
They want to reach down to my level of the federal apparatus, and make us loyalists.
Depending on how "Dismantle the administrative state..." is interpreted, they may want to just get rid of you altogether.
It's difficult to get them to explain "dismantle" coherently. Do you want to keep the National Weather Service? Okay, does NOAA get to keep operating the satellites? How about the super-computer resources and global weather models? And so on, and so forth.
Recall Rick Perry's surprise when, after he was appointed Secretary of Energy, he discovered that DOE is the civilian agency that designs, builds, and maintains the nuclear warheads.
When I was a lad, my Grandfather Cain would complain that none of the then-current radio baseball announcers could hold a candle to "Dutch" Reagan. Reagan, of course, did play-by-play for Cubs games in the 1930s for WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa from a studio there using the game ticker.
Improved healthcare and the crew born in the 1940s have held on to the levers of power in the federal government tenaciously. The only exception is the House Republican conference. Gingrich changed the conference rules there to make seniority much less important/valuable. It's the only place where a Paul Ryan could happen: chair both the Budget and Ways & Means committees, Speaker, and a little side gig as a VP candidate, all before he was 50.
You'll need to explain your Warren proposal to me. Replace someone (Schumer) who has been very good at finessing things using a very narrow majority with someone who is two years older?
Mark Warner, the other vice chair of the Democratic Senate conference is up to something. He just announced that he's organizing a group of senators to urge Biden to withdraw.
When I was a kid in certain parts of rural Iowa in the 1960s, if you knew the right person you could get a quarter-stick of dynamite and a fuse cap with a safe length of fuse. In the tiny town in southern Iowa where my Grandparents Cain lived, the old guy at the hardware store would sell me all sorts of interesting stuff since I was "Bill Cain's grandkid."
It was years later that I finally realized most of my contemporaries hadn't been able to buy a quarter-stick of dynamite when they were eleven. More years after that before I started digging a little, and discovered that particular corner of Iowa had a coal-mining industry that did hundreds of thousands of tons of annual production in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Not just industrial environments. Back in the 80s I was working on a reasonably complicated wire-wrap printed circuit board, reached under it, and inadvertently hit several of the wire-wrap posts with my wedding ring. Fried a $700 chip. And this despite knowing about the significant scar on my father's left-hand ring finger, where his wedding ring short-circuited the positive and ground on the DC power supply for an aircraft carrier's sonar system. Visible damage at the points of contact on his ring that he never had repaired.
The most paranoid person I knew about electrical equipment had worked 10 years in a large commercial power plant. Even 10 years after he left that environment, if he was walking around he had both hands behind his back, one holding tightly to the other wrist. He was the only engineer I ever knew who could give a technical talk and never make a hand gesture.
Why in the world is China pulling this crap *NOW*?
The other large powers in the world are currently distracted. The US is distracted by the Supreme Court and election chaos. The UK is distracted by its elections (and possible extinction of the Conservative Party) tomorrow. France is distracted by its own set of elections. The EU and NATO are distracted by Ukraine. Israel/Gaza is distracting almost everyone.
If the PRC is looking to squeeze Taiwan a bit harder, rolling over the Kinmen islands is the obvious step.
Most of the legal speculation I've seen on the subject suggests that if Biden were to resign/withdraw, a Harris campaign would "inherit" the $150M or so in the Biden/Harris fund. It's one thing for pundits and donors to pick, say, Newsom; it's another matter entirely to come up with that kind of money on short notice and legally.
Also "Dems in disarray" is an axiom for them. The last three years must have been frustrating given the number of things Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries have finessed.
The Court seems to have made a lot of work for itself, from extending the time allowed to claim damage from a rule, to requiring the courts exercise their own judgement on how to interpret regulatory statute, to requiring jury trials in order to impose regulatory civil penalties.
[M]any policy wonks brilliant on econ or foreign policy have no f*cking idea how politics works.
At a minimum, any Democrat who says Biden should withdraw ought to be required to name someone that they think could pull together the party. People in vote by mail states will be casting ballots in less than four months.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Struggling For Normal”
I'll just pass on what a family counselor told my wife and I once: "If you're worrying about whether you're doing a good job of parenting, you probably are."
"
The last time I taught was after a several year break. Accommodations took me a bit by surprise. However, the administration staff at the community college made it straightforward to deal with. There was only one instance where I had to put together two versions of an exam.
The last time I was a college student was my most recent time in graduate school. No accommodations were made for that. After the second time I had to write several pages longhand in a blue book, I was tempted to ask, "What if I had my wife's arthritis and couldn't write longhand for two hours?"
