Lord Ratner

I flew with a guy who is in his guard unit. Apparently his public persona is fairly well matched to his private persona.

If "hairdresser at Walmart" didn't signal an immediate greenlight for extramarital butthole pleasures, the dueling foot tattoos are a reliable source of secondary confirmation.

Huh? I've been gone since '17. Is this literal?

Here's a fun solar statistic. Power plant generation is rated by utilization percentages. A nuclear power plant in a well-run country usually is slightly above 90%. Germany, the icon of renewable nonsense, reported their annualized utilization percentage for solar at 11%. 11! And they just spent half a trillion dollars setting world records at reestablishing coal plants. In fact, in December they were one of the dirtiest power producing countries on earth. Solar is not a serious technology (for grid use), and if the central banks lose the ability to print unlimited money for similar government waste, solar is going to go down in flames.

Trains are more comfortable to be in, and easier to disembark from. Those are the only advantages over air travel I can think of. As usual, the market does a good job assessing value

10 years maybe, but 5 years I'm doubtful. Right now the best deal is in lithium iron phosphate batteries, and those are overwhelmingly made in, you guessed it, China. With the direction things are going, I don't suspect anything out of China is going to get cheaper in the medium term. That being said, it's already gotten a lot cheaper if you look anywhere but Tesla. The YouTube channel I referenced covers all of the technologies, installations, product reviews, and a variety of setups. Doing it yourself you're looking at about 30% of the cost of having someone do it with the popular brands.

Yeah, that's definitely where most of the savings are. It's amazing how cheap the LFP batteries have gotten. So much so that in my opinion the solar panels are now the secondary focus. Batteries + Inverters first, with a small generator. Because the Inverters cover peak load, the generator can be much, much smaller, sized for average use rather than peak use. Much less fuel to keep the home running during a blizzard. Then wait for a good deal and add the panels whenever. You can buy them used for a song, and they still put out a ton of power. Panels are about the simplest thing in the world to install, so it's almost criminal how much installers are charging people who don't know any better. But that's always the cost of having someone else do the labor. And you don't have to add them all at once either, the modern inverters handle a wide range of voltages so you can add panels onesie twosie without having to change anything at the power panel. And if you already have a whole home generator, depending on your setup, the batteries and inverter can still be a great investment. When we had the blizzard in Texas, the people with whole home generators were sitting fat dumb and happy until they ran out of propane. I think in most places the natural gas lines kept running, so those people were fine. But many were still shocked by just how much gas those things use at idle. With a battery bank you can fire up your whole home generator, run it at peak for just long enough to recharge the batteries, then turn it off again until the batteries are low. Fuel usage can be reduced by 75 to 90% this way. I'm a big Elon fan, and I'm hoping the battery chemistry ends up being another area he revolutionizes.

Look up Will Prowse on YouTube. The Tesla Powerwall is wildly overpriced. When it was the only game in town it made sense, but now there are a lot of really good options for cheap, comparatively.

I have a hard time believing Russia can do better in the winter than they have in the warm months. It appears the Ukrainians will fight for as long as we fund them, and we will fund them for as long as it keeps weakening Russia.

It never ended up being cheap when I lived there.

Follow the money, brother. It's not a coincidence that so many previously sure-things are coming apart now that the central banks of the world are cutting their money-printing operations faster than in any time in history. You're going to see all sorts of things that governments, corporations, and investors invested dumped trillions into come apart. Bitcoin was the most cartoonish example. ESG will probably be the most costly. The meme stocks are certainly putting on a show (TSLA, AMC, PTON, CVNA, etc). Don't forget housing, which is rolling over faster than ever before. Let's start with just the US: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm But I like figure 1 here: https://www.yardeni.com/pub/balsheetwk.pdf Makes it easier to just combine the major central banks. Even that doesn't include China. What do people do when they win the lottery? They spend stupid. Easy money leads to speculation. Governments, corporations, and investors are no different. We've seen it before, we're seeing it again. The economic reality is that wind and solar are only where they are because of the immense amount of government subsidizing and pressuring. I 100% support government funded research into alternative energy. But a technology that needs subsidies to implement (for decades) is a different story. Maybe one day solar panels will overcome the ~25% loss of efficiency at high-heat operation. Maybe they'll capture >50% of the solar energy. Maybe we can find a way to mount them above the clouds, who knows? But if/when that day comes there will be trillions in waste from the not-ready-for-prime-time panels we've been buying from our geopolitical enemy and paying people to install on their roofs. I suppose if you simply have no idea how solar panels work, you could take the cheaper-than-fossil fuels nonsense at face value.

