StrangeSox

The initial reports of blocking infection/transmission out of Israel is probably the best news yet on the vaccine front.

This is all missing the forest for the trees. The astronomical bills are just the salt in the wound, but the main wound is that many millions were without power. This has caused a lot of suffering, dozens of deaths, and a huge amount of damage to physical property. If Texas hadn't isolated their grid in an effort to shirk federal regulation, FERC's 2011's 'recommendations' could have carried the weight of actual regulatory enforcement and the fines that come with that. Instead, ERCOT more or less ignored all of FERC's "hey maybe you should winterize your stuff so this doesn't happen again!" report, and then it happened again.

The Eastern Interconnect already exists. Because the electricity crosses state lines, all operators are subject to FERC/NERC regulations to ensure reliability. This includes everything from grid design and operation requirements to cyber and physical security requirements. The larger eastern and western interconnects are already broken down into more regional groups like WEC that are subject to FERC still but form working groups among regional partners that more directly impact each other. Texas went their own way to evade federal regulation. That was the whole point, and something they've long bragged about. This is the result.

Mars rover with onboard hypersonic helicopter! https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/ They're using it to test commercial-off-the-shelf electronics components as well. If they find they don't need to use bepoke radiation-hardened chips on as many systems, it could make future rovers cheaper and easier and more powerful. The computers running the rover itself are more like mid-aughts technology compared to the Snapdragon 801 cellphone chip running the chopper from the mid-10's.

Kinda sad that the era of "snow days" seems to be over now. Overwhelming majority of school districts around Chicago just had "remote learning day" on Tuesday.

The people "dunking" on the millions suffering in Texas because it's a "red state" are pretty gross and revealing.

FERC recommended winterizing back in 2011, because this same exact thing happened then. So much for "100 year events." Or you could interconnect with the rest of the country instead of remaining separate to avoid federal regulations. Or you could kill a whole bunch of people and cause a lot of suffering in the name of deregulation and energy company profits.

ERCOT being it's own thing and not subject to FERC certainly doesn't help. More on how the failures here are by and large from fossil fuel plants, not a small amount of offline wind that people are trying scapegoat. If the grid crashes hard enough, everything starts tripping offline. And most power plants rely on off-site power to get started up, so restarting capacity is limited. Balancing across the entire grid is a very slow and delicate process.

Yikes

Why did Fauci say "April" on Friday and now May, June or July just a few days later? That's a pretty enormous difference.

tfw your jet stream collapses and lets artic air plunge all the way down to Mexico

There's about 1GW of wind offline, but the much bigger problem is 30GW of natural gas plants being down because the gas is getting rerouted for heating

Darn near 100k shots given in Illinois today.

Yup. If Bears go into football hell, it's entirely their own fault for letting Pace have yet another crack at finding a QB at the expense of future draft picks + cap space.

Something like 25% of cases are still infectious at 14 days.

Everyone who has already been vaccinated or will be vaccinated over the next couple of months is going to need a booster shot to bump up efficacy against the SA and any other immunity-evading variants we cook up globally over the next year or so.

25% efficacy against mild/moderate COVID, no data on hospitalizations or deaths yet. Certainly not great. AZ/Oxford has already said they're working on modifications but that they won't be ready until the fall. At least the J&J and Novavax trials showed better efficacy with more data. We're already seeing community spread of the SA variant in the US.

Giving Pace yet another crack at a QB seems like a bad idea. You also have this perverse incentive where he either hits it big or gets fired, so he had every reason to gamble away the team's future draft picks to try to make something happen right now.