US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9979

On February 27 2018 22:37 GreenHorizons wrote:

So long as liberals (a few in particular) refuse to see the influence of US propaganda on their perceptions of Russian influence it's going to be a problem. Particularly if they try to take a shot at me in the process.

On February 27 2018 22:41 brian wrote:


so to be clear, every time anyone takes a shot at you we’re going to circle back to this? because that’s sad. and we’ve got a long future here to look forward to.

when exactly do you think it’ll be appropriate then to take you seriously again?

On February 27 2018 22:41 brian wrote:


so to be clear, every time anyone takes a shot at you we’re going to circle back to this? because that’s sad. and we’ve got a long future here to look forward to.

when exactly do you think it’ll be appropriate then to take you seriously again? i’ll look forward to it.

On February 27 2018 23:03 brian wrote:


it sounds like you’re ready for a little introspection on the matter and why it’s nice that people don’t continuously beat this drum of singling people out. it’s lucky for the both of us that (most) everyone stops beating a particular drum after a week, or two, or three. or months. most importantly, it’s tired.

though i’ll take this opportunity while i’m trying to be the fun police to confront my own failing in the regard and i’m sorry LL when i didn’t just let it go. i felt bad about that back in the day if i’m being honest, though now i don’t even remember what it was.

On February 27 2018 23:03 brian wrote:
this is as awkward as reading all of GH’s recent posts so i’ll just leave it where it is.

On February 27 2018 23:24 GreenHorizons wrote:


I get it, but they are ongoing issues (the cheapshots and the propaganda). People are acting as if I'm the unreasonable one for expecting people to back up ongoing claims, lay off the unsubstantiated attacks, engage with the argument, and acknowledge their mistakes.

Before anyone mentions P6 apologizing, it wasn't an apology and he wasn't being honest. He had posted the same propaganda 3 months earlier, I refuted it, he ignored my refutation and attacked me instead of my argument then came back an tried the exact same thing again.

So when he says he was misremembering some bullshit NPR story or some other crap he's lying to us, himself, or both.

But let me be clear, it's not personal, other than he was the one who got caught as red handed as it could possibly get and STILL can't confront it, let alone deal with what it means to have that propaganda still circulating unchallenged by any corporate journalists he would say he trusts.

And instead of telling him (and each other) to own what happened for a long time between the unsubstantiated attacks at me, and the blatant propaganda being posted here, several of you have chosen to make it seem like I'm the unreasonable one here.

On February 27 2018 23:36 Mohdoo wrote:


It's not reasonable or fair for you to (as you admit) continuously do everything you can to shift conversation like this. A lot of other people enjoy discussing lots of different things. You aren't the only person in this thread.

Just look at your post. It is weird at this point.

On February 27 2018 23:47 Gahlo wrote:
Just gonna put out there that I have a script that will let you ignore users, if anybody wants it.

On February 27 2018 23:33 Nebuchad wrote:


It's funny that this post is the one that annoyed you and not your last post, I've written and deleted four answers to it. You reformulated an argument into something insufferable under the guise of being clear about it, and then complained that the result was insufferable. It's a post that should never have made it into a honest discussion.

Watching people punch left is truly the most perplexing thing I've experienced ever since I've been political online. It goes from people who are way to the right and generally hard to follow, if they ever suddenly decide to attack a rightwinger they can and will make perfect sense (That was mostly on Youtube so Dr Layman, that guy who thinks he's real, even Danny Duchamp who is otherwise probably far right enough to be classified a white nationalist...). But we have people like you or aquanim recently on that Greenwald article, who I generally respect and whose logic I can easily follow, and suddenly it devolves into this.

The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes.

In all that bedlam, it’s easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant.

Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became “decoupled”.

This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure. Some of that havoc is high-profile and headline-making, as in the recent requests from utilities (and attempts by the Trump administration) to bail out large coal and nuclear plants.

Some of it, however, is unfolding in more obscure quarters. A great example recently popped up in Tennessee, where one utility is finding its 20-year forecasts rendered archaic almost as soon as they are released.

Every five years, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) — the federally owned regional planning agency that, among other things, supplies electricity to Tennessee and parts of surrounding states — develops an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) meant to assess what it requires to meet customer needs for the next 20 years.

The last IRP, completed in 2015, anticipated that there would be no need for major new investment in baseload (coal, nuclear, and hydro) power plants; it foresaw that energy efficiency and distributed (customer-owned) energy generation would hold down demand.

Even so, TVA underestimated. Just three years later, the Chattanooga Free Press reports, “TVA now expects to sell 13 percent less power in 2027 than it did two decades earlier — the first sustained reversal in the growth of electricity usage in the 85-year history of TVA.”

TVA will sell less electricity in 10 years than it did 10 years ago. That is bonkers.

This startling shift in prospects has prompted the company to accelerate its schedule. It will now develop its next IRP a year early, in 2019.