Except your tax credit is a subsidy. So, not you. I built my system on my own. And it cost more than just using grid power. I'm designing a much bigger system for a new house, and it too will cost more than just using the grid. However the batteries and inverters are the main reason for the system (power-outage protection with a much smaller generator needed), so I'd skip the panels entirely except you can get pallets of used panels from power companies for very, very low prices, which make the system economically viable. But the used-panel strategy is a market abnormality supported by government subsidies, so I don't count it. Yeah I would do the same. I don't fault people for taking advantage of the system. When they defend it, however, is a different story. I don't think anyone on this forum thinks you care about anyone the poor, but CA allegedly does, and they are just discovering these policies are hurting them.

It's the universe where input costs and secondary effects are factored into overall cost. The oft quoted $.03 is nonsense. It ignores bad weather, damage maintenance, and, most critically, the costs associated with the rest of the grid. When you move to solar you drastically change the pricing dynamics of fossil fuel/nuke power production which is necessary in any system due to the inherent failings of solar and wind. Power plants are most efficient when running at full tilt 24 hours per day. Power demand doesn't work like that, however the use of solar takes somewhat regular and predictable demand curves and shakes them. Nice hot sunny day in the summer? Great, solar shines, and the power plants can spin down. But those same plants still have to be able to reach full grid coverage if a summer storm rolls in. Or similarly with a winter storm. So the irony here is that solar increases the cost of fossil fuel and nuclear power production, then brags about the cost difference. It is a 100% fact that on a cost basis alone, solar does not compete. Do you really think we would still need government subsidies to promote solar if it was cheaper? That's a lack of surface level analysis. Because of the lack of battery technology, which is nowhere close to ready for grid-level coverage, solar and wind do not reduce the need for baseload power. You still need full grid coverage from fossil/nuke for those times the sun is gone and the wind is calm. So you are adding to the infrastructure costs, leaving only the fuel reduction as the cost-savings offered from solar. That savings is far lower than the cost of solar manufacturing and infrastructure. To repeat, the less you use a power plant, the more expensive it becomes on a /KWh basis. Without the ability to store ~ 1 month of energy from a battery array (not happening anytime soon), you must maintain your non-solar/wind power generation capacity. I know this is par for the course, because you are generally the most self righteous person here (which says a lot if you can out-righteous me), but you're ability to straw man is almost as impressive as your ability to be consistently wrong. Thanks to Russia we now have all the evidence we needed that the wind/solar movement was bullshit. And no, you can't compose a scenario where this war isn't a factor. This is the problem with liberal ideology in general. It works great in a hypothetical world, it collapses in reality. Germany, the icon of solar and wind installations, has been importing wood from the US to burn in their power plants. Wood is one of the worst fuels imaginable, yet because their zeal for killing fossil/nuke power was unstoppable, they ended up using fucking wood(!), while having to fire up some coal plants too. So much for carbon emissions. Of course the EU quietly revises their climate guidance to declare nuclear power is now suddenly "green," because they see the failure of their wind and solar strategy agitating their populace. And the UK was paying people's power bills because they went up 500-1000%. Neat. How did we get there? The promise of solar and wind convinced these countries they could rely on countries like Russia to provide them with cheap fossil fuels for the "transition period" where they shut down the nasty fossil fuel and nuke plants. No need to invest in new power plants or fossil fuel exploration, wind and solar to the rescue. Wind and solar are nothing but feel good nonsense. Ambrosia to the academics and virtue signalers, but impractical for wide-scale use. Solar/Wind + Batteries are great for purpose built systems that require off-grid or grid-failure resiliency, but that does not describe the average use-case. And anyone who has built a system like that without government subsidies knows how much more expensive it is than just plugging into the grid.

