Muda69

H.R. 1 Is a Partisan Disgrace https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/h-r-1-is-a-partisan-disgrace/

Yep, I'll be shocked if Mr. Biden lasts as president through the end of 2021. The man's mental faculties are simply not up to the task.

Wind Power Is a Disaster in Texas, No Matter What Paul Krugman Says https://mises.org/wire/wind-power-disaster-texas-no-matter-what-paul-krugman-says In contrast to this dirty rotten lie from the right-wingers, Krugman instead explains: A bit later in the article Krugman admits that wind was involved as well, but minimizes its role in this way: Incidentally, there are literally no numbers in Krugman’s article (except for numerals referring to dates), which is a signal that he’s pulling a fast one on his readers. From his qualitative (not quantitative) description, most people would have assumed that when the unusually cold weather hit Texas last month, electricity generation from various sources was down across the board, but that it mostly fell from natural gas, while the drop in wind was insignificant. As I’ll show in the next section, this is utterly false. What Really Happened During Texas’s Power Crisis Had I not seen the analysis from my former colleagues at the Institute for Energy Research (see their articles here and here), I might have believed the spin that the Texas crisis was really a failure of fossil fuels rather than renewables. Yet as we’ll see, the actual numbers tell a much different story from what most Americans probably “learned” from the media discussion. The simplest way for me to communicate the relevant information is through three infographics, generated from the Energy Information Administration’s handy tool that shows the source mix for daily energy generation by state. Before showing the numbers, I need to make an important clarification: the demand for electricity soared to unprecedented levels during the freeze. In particular, on February 14, peak demand on the electric grid surpassed sixty-nine gigawatts, breaking the previous winter record of (almost) sixty-six gigawatts set in 2018. It was in the early hours of the following morning (February 15) that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) implemented rolling blackouts to prevent the entire grid from collapsing. So to be clear, the issue wasn’t that supply in an absolute sense fell, but rather that demand soared. (Texas typically uses more electricity in the summer to keep things cool, rather than in the winter to keep things warm.) With that context in place, here are the stats for electricity output from various sources on February 15, 2021: 2021.03_texas_feb_15_2021.png Already we see something interesting. Of the total amount of electricity delivered on this first day of blackouts, 65 percent came from natural gas, while only 6 percent came from wind and 2 percent from solar. But in fairness, maybe what guys like Krugman meant is that this is much lower than what we normally could expect from natural gas. (Remember Krugman had said that natural gas “normally supplies most of the state’s winter electricity.”) To test this possibility, we can look at the situation one year prior, on February 15, 2020: 2021.03_texas_feb_15_2020.png Now, this is interesting. A year earlier, during a normal mid-February day, natural gas “only” supplied 43 percent of the total electricity, whereas wind accounted for 28 percent and solar was the same at 2 percent. Remember how Krugman said wind was only a “small fraction” of Texas generation? Overall for the year 2020, wind produced 22 percent of Texas’s electricity, a higher share than coal. Yet besides the proportions, also look at the absolute quantity of electricity generated: on Feb. 15, 2020, natural gas produced 398,130 megawatt hours (compared to 759,708 MWh during the recent freeze), while wind produced 264,024 MWh (compared to 73,395 MWh during the freeze). To sum up, compared with the same date a year earlier, during the first day of the blackouts in Texas, electricity from natural gas was 91 percent higher, while electricity from wind was 72 percent lower. To reiterate the clarification I gave earlier, part of the confusion here is that electricity demand in February isn’t normally as high as it was because of the freeze. So to test whether natural gas is the culprit, we can compare the generation from various sources during the freeze to the situation back during the summer. For example, let’s look at how things stood on August 15, 2020: 2021.03_texas_aug_15_2020.png As our date occurred in the dog days of summer, total electric demand was higher in mid-August 2020 than on February 15, 2021. Furthermore, output from every source was lower during the freeze when compared with their performance the prior August 15. However, it seems odd to single out natural gas as the culprit, when it experienced the lowest percentage drop, and (on all dates) was the single biggest source. The following table summarizes electrical output from various sources on the three dates we have analyzed, and shows the change going from the earlier dates to the first day of the recent blackouts: 2021.03_texas_table.png As the table indicates, on all three dates natural gas was always the leader in electrical generation. During the freeze, it produced 91 percent more than it had the prior year during a more typical winter day. And although natural gas produced less electricity during the freeze than it had during the peak summer demand, it was only a 7 percent drop. In contrast, wind power during the freeze was down a whopping 72 percent compared to the previous year, and compared to the summer it was down 47 percent. Among all sources, the percentage difference between either the previous year or the previous summer was highest for natural gas. That is, the surge in natural gas output year over year was the biggest by far (with coal coming in second with a 54 percent surge), and compared with the summer load its drop was the smallest at 7 percent. Wind, in contrast, was the worst performer in both cases, if we measure in terms of the difference. That is, wind’s 72 percent drop in the year-over-year column was the biggest one, and its 47 percent drop in the column for summer to winter was also the biggest. In light of these statistics, it’s a bit odd for commentators to blame the Texas blackouts on natural gas while excusing wind. What They Mean: Wind Is the Ted Cruz of Electricity Now, in fairness, what the commentators blaming natural gas have in mind is that ERCOT’s emergency planning assumed that natural gas (and the other “thermal” electricity sources, namely coal and nuclear) could be called upon to fill the gap should there be record demand during a winter storm. If we measure in terms of the total capacity that was temporarily knocked out because of the freeze, then the culprits were thermal sources, rather than wind and solar. As Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor at Princeton tweeted out, “Main story continues to be the failure of … natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants … which ERCOT counts on to be there when needed.” He further specified, “Of about 70,000 MW of thermal plants in ERCOT, ~25–30,000 MW have been out since Sunday night. Huge problem.” And so we see what people mean when they say the Texas blackouts are the fault of natural gas, rather than wind: since no serious official ever expected wind to be any help during a crisis, it can hardly be blamed for not showing up when disaster struck. In effect, Krugman is arguing that wind power is the Ted Cruz of electricity. Conclusion When assessing blame for a disaster, it’s hard to know what the relevant counterfactual should be. Yes, had the (relatively) unregulated Texas power providers done a better job in winterizing their natural gas lines, things would have been better last February. But by the same token, had the federal government never implemented the wind production tax credit (PTC)—which subsidizes wind so heavily that it sometimes sells for a negative price in the Texas wholesale market—then there would have been more fossil fuel-generated capacity in Texas, which the numbers clearly show did better at providing electricity during the deep freeze. Normally the boosters of renewable energy point with pride to Texas, which has the most wind capacity of any state by far in absolute terms, and even has almost 25 percent of its official generating capacity consisting of wind. Yet when wind collapsed during the deep freeze, suddenly even its biggest fans admit that nobody ever thought it could do the same job as natural gas.