On “Trump was just shot at a rally. He appears to be fine.”
Idle curiosity, and I haven't seen it anywhere, which local police organization was responsible? Small town police department? Sheriff's office? How many officers would they normally have available?
On “Linky Friday: Eternal Vigilance Requires Eternal Listicles, Soundtracked to Roundball Rock”
First point, anything I'm talking about here is in the Western Interconnect, which comes with a different set of opportunities and constraints than the rest of the country.
There's more than one way to provide reliable power. The traditional way is dispatchable power sources. An alternative is to have many intermittent sources with independent outage patterns and enough bulk transmission capacity. (Example: it is rare for the wind to not blow in both the Columbia River gorge area and the South Pass outflow area at the same time.) Two very different sets of statistics apply, two very different management approaches. Both can fail. Texas's Feb 2021 experience demonstrated that they didn't understand their particular statistics (or all of the system failure modes). In round numbers, the WI states got 43% of their 2023 power from renewable sources. 20 years ago most regulators and utilities said it was impossible to coordinate that much renewable power, the grid would collapse. The WI is building (ground has been broken on) multiple long-distance bulk transmission projects. I'll certainly admit the management is lagging, but it is making progress.
"
LF4: Yes, Vogtle 3 and 4 are in operation, and are producing by far the most expensive electricity that goes into Georgia Power's mix. A few years ago, the South Carolina PSC approved cancellation of the Summer 2 and 3 reactors because everyone had agreed it was cheaper to eat the sunk construction costs and buy power from alternate sources. The UAMPS small modular reactor project has been cancelled. Even with the federal DOE providing the land, and covering the costs to get the NRC up to speed so it could issue a license, the price of the electricity was going to be more than the price from alternate regional sources. The Gates/Buffett molten-salt reactor project that's to be built in Wyoming has been pretty secretive. There are rumors, though, that the electricity will be expensive enough to be non-competitive for sale to utilities, but will now serve as a guaranteed, fixed-cost source for cloud/AI server farms.
On “The Arrow of Time, Lodged Deep in Our Political Posterior”
And yet... Biden's reputation has never been that he's a stand-up comic class comeback guy. None of the names that might replace him -- Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Warren, Booker -- have called for him to step down. Nor the majority leader in the Senate, nor the minority leader in the House. None of the NATO leaders who just spent a few days with him said that they don't think he has what it takes. His whole cabinet appears to be standing with him.
All of that said, if George Clooney had filed the paperwork and said, "Joe hasn't got it, I declare that I'm running for the Democratic nomination, and will pour all of my personal fortune into it, and to hell with the party rules," I might buy that there's someone who's not Biden that has a better chance. But Clooney didn't name names, did he?
"
Have you pushed for Biden to be replaced?
No, and I've told a lot of people that the ability to come up with a clever 90-second soundbite to a random question in real-time is not a core competency for being a good president.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/8/2024”
Re #2... I'm waiting to see a proposal that doesn't violate the party's rules and can block a candidate who shows up with a huge super-majority of bound delegates from winning on the first ballot. A number of Republican AG's have indicated they are prepared to go to court if the party attempts to block bound delegates from their state from voting for the primary winner, at least for the first or first few rounds. Also complicated by the fact that we are six weeks from the opening of the convention -- five weeks from the voting if they do the conference call thing -- and none of the leading "candidates" other than Harris have filed the FEC paperwork.
The Democratic National Party has spent decades jiggering their rules so that #2 can't happen unless the candidate withdraws.
On “It’s Time For Biden To Be A Statesman”
Cheryl may be wrong, but that doesn't change what she's writing about.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/8/2024”
You lack the proper conspiratorial mindset. Of course the Biden crime family is falsifying visitor records...
On “It’s Time For Biden To Be A Statesman”
Less Cheryl Rofer, who argues that no matter who runs, it's the policies that win or lose the election.
"
Polling numbers be damned. If anyone but Harris replaces Biden, they start from scratch. Suppose a ton of people get together and arrange to nominate a Whitmer/Newsom ticket at the end of August. As of today, neither of those two are registered with the FEC as running for President. They can't collect money for a presidential campaign. They don't have a 50-state campaign organization. There are severe limits on how much the Biden/Harris campaign can donate to them in the form of leases, phone lines, reserved advertising slots, etc.
Running for President is big business. Logistics matter. Which means long-term planning and organization matter. A lot.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/8/2024”
They want to reach down to my level of the federal apparatus, and make us loyalists.
Depending on how "Dismantle the administrative state..." is interpreted, they may want to just get rid of you altogether.