No one is arguing that. The issue in California is the reduction of net metering rates down to wholesale-or-lower prices. Further, the power companies don't need a lot of the solar generated power when it is being produced, but they are forced to buy it under the current rules. The power companies are not asking for free power. They want the ability to offer a price based on market conditions. The solar lobby knows that will be the death of residential solar. It's not even close. And if you remove the cost benefits of having China build them with extremely wasteful and environmentally unfriendly processes, it gets even worse. And since we are currently in the process of detaching from China... Agreed entirely. But that's not how the solar homeowners in California feel at the moment... You have to contrast that with the cost of installing the system. Right now, and this is according to CA, without batteries you won't be able to make back the cost of the install if net-metering is fixed. Like nearly all regulated utilities, they set rates at the discretion of the controlling agency. Solar is never going to replace baseload power. The stalling out of the wind and solar movement has forced politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to (finally) accept nuclear as the future. Only took a few decades. The catalyst will be the continued spikes in the price of oil and gas. Russia is just part of the story. The systemic underinvestment in exploration and production for over 10 years is going to make things painful. The strategic reserve hitting record lows won't help either. But that will be masked by the building global slowdown, which will further delay investment in exploration and production. California hasn't done a bang up job of infrastructure planning. The water situation there is another self-inflicted wound. Sure, that was the theory, and I don't particularly mind the logic, though I don't agree either. But as California is learning, this system is benefiting those who need little benefit, and costing the lower class. Is there a single person here with home solar that didn't receive subsidies? The government paid for (statistically) wealthier Americans to install solar on their homes, and now the costs of net metering (which are largely detrimental to the power companies) are pushing the costs onto those without solar. This is an emblematic example of the free market distortions at play at almost every level. This shit is why people are souring on capitalism. But it isn't capitalism, it might be corporatism, or good old-fashioned government waste, but it sure as shit isn't the free market. Solar system should be paid for in full by the homeowner. Whether or not they tie them to the grid should be their choice. When the power company would like to buy power from residential solar systems, they can offer a price, and you can choose to accept or refuse. But this nonsense of paying people to install the systems and then forcing the power company to pay them more than it costs them to produce power in the first place, is silly. It's fucking stupid actually. And considering the input energy for producing solar panels are higher than the output of the solar panel over their 20-year lifespan (if you live at a latitude above Texas), not to mention the environmental damage caused by the mining practices of the countries that make these panels, or the waste generated when these panels hit their end of life, there should be pretty easy to recognize as another government. Boondoggle. How many more fucking years are we going to pretend like solar is economically viable? It's been decades and yet still we need subsidies to get them installed?

They are forced to take it at a rate equal to what they sell it at, depending on what state you're in. The big change in California is getting rid of the requirement that what they pay equals what they charge. With this change, the economics of solar turn red for many, many homeowners. This of course was obvious to anybody paying attention, but as I said before, government meddling in an attempt to promote the wide scale adoption of a half-baked technology has once again left us worse than we were before.

There's a big difference between solar and net metering. Net metering was always absurd. Why should the power company pay you for electricity? And pay you the same rate they charge? Can you imagine going to the grocery store and trying to sell your homegrown tomatoes to the produce manager, except you want him to pay you the same amount he plans to sell them for? It was yet another government scheme to get more people to adopt solar. And of course it increased the price of power. And yes, since the wealthy are more able to afford the frivolity of solar power, they disproportionately benefit. I'm not a big fan of subsidizing the poor, but having the poor subsidize the wealthy? Only California could hatch a scheme so absurd. Too bad others followed. You want to be off the grid with solar panels? Awesome. Go for it. But wanting the power company to subsidize your prepper fantasies was a gross distortion of free market capitalism, one of many these days. Now a bunch of people are upset that they aren't making money off their solar panels. Many of them are allegedly conservative. Boo hoo. A handout is a handout, even if it's to someone with a big house and nice cars.