lol, first I have ever heard of a Bluffton University. First I thought "there is a university in Bluffton, Indiana?", only to find out it is in Ohio..................

I've always wondered about the inferiority complex Purdue fans seem to have regarding their public university counterparts from Bloomington. Like why does the crowd at Ross-Ade erupt with "IU Sucks" even they are not actually playing the Hoosiers? Could it be the five banners hanging in Assembly Hall versus the zero hanging in Mackey Arena? Why hasn't Purdue basketball ever been able to "get over the hump" and bring a men's national championship banner back to West Lafayette?

Sorry, I don't really take anything from Vox seriously. The leftist, progressive agenda from that organization is quite clear. DOOM! GLOOM! Animals running in the streets!

Sorry, these "independent commissions", whose members will most likely be appointed by politicians in Washington, will be anything but "independent". They will be as politically motivated as anything done at the state level.

Because it is.

https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2021/03/08/indiana-ad-scott-dolson-rewards-tom-allen-new-contract-after-football-success/4626775001/ (Note: story is behind a paywall) I supposed with this increased compensation comes highly increased expectations. Can Mr. Allen deliver? And does this officially make IU a "football school"?

No, thank you.

https://www.wlfi.com/content/news/Senate-Bill-97-honors-the-amount-of-popcorn-produced-in-Indiana-573939401.html Nice to now the Indiana state legislature is debating and passing such weighty matters. Your tax dollars at work, fellow Hoosiers.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/h-r-1-is-a-partisan-assault-on-american-democracy/ Agreed. I heartily urge all Americans to contact their U.S. Senators and urge them to vote against the major usurpation of state power and authority.