Think for a moment about why a big utility like TVA (serving 9 million customers in seven states, with more than $11 billion in revenue) sets out to plan 20 years ahead. It is investing in extremely large and capital-intensive infrastructure like power plants and transmission lines, which cost billions of dollars and last for decades. These are not decisions to make lightly; the utility wants to be sure that they will still be needed, and will still pay off, for many years to come.

Now think for a moment about what it means for the electricity sector to be changing so fast that TVA’s projections are out of date three years after its last IRP, so much so that it needs to plunge back into the multimillion-dollar, year-long process of developing a new plan.

TVA wanted a plan for 20 years; the plan lasted three.

But investor-owned utilities (IOUs), which administer electricity for well over half of Americans, face another imperative: to make money for investors. They can’t make money selling electricity; monopoly regulations forbid it. Instead, they make money by earning a rate of return on investments in electrical power plants and infrastructure.

The problem is, with demand stagnant, there’s not much need for new hardware. And a drop in investment means a drop in profit. Unable to continue the steady growth that their investors have always counted on, IOUs are treading water, watching as revenues dry up.

Utilities have been frantically adjusting to this new normal. The generation utilities that sell into wholesale electricity markets (also under pressure from falling power prices; thanks to natural gas and renewables, wholesale power prices are down 70 percent from 2007) have reacted by cutting costs and merging. The regulated utilities that administer local distribution grids have responded by increasing investments in those grids.

But these are temporary, limited responses, not enough to stay in business in the face of long-term decline in demand. Ultimately, deeper reforms will be necessary.

On February 27 2018 23:47 Gahlo wrote:
Just gonna put out there that I have a script that will let you ignore users, if anybody wants it.

On February 27 2018 23:50 brian wrote:

well, funny this should be the reply that didn’t get deleted. in the trend it’s clear that when GH feels attacked he comes back to this. i didn’t reformulate anything, i took one sentence out of his three, granted the other two certainly were worth reading. and they were valid and nothing to take exception to, leaving me at the last. GH himself didn’t seem to take exception to the caricature. not all caricatures, after all, are too far from the truth. but i’ll always admit that his drum beating is not wrong, just tired. which is all i’ve said through this point. and very specifically why i’ve carefully avoided implying any wrong ness on his part, truth wise.

then, the post i deleted was in no way a complaint about the result. but that seems to be what you’ve gleaned from it. i don’t know how, and i don’t think i can properly respond to this without that.

i don’t punch left or right. i take exception to shitty behavior in general, especially when couched so deeply in hypocrisy.

On February 27 2018 23:53 Mohdoo wrote:

Please pm it. Thanks!

On February 27 2018 23:47 Gahlo wrote:
Just gonna put out there that I have a script that will let you ignore users, if anybody wants it.

On February 27 2018 23:57 GreenHorizons wrote:

I mean you asked if I was a parody lol...

The whole "he's not wrong" is kinda a big deal, and you'd be surprised how helpful to moving along it might be if when it came up, you focused on that part instead of trying to get the not wrong person to just let the wrong people revel in their celebration of wrongness.

Believe me, I'm as tired of it as anyone, but bet before the week is out someone tries to make another one of those unsubstantiated claims influenced by propaganda and your solution is to just let the propaganda flow and I'm the jerk for thinking that's a bad idea.

Frankly if some of the more notable liberal posters had just spoken up sooner about why it's problematic for propaganda like that to still be circulating unchallenged this all could have been avoided.




Like some liberal with integrity should just call this what it is instead of pretending it's not exactly the problem I'm highlighting.

EDIT: lol at people replying in thread to look at the ignore feature. 2 points for the petty

On February 28 2018 00:52 hunts wrote:


You keep accusing anyone who disagrees with you of having unsubstantiated claims driven by propaganda, I don't think you realize what those words actually mean. Given how well your own talking points have aligned with actual proven russian propaganda, and how time and again yo uhave failed to show any actual proof of your claims, I would say you are doing the trump thing and accusing others of the thing that you yourself are doing.

On February 28 2018 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


This is what I'm talking about. ^ I'm supposed to just pretend like this isn't a trash tier post that other liberals are nodding along to as if I haven't thoroughly shown hunts posts to be notably poor on this topic. If someone else wants to point out why his post is trash I'd happily sit this one out, but if not, I don't see why I shouldn't clearly outline why it is, less it be accepted as reasonable/accurate otherwise.

On February 28 2018 01:01 GreenHorizons wrote:


This is what I'm talking about. ^ I'm supposed to just pretend like this isn't a trash tier post that other liberals are nodding along to as if I haven't thoroughly shown hunts posts to be notably poor on this topic. If someone else wants to point out why his post is trash I'd happily sit this one out, but if not, I don't see why I shouldn't clearly outline why it is, less it be accepted as reasonable/accurate otherwise.

On February 28 2018 01:13 xDaunt wrote:

My first reaction upon seeing that post is that it's what zlefin's posting would look like if he ever got over his phobia of proper punctuation.