What more do you want when wind and solar power was pointed out to be doing the best we've seen in at least 35 years?

Only on federal land. 95% of new wind and solar power capacity has been on private land.

So what if Trump refused any new permits on federal land? If that's a problem then maybe the issue is deeper than permits. As in perhaps the federal government owning so much land that POTUS could threaten to kill the renewable energy industry single-handed. Since there's other land to build then POTUS can't threaten the industry so easily.

Thank you for highlighting what I missed. I guess I didn't look close enough. I see now how people would have justified Granholm for leading Energy.

Five Guys is infamously overpriced.

You can get a burger and fries and a soda at Wendy's for under $10.

Is it as good as Five Guys? Nearly, since Five Guys actually isn't actually that good IME.

When the economy dives, people typically continue to spend on liquor and luxury food items as these are relatively inexpensive ways for them to comfort themselves. But as it continues to worsen they will cut out those expenditures and learn to make beans and rice taste good. No doubt you are still doing well now, but you're going to face worsening supply shortages on the one hand and customers who cannot afford to feed themselves adequately on the other. And as SNAP eligibility gets cut down, you're going to feel the crunch there as well. They're bringing back ABAWD and eliminating the exemption for the homeless, which means those homeless who aren't also disabled are going to only have SNAP for 3 months per 3 years. There are some programs that will keep some of them eating, but funding for those programs is also being cut, so they won't be able to help many people remain eligible.

And falling.

Which dust? Nuclear fallout? The US cannot become fully self-sufficient in less than a couple of decades. We moved manufacturing of entire classes of product to other nations and it cannot come back overnight. The only way the US became the manufacturing titan in the first place (a title which it has since ceded to China in pursuit of increasing corporate profits) was that all of the other contenders had war in their countries which damaged their manufacturing base, so the world became accustomed to buying things from the USA. Now the world is becoming rapidly unaccustomed to buying anything from us thanks to Dipshit Don's tariffs and other fuckery. We'll be lucky if we keep the #2 spot for long.

We couldn't subjugate Viet Nam and we couldn't subjugate Afghanistan, you think we can conquer the world in 12 months? Put down the crack pipe before you burn yourself.

Mostly I agree with you about who is driving this though you weren't clear if you regard it as a problem... My take is that given that we are in the middle of the Singularity and we humans are becoming increasingly replaceable by AI, then I'm not sure that it matters much if we become dumber on top of AI becoming smarter. MUCH smarter. And how.

I would like to see a better evaluation of the degree to which the test has been dumbed down. Obvious approach would be give the old and new tests to two randomly selected groups of students that are normalized on the various relevant dimensions. It is actually quite possible that the technology of testing has improved enough so that the results will be similar. Just because one test is slow and cumbersome doesn't guarantee that it is more accurate.

There's also the personal side. I would actually be interested in the other kind of normalization over time: How much has my own score declined over the years? When I was a young whippersnapper I took a lot of those test things and generally couldn't complain about the results, but now that I'm old and whippersnapped I would (sadly) expect to see much lower scores--unless the tests have actually become easier.

I thought being so over the top I'd make the point I was trying to be humorous. I didn't expect that to be taken seriously. I do know Tony Stark likely broke as much as he fixed, that was kind of the lesson on "be careful what you wish for" that made his story arc so interesting.

The "contest" was more on the width and breadth of Wright's CV than depth. He did a little of a lot of things in energy and so that made him appear a good pick for energy and more than just someone that knew how to squeeze oil from stones. I don't believe it fair to reduce him to some oil and gas CEO. Just like it's not fair to reduce Granholm to a lawyer from Canada, she did things that likely made her a competent lead to Energy. I'm just not seeing anything scream from her CV that makes her the right person to lead a department where people that held that office previously tended to have a STEM background in addition to experience in some kind of leadership over a lot of people. Rick Perry was also something of an odd pick, like he was picked to lead Agriculture or Interior but got lost on the way and ended up in Energy. His relevant experience for the job was questioned in spite of a leadership history that could be considered at least somewhat equal to Granholm. Best I can tell Perry and Granholm both did well enough.

Thank you.

The medical expert in HHS is the Surgeon General, no? The Secretary is the administrator. We'd still want some expertise in the field though. Wright seems to be getting flak for his policies but also because he's somehow not qualified. On qualifications he's at least average as far as members of Cabinet go, and if he's considered merely average it's only because the bar is set so high. If Granholm was considered qualified for Cabinet then so should Wright and RFK Jr. be considered qualified. After that the issues should be on policy disagreements, not pulling out one's CV to see who's is bigger.

Who knows what was going on. It could just be that those suited to be a popular candidate for POTUS are generally good people to have as advisors and aids to POTUS. People will say what they like about their policies but it seems that those in Cabinet now are taking their jobs seriously and are staying engaged. On the other hand we had a Secretary of Transportation recently that seemed to be constantly vacant from his post. Likely few people would have noticed or cared if it weren't for some very visible transportation mishaps during that time.

Well, you are going to get people familiar with the industry and so will have some "baggage" with that, or you have a Secretary of Transport that got the job based on him liking trains. Oh, not just liking trains but also being a popular candidate for POTUS certainly helped. It's pick the oil CEO, the nuclear physicist, or someone without some pre-established bias and roll the dice on if they can stay interested and engaged enough to be effective administrators. What's the odds on that working well? 50/50?

Your [Sebby's of the FP] "then" should be a solution approach. Too bad "We can't get there from here" where "there" is any better state from the sick "here" of the status quo.

My favorite solution approach would still involve pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation. Basically a progressive tax on profits linked to market share. Delayed a bit to encourage innovation, but abuse detected by asking such questions as (1) Do customers have meaningful alternative choices? (2) Can competitors enter the market niche? And even (3) Can the top employees in the niche change to a different company if they want to?

Sure, but there's a whole editing step between the direction and the release where that is supposed to be fixed.

Well, true, but wouldn't you really rather have a Funny mod?

Story had some potential for humor, but...

Sure sounds like you are trying to defend the YOB. Also even if you want to divert some blame to Powell, how did Powell get into the loop?

Oh wait. We're back to the YOB again.

Slightly insightful, but also funnier than the only post modded Funny.

But not to worry. The YOB will fudge the numbers RSN.

Probably not. Since many jobs are fake and there is therefore no intent to fill them, this has likely been true for some time already.

It's easy to believe that things are much worse now, though.

Followup, there's not enough jobs for everyone just at the same time that the big bountiful buttfuck reinstitutes work requirements for aid programs. But you can't get a waiver unless unemployment is over 10%. And while this is actually true pretty much everywhere, the unemployment rate is designed to stop counting people when they have been unemployed for a long time. Therefore, the worse unemployment gets, the bigger the lie of the unemployment rate is, specifically for reasons like this — and to support government lies about how good the economy allegedly is.

TL;DR: This is going to get really fucking ugly really, really soon.

The specific degree is irrelevant for most people, but having one is necessary because the lack of one is used to disqualify applicants in order to reduce the pool of applications which must be reviewed. You can't fix this without setting standards for what positions you can require a degree for, which isn't realistic. Also, if you did that, HR departments would use some even dumber metric for which applications to reject up front to shrink that number.

It seems like fewer and fewer sets have a 24 Hz mode...