It's difficult to get them to explain "dismantle" coherently. Do you want to keep the National Weather Service? Okay, does NOAA get to keep operating the satellites? How about the super-computer resources and global weather models? And so on, and so forth.
Recall Rick Perry's surprise when, after he was appointed Secretary of Energy, he discovered that DOE is the civilian agency that designs, builds, and maintains the nuclear warheads.
On “Why Is The Fourth of July?”
When I was a lad, my Grandfather Cain would complain that none of the then-current radio baseball announcers could hold a candle to "Dutch" Reagan. Reagan, of course, did play-by-play for Cubs games in the 1930s for WHO radio in Des Moines, Iowa from a studio there using the game ticker.
On “Dems in Disarray! No, For Reals This Time”
Improved healthcare and the crew born in the 1940s have held on to the levers of power in the federal government tenaciously. The only exception is the House Republican conference. Gingrich changed the conference rules there to make seniority much less important/valuable. It's the only place where a Paul Ryan could happen: chair both the Budget and Ways & Means committees, Speaker, and a little side gig as a VP candidate, all before he was 50.
"
You'll need to explain your Warren proposal to me. Replace someone (Schumer) who has been very good at finessing things using a very narrow majority with someone who is two years older?
Mark Warner, the other vice chair of the Democratic Senate conference is up to something. He just announced that he's organizing a group of senators to urge Biden to withdraw.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Hey, Baby! It’s the 4th of July!”
When I was a kid in certain parts of rural Iowa in the 1960s, if you knew the right person you could get a quarter-stick of dynamite and a fuse cap with a safe length of fuse. In the tiny town in southern Iowa where my Grandparents Cain lived, the old guy at the hardware store would sell me all sorts of interesting stuff since I was "Bill Cain's grandkid."
It was years later that I finally realized most of my contemporaries hadn't been able to buy a quarter-stick of dynamite when they were eleven. More years after that before I started digging a little, and discovered that particular corner of Iowa had a coal-mining industry that did hundreds of thousands of tons of annual production in the late 19th and early 20th century.
On “Fourth of July Group Activity: Civics Quiz”
Question #10 in my set was about geography. I could easily imagine someone who had spent their time in coastal cities having to simply guess at it.
"
10/10. Does everyone get the same ten questions?
On “Bring Back Signet Rings”
Not just industrial environments. Back in the 80s I was working on a reasonably complicated wire-wrap printed circuit board, reached under it, and inadvertently hit several of the wire-wrap posts with my wedding ring. Fried a $700 chip. And this despite knowing about the significant scar on my father's left-hand ring finger, where his wedding ring short-circuited the positive and ground on the DC power supply for an aircraft carrier's sonar system. Visible damage at the points of contact on his ring that he never had repaired.
The most paranoid person I knew about electrical equipment had worked 10 years in a large commercial power plant. Even 10 years after he left that environment, if he was walking around he had both hands behind his back, one holding tightly to the other wrist. He was the only engineer I ever knew who could give a technical talk and never make a hand gesture.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/1/2024”
Why in the world is China pulling this crap *NOW*?
The other large powers in the world are currently distracted. The US is distracted by the Supreme Court and election chaos. The UK is distracted by its elections (and possible extinction of the Conservative Party) tomorrow. France is distracted by its own set of elections. The EU and NATO are distracted by Ukraine. Israel/Gaza is distracting almost everyone.
If the PRC is looking to squeeze Taiwan a bit harder, rolling over the Kinmen islands is the obvious step.
On “About Last Night: Debate Debacle Edition”
Most of the legal speculation I've seen on the subject suggests that if Biden were to resign/withdraw, a Harris campaign would "inherit" the $150M or so in the Biden/Harris fund. It's one thing for pundits and donors to pick, say, Newsom; it's another matter entirely to come up with that kind of money on short notice and legally.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/1/2024”
Also "Dems in disarray" is an axiom for them. The last three years must have been frustrating given the number of things Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and Jeffries have finessed.
On “SCOTUS Opinions on Trump Immunity, Corner Post, and Netchoice: Read Them For Yourself”
The Court seems to have made a lot of work for itself, from extending the time allowed to claim damage from a rule, to requiring the courts exercise their own judgement on how to interpret regulatory statute, to requiring jury trials in order to impose regulatory civil penalties.
On “About Last Night: Debate Debacle Edition”
[M]any policy wonks brilliant on econ or foreign policy have no f*cking idea how politics works.
At a minimum, any Democrat who says Biden should withdraw ought to be required to name someone that they think could pull together the party. People in vote by mail states will be casting ballots in less than four months.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.