This means that at least around 26,000 Hamas members have been put out of action by Israel to date when adding together killed, wounded, and arrested totals. ... Adding all these numbers up, one comes closer to a pre-war Hamas force of 40,000 or more and the idea that it still has around 15,000 or more remaining forces.
Friday, March 29, 2024
Insurance companies got rich because of Obamacare rules, now electric utilities are poised to get rich because of Biden climate rules
Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.
Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.
From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :
Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.
The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”
Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators.
Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.
Few things are as funny as a WaPo ignoramus blaming the Christians for Moses turning the Nile to blood
Christianity was a particularly blood-obsessed religion, with the Nile transformed to a river of blood in the Old Testament plagues of Egypt . . ..
It's going to be even more funny when The Washington Post blames the Christians for the fires in town.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The dingbat who wrote this trainwreck of a story just got married and says she's looking forward to the big tax break from married filing jointly and being a dependent on her husband's health care plan lol
Farewell -- and good riddance -- to 'typical American family'...
When my partner and I file our annual income taxes in the coming weeks, we'll enjoy a sizable tax break thanks to our decision to tie the knot last fall. And as a dependent on his employer-provided health-insurance plan, I'm able to make a living as a freelancer without worrying about healthcare coverage.
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
In time of need, dummy, in time OF need
KING CHARLES CALLS FOR MORE KINDNESS IN TIME ON NEED...
King Charles will stress the importance of friendship "especially in a time of need" in his first public address since the Princess of Wales revealed she was undergoing cancer treatment.
Drudge wants you to think a US House seat flips Democrat when it's only an Alabama state Legislature seat
... a state House seat in north Alabama ...
The Alabama Legislature was firmly Republican, 77-28 lol.
Smart move
Israelis Questioning Their Nation's Dependence on USA...
The [UN] resolution called for a cease-fire as well as the release of hostages, instead of embracing the Israeli position that a cease-fire be predicated on the hostages’ release. ...
The U.S. has rarely used its leverage in the Security Council before to express dissatisfaction with Israel. The last time was in 2016, under the Obama administration, when the U.S. abstained from voting on a resolution that called for a halt to all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
As much as I sympathize with this guy's tale of Obamacare woe, his timeline is pure fantasy
The story is here:
My insurance was $185/month with a $1,000 deductible. That was for a family of 5. So I voted for Obama-Biden in 2008 based on Obamacare. ... the cheapest insurance I could find to replace that one was $1,200 a month with a $6,000 deductible.
The guy had a great plan before Obama!
But Obamacare as he now thinks he knows it didn't even exist in 2008 for him to base his vote on it.
Obama was for something else, the public option, a government-funded health insurance plan designed to compete with private health insurance. That was also Nancy Pelosi's preference, and the preference of the US House Democrat left at the time.
The great fear was the public option would crowd out private insurance and defeat it because it would be more attractive to women and the chronically ill.
The House public option plan put forward in 2009 competed with the Senate plan, and the two proposals were at an impasse by the end of 2009. Eventually the Senate version prevailed in March of 2010.
The Senate plan was actually worse, what we now call Obamacare.
It dictated the much more expensive nature and new shape of all existing private insurance plans instead of providing a separate public option to compete with those already existing private insurance plans. It cost more to provide because it eliminated pre-existing condition exclusions, and treated men and women equally even though women's care is more costly.
It was fascism pure and simple, government dictating to the private sector what will be, and what will not be.
That's how you lost your old plan, your old doctor, and your money: Because Obama bowed to the Senate plan, instead of fighting for what he said he believed in.
If you were too poor, though, to qualify for Obamacare, you just got stuck with Medicaid, health insurance for the poor, and, failing that, with nothing at all.
The once heralded public option for everyone defaulted to Medicaid. Nearly 86 million are now stuck with that, and most are unaware of its clawback provisions.
Today only 21 million can afford Obamacare, and about 25 million non-elderly adults have bupkis, like the poor fella in the story had for ten years.
Meanwhile, 158 million have employer-provided health insurance, the cost of which climbs relentlessly. The average worker had to pay $549 a month in premiums for it in 2023.
Medicare provides coverage to about 66 million aged 65+, and costs nearly $175 a month in 2024.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Monday, March 25, 2024
Record 549 cases of dengue fever in Puerto Rico
Story here.
There have been nearly 25,000 cases so far this year in Peru, double the 2023 year to date figure.
Just a reminder that the Fed said all these purchases it made in 2008 and again in 2020 were just temporary
Now Fed Chair Powell has just said it's time for the pace of the roll-off to slow.
That's the curved line slowly trending down from it's peak near $9 trillion to $7.5 trillion now.
Just as the National Debt will never be paid down, the Fed will never stop intervening in the Treasury market to limit supply and support prices, which suppresses market driven interest rates.
Powell isn't serious about fighting inflation.
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