Friday Open Thread

7 thoughts on “Friday Open Thread”

1. What Grids are 90% or More Green

   What grids can Colorado look to to emulate?

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   1. Another ad for nuclear power – brought  to you by David "Nukem" Thielen and the  Nuclear Institute lobbying group.

      Social costs? Extraction costs? These don't matter. We only count the carbon and dollars at the receiving end of the power supply. We also don't count what happens to spent fuel, because, heck, the people who deal with nuclear waste storage are  just farmers, ranchers, and indigenous people on reservations, and who the heck cares about them?

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      1. Yep, I also worry about the social & extraction costs – which tend to be gigantic for wind & solar. Including screwing over Native American tribes. They do exist for nuclear (but orders of magnitude less).

         Anyways, can you point to a grid being primarily wind & solar other than Denmark? If not, why should we be able to accomplish something no one else has pulled off?

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2. All things old are made new again ….

   The Bidens want back in

   What the hell do we have to lose? In the last three election cycles, he's the only guy who was able to defeat You-Know-Who.

   BIDEN/HARRIS '28

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   1. The article says Biden is offering to help how he can, not suggesting he or Jill Biden would be candidates.  No one will overlook that Joe Biden beat Trump once (and lost to him once) AND is only 1 for 4 in his runs for President.

      If I had a way to advise, it would be to have Joe Biden talk to any of the House or Senate Republicans willing to talk with him, urging them to think independently and vote against the excesses.  And perhaps to have him talk with previous Presidents, Vice Presidents, and candidates to urge them to speak out when a program they were closely involved with is getting cut.  If a donor wants to have a conversation with Joe, agree to take the call. 

      But he is not a dynamic rally speaker, not a key endorsement for candidates, not a centerpiece for raising money.

       

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3. WIRED should get a Pulitzer prize for their reporting on NaziTechBro…if there's a free media next year. 

   ‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE

   WIRED talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite.

   “An audit that follows Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS), also known as a Yellow Book audit, is conducted in accordance with the standards issued by the US Government Accountability Office,” says the first auditor. Audits can focus on the finances, compliance, or performance of an agency. “That is the gold standard for how you audit the government.”

   There are generally five phases of a GAGAS audit, the auditors tell WIRED: planning, evidence gathering, evaluation, reporting, and follow up. Auditors work to define the scope of an audit, identify all the applicable laws and standards, and come up with an audit plan. Next, auditors conduct interviews with staff, review financial records, and comb through data, reports, and transactions, documenting all the way. From there, auditors will assess that information against policies or procedures to figure out if there’s been some kind of alleged waste, fraud, or abuse and issue a report detailing their findings and offering recommendations. Often, those reports are made available to the public. After an audit, the auditors can follow up with the agency to ensure changes are being made.

   The two auditors told WIRED that going through the technological and financial minutiae of even just a single project or part of an agency can take anywhere from six to 18 months.

   “You can’t coherently audit something like the whole Social Security system in a week or two,” says the second auditor. It’s exactly this rush to crack systems open without full understanding, the auditors say, that has led to Elon Musk’s false claims that 150-year-olds were receiving Social Security benefits. “It could be that DOGE didn’t de-dupe the data.”

   “In no uncertain terms is this an audit,” claims the second auditor. “It’s a heist, stealing a vast amount of government data.”

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   1. Forgot the link and my HTML skilz suck – https://www.wired.com/story/federal-auditors-doge-elon-musk/

       

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