Why Dr. Seuss Is Worth Defending https://reason.com/2021/03/08/dr-seuss-defend-cancel-culture-toronto-books-censorship/ They actually had it right the first time. But nonracism—the idea that skin color should be overlooked—has lost popularity among progressive activists, and anti-racism—the idea that skin color matters a great deal—is in vogue. The former is an egalitarian message at the heart of many Dr. Seuss books; the latter is a smokescreen for all sorts of policies that have very little to do with combating racism: like abolishing standardized tests or spending more time renaming schools than reopening them. There is certainly no obligation to read or teach Dr. Seuss, nor should Seuss defenders feel some moral or practical imperative to gloss over his imperfections. The man did draw racist caricatures, and some of his work can be read as a defense of Japanese internment. He was a flawed genius—but a genius nonetheless, and a towering figure in the world of children's literature. There is a disturbing trend among modern liberalism to seek to cast out all such flawed figures, which has the rest of us reasonably worried that no art or artist more than a few years old can possibly stand the test of time. (For another example of this, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow recently accused Pepe Le Pew, the lovesick skunk from Looney Tunes, of perpetuating rape culture.) There's not really a law or policy that could fix this problem—though Sonny Bunch's proposal to release now unpublishable works into the public domain is an interesting one—and so much of the pro-Seuss grousing in nonliberal circles can feel as performative as the anti-Seuss extremism. Yet there's good reason in this case to regard the slippery slope with suspicion. The report that led to the cancellation of the six books also stipulates that The Cat in the Hat embodies a "racist tradition" and that Horton Hears a Who! "reinforces themes of white supremacy." I would not be surprised to find the entire Seuss canon under attack a few years from now. To quote the last lines of The Butter Battle Book, "Who's gonna drop it? Will you or will he?" (To which the narrator's grandpa replies: "Be patient. We'll see. We will see.") Waiting for the book burnings to begin...............................

But take this into account: https://globalsportmatters.com/health/2019/06/14/for-better-health-safety-of-athletes-which-playing-surface-is-best/

Yeah, and who is stuck repaying that "free" money? Primarily our children and grandchildren.

Wanted: IU donor to write check for Brad Stevens https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/columnists/gregg-doyel/2021/03/06/indiana-gap-grows-between-purdue-iu-basketball-archie-miller-falls-again/6843665002/ (Note: story is behind a paywall) Why did Mr. Miller and his coaching staff stop coaching? Or is it the players who have basically stopped listening?

A lot of kids could be covid-19 vaccinated for what it cost to build these extravagant high school turf fields. It's just a game played by children.

Kentucky Bill Would Make Insulting a Cop a Crime https://reason.com/2021/03/05/kentucky-bill-would-make-insulting-a-cop-a-crime/

How To Succeed In School Without Really Trying: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/how-to-succeed-in-school-without-really-trying-baltimore/ Read it all. You can say that Tiffany France ought to have been more on top of things with her kid’s grades, but she’s right to say that if the school was passing him, there is a basic trust that every parent has to have in their children’s school — and this school violated it. This is how the school advertises itself on its website: Of course, the Augusta Fells Savage Institute lied. If this kid was near the top half of his class with an 0.13 GPA, think about those lower! Does any learning happen in this school? Clearly not, but I bet Woke Inc. can explain why. It’s probably on account of racism! Maybe the Augusta Fells Savage Institute leaders need to rebrand themselves as at the forefront of woke pedagogy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in collaboration with a number of California educational institutions, have produced Equitable Math, a guide to teach “anti-racist mathematics.” In what ways does mathematics instruction uphold white supremacy? Well, check out the guide: Perhaps Tiffany France’s ire at her son’s school is misdirected. Perhaps the school was practicing antiracism by not holding him to perfection on his classroom attendance, and his classwork. Sarcasm over. The thing is, sensible middle class parents of all races are not going to subject their kids to this kind of garbage pedagogy. They are going to move to school districts where their kids are taught actual math, or put them in private school. It’s going to be the children of the poor, especially the racial minority poor, who suffer the most.