College was taken over and misused by a bunch of unproductive pseudo-intellectuals who figured out the only way their obviously stupid ideas could gain a foothold would be to form indoctrination camps for inexperienced adults. That's probably not surprising to anybody here. But while they were doing so the world changed and the distribution of information was radically redesigned by the internet. While colleges probably could have adapted to this new landscape, they were far more concerned with dogma and societal change. At the same time, the government wildly distorted the economics of education with, go figure, unlimited money. Now the cat is out of the bag as my generation, the millennials, are facing the reality that their degree did not, as they were promised, result in a more lucrative life. It did give many of them an inescapable financial anchor around their neck. The gen Z kids behind them, at least the latter half of the generation, are beginning to reject the system that is quite obviously built on false promises and lies. I suspect at this point it's too late to save the system, and there will be a split. College will return to the playground for the rich and breeding ground for politicians, while everyone else will shift back towards on the job learning, heavily supported by much cheaper and adaptable online courses. We haven't reached the final act yet because the money printing has only just stopped, but when unemployment starts going up and the long due pandemonium from the last 15 years of intentionally blind spending comes due, the idea that middle and lower class kids with no road map for their entire adulthood will just go to six figure institutions to get drunk, fuck, and occasionally sit in a room with 500 other people learning subjects they don't need to know, well that just isn't going to hold when people can't afford it.

Same

And Hillary or Joe are? What country have you been living in? I've had to choose between different flavors of shit sandwich since, well, my whole adulthood. A lot of people decided that they'd rather have the narcissistic profiteering liar who seems to at least love the idea of America over the narcissistic profiteering liar who doesn't. I think Romney was the only post-primary candidate since Bush/Gore who was worthy of the seat since I've been voting.

Boy, I have bad news for the commentators here who aren't familiar with unions. You've got some of the most unstable people I've ever met in my life flying planes every day, and they are almost perfectly shielded from any consequences by the way unionized work functions. Off the top of my head, there is a guy who threw the TV out the hotel window because it didn't have the channel he wanted. The guy who shot his neighbor's mailbox multiple times because he was mad at him. The guy who got caught creeping around the union headquarters at night on the security cameras. The guy who called flight attendants "sugar tits" in 2020. The guy who punched a gate agent in a foreign country. The multitude of pilots who have shown me graphic, personal sexual photos in the cockpit. Guys who have entire second families in South America. I have one guy explained to me the whole Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. How Kanye West's vice presidential running mate in 2020 was one of the Epstein child prostitutes who had been drained of their blood by the billionaires, and who had a demon possessing her body. He was dead serious. At a certain point, you just realize that there are lunatics everywhere. My friends in the medical profession have stories about highly credentialed surgeons and specialists that are quite similar.

You're putting off some major anti-gay-minister-who-secretly-hires-male-prostitutes vibes.

And yet, his actions selected him for a position of immense power. It's not a fluke, all the nonsense feel-good speeches from guys like Mosely and Welsh and Goldfein we're just fluff. The military is an organization that lacks/avoids any metric for success (profit, customer satisfaction, productivity, reduced casualties, successful pullout from Afghanistan, etc) and therefore the least valuable on the outside will become the most successful on the inside. Perhaps, like in the past, a real war will fix that, but a decade later we'll be right back to where we are today.

Of course they did. But that's the point, isn't it? Are we really prioritizing that type of conflict? We don't have the luxury of another, better country picking up our slack while we toy around with a dying empire. It's super neat watching a plane land vertically (but not take off vertically...). But it's fucking stupid for the US to prioritize that capability, to the great detriment of the more-relevant capabilities of the A and C models. We could barely fund enough of these planes during the most financially permissive environment in modern history. It's very possible we have austerity measures soon. But our Argentina-like foes will be suitably humbled I'm sure. Marine leadership, like nearly all government leadership, are unserious people in increasingly serious times.

And that's great, what a proud moment for USMC public affairs. But there's what's possible and what's plausible. The military is caught in the same "unlimited resources" model that has gotten us into a pretty big mess nationally and globally. If you want a jump jet, then justify it and build it. They couldn't, so it got shoe horned into the F35 and it's a much, much weaker MWS for it. Neat. China must be shitting themselves. Yes, the incredibly neutered European militaries are a great example of image over effectiveness, thank you.

What a stupid capability the Marines are obsessed with. Anyone who thinks we are landing those things on contested beaches is smoking the good shit. Good thing we didn't have to make humongous financial and engineering sacrifices to keep that party trick...