Public Schools Refuse to Open. Give the Taxpayers Their Money Back https://mises.org/wire/public-schools-refuse-open-give-taxpayers-their-money-back The schools’ administrators do not know of a single case of anyone being hospitalized as a result of transmission through these schools. This is a fairly common experience for Catholic schools. In the archdiocese of Denver, schools were “100 percent open” beginning last fall, and Defenders of the public schools’ lackluster efforts have attempted to explain all this away by claiming private schools are all the well-heeled domain of the wealthy. Many articles point to the tuition rates of boutique schools, like the Germantown Friends school in Pennsylvania, which charges more than $40,000 per year. This, however, is an outlier. Many private schools charge far less than that. Yes, some Catholic schools—which are 37 percent of all private schools and comprise the largest nonpublic school system in America—are indeed expensive boutique schools run by “private orders.” But most Catholic schools are run-of-the-mill archdiocesan schools that charge under $9,000 per year for high schooling, and even less for elementary school. That may seem like a lot, but it’s well below what many public schools spend on educating each student. Moreover, anyone who is familiar with urban Catholic school knows that these schools hardly cater to the wealthy elites. This is largely because of extensive scholarship programs for lower-income families. These hapless parents who have been driven to private schooling by the public schools’ Covid shutdowns have to pay twice—once for the public schooling that’s been reduced to Zoom meetings, and once for the actual schooling taking place at private schools. What If We Ran Grocery Stores like Public Schools? The private sector could never get away with this. Just imagine, for example, if grocery stores functioned this way and that grocery stores were government-owned institutions. Funding would come from tax revenues and funding levels would be calculated on the assumption that at least 90 percent of consumers would obtain all their groceries through these stores.1 Taxpayers would be charged accordingly. Just as state governments now spend 20 to 40 percent of state budgets on public schools, state governments would budget a sizable portion of the budget to “grocery finance.” Naturally, taxes would be much higher than they are now. Moreover, since taxes would be much higher—and posttax income much lower—countless Americans would indeed shop at these government stores. They would likely do so even if the quality of the food were lower. "Hey, I already paid for it," the thinking would go, "so I might as well shop there." We’d be told these government grocery stores are indispensable. How could the poor buy groceries otherwise? Of course, your shopping list would have to meet the approval of grocery planners so as to fit within the budget. Don't like the menu that the grocers have selected for you? Tough luck. Moreover, given the enthusiasm with which public school staff and officials have abandoned their usual work in the face of Covid, it's easy to imagine a scenario in which government grocery services are even more limited in case of a public health scare. Admittedly, like the schools, these grocery stores would probably not end all their services. They’d likely still allow some limited shopping. No nonemployees would be allowed to enter the stores. As with schoolteachers, these public sector grocery workers would insist that the grocery stores function under numerous restrictions, perhaps with fewer business hours, and even long weekend closures to allow for extensive cleaning. And why not? The staffers and managers will get paid no matter what. Yes, there would be some private sector grocery stores for those insist on shopping in person or "after hours." If you want to shop for groceries elsewhere, you’ll just have to pay twice: once for the government stores, and a second time for your “private” groceries. Grocery Vouchers, a.k.a. “Food Stamps” Obviously, if presented with the option of a world of fully government-owned grocery stores, many Americans would consider such a thing to be madness. And rightly so. Moreover, even when confronted with the question of whether or not low-income people can afford groceries, few advocate for a government takeover of grocery stores. Instead, the taxpayers tolerate funding a system of monthly grocery vouchers for households below a certain income level. These vouchers are commonly called “food stamps.” Now, many people may take exception to food stamps as a boondoggle. But it’s also hard to deny that if voters and politicians are going to insist that low-income consumers be subsidized, this grocery voucher system is orders of magnitude better than an extensive system of government-owned grocery stores. Yet why do so many Americans think a system of government-owned schools makes sense? If the same commonsense thinking that prevents a government takeover of grocery stores were applied to schools, the situation would look very different. Schools would virtually all be private institutions. If a parent doesn’t want to “shop” at a particular school or school district by enrolling his child there, the parent need not spend any money there. Of course, politicians and many voters would insist that something be done to subsidize education for low-income residents. With this, the less bad strategy is the grocery model: provide the educational version of food stamps for students. These funds aren't tied to any institution or any government districts. They go where the consumers go. Meanwhile, so long as public schools continue to receive direct funding from government coffers—with no economic connection to consumer choice—the public schools won't have to care what the public wants or needs.

Remove the Fences Surrounding the Capitol and Send the National Guard Home Now https://reason.com/2021/03/04/capitol-building-riot-national-guard-fences-remove/

Yep, and this is information a great many unions would like to keep as close to their chest a possible. Yet another reason to get rid of public sector unions entirely.

Do you find purpose in your work, Dante?

Why would a "master contract" for a labor union contain language bestowing certain extra benefits for non-members of that union? Make zero sense.

Depends on how you define "work" and "people".