I think it’s more accurate to say “You will die for Epstein so that the oil class stays wealthy.”

There have been examples of postponements of elections for emergencies (most notably, the mayoral primaries in New York scheduled on September 11, 2001 had to be postponed for 14 days later), I’m not aware of any instance of an actual changing of swear-in dates being postponed.

Fuckery can still happen, but I’m more worried about threats and governmental terrorism that suppresses votes on the election day that moves forward as scheduled rather than actually moving the election schedule itself.

Still interesting to see how it is implemented in neighborhoods and buildings that are over 150 years old. I think the Smithsonian museums in our capital are actually the most interesting examples, because many are old buildings whose historical character were preserved, but where wheelchair ramps, railings, and elevators were tastefully and functionally installed many decades or more than a century after the building was originally constructed.

And perhaps the best thing about the ADA is the sidewalk requirements. It doesn’t much matter why a sidewalk developed a raised crack when the ADA requires that it be fixed.

I’m not even disabled, but I’ve pushed baby strollers in different cities (including outside the US) enough to realize how nice it is to be in a city where all the sidewalks and public buildings are ADA compliant.

Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.

Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.

It’s because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.

Oh, I agree.

I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that “cheaper” and more “scalable” AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.

Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.

The technology is still neat but I don’t believe there’s an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.

Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it’s projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won’t run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we’d rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.

Lots of non-American banks don’t want to deal with the rules, so it’s easier for them to just say that they won’t open accounts for Americans.

It’s not discriminatory.

I mean it quite literally is discriminatory, but it’s legal and justified discrimination.

Yes, but the economies of scale of cargo transport generally mean that the percentage of the total cost attributable to fuel cost is usually pretty small.

Take bananas, for example. If they cost $0.70 per pound at the store, how much fuel could have been used getting a pound of bananas from the plantation to the port, shipped from that port to a port in the United States, then from that port to a distribution center, then to the store? So what would doubling the price of fuel do for the price of bananas?

With more expensive items, shipping (and therefore fuel) is an even lower percentage of the total input costs.

The price of goods will go up with the price of fuel, but not as much as a lot of people seem to assume.

I wonder how those specific buyers’ household incomes are. Part of the “k shaped recovery” from COVID is that some people genuinely are richer than ever.

If 10% of US households make more than $250k/year, and richer households are more likely to buy new cars (and buy them more frequently), it might very well be that the $1000/month payments are being paid by those who can easily afford them, while the $300/month payments are the ones actually causing financial strain on average households.

Every once in a while there are multiple parties structuring a deal where someone is left with a bad deal when it’s all said and done. As a consumer, you just have to make sure it’s not you.

But take, for example, the early days of Moviepass. You pay a cheap subscription to a service, and they buy you unlimited mobile tickets at the theater. Too good to be true in the long term, but in the short term it was a good way to spend some money that venture capitalists were giving away basically for free.

Businesses aren’t always smart. Sometimes they make financial mistakes and it’s your duty as a responsible consumer to punish those businesses for those mistakes.

In the case of dealer/manufacturer/financing incentives and the individual salesman commission, sometimes the kickback/fee scheme leaves someone else holding the bag. If you can negotiate a lower sticker price because it comes with some predatory terms on financing, but there’s no penalty for prepayment, it might make the most sense to take the low sticker price (made possible by the lender paying the dealer a kickback for the loans), finance at high rates, and then pay the whole thing off as soon as you can, so that you get the “discount” without having to pay high interest/fees, then you walk away with a good deal in exchange for just a little bit more hassle and paperwork. Sometimes the incentives swing the other way, too, where the lender is affiliated with the manufacturer and needs to juice sales volume by offering below-market rates on financing. As long as you can actually see how everything works and you can find the pain point, it may be possible to get a good deal and dump the bad deal on some faceless corporation for them to worry about.

How do they get calculated?

This page has answers:

The CPI consists of a family of indexes that measure price change experienced by urban consumers. Specifically, the CPI measures the average change in price over time of a market basket of consumer goods and services. The market basket includes everything from food items to automobiles to rent. The CPI market basket is developed from detailed expenditure information provided by families and individuals on what they actually bought. There is a time lag between the expenditure survey and its use in the CPI. For example, CPI data in 2023 was based on data collected from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for 2021. That year, over 20,000 consumer units from around the country provided information each quarter on their spending habits in the interview survey. To collect information on frequently purchased items, such as food and personal care products, approximately another 12,000 consumer units kept diaries listing all items they bought during a 2-week period that year. This expenditure information from weekly diaries and quarterly interviews determines the relative importance, or weight, of the item categories in the CPI index structure.

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W). BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups (food and beverages, housing, apparel, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and communication, and other goods and services). Included within these major groups are various government-charged user fees, such as water and sewerage charges, auto registration fees, and vehicle tolls.

If you want to see the current makeup of the basket of goods whose prices are tracked, and their weights in the index, here is Table 1 of the most recent report. And if you want to follow the price of a specific category over time, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis keeps a really helpful interactive chart service for almost every public economic stat. Here is Table 1 of the CPI report.

It’s a lot of data collection on prices across a lot of transactions, and a lot of list prices, and a lot of locked in contract prices, to determine how much people are spending on different types of things, whether the quality of those things is changing over time, and what percentage of a typical household income gets spent on those types of things.

1 oz = 28.35 g

Maybe that 1/3 of a gram is shorting someone, but a single ounce is closer to 28g than to 30g.

Obviously depends on the specific item.

Here’s the national averages for:

Flour

Milk

Boneless chicken breast

Or an entire table of food items they’ve been tracking monthly prices on for years.

The Five Dollar Footlong was a promo created in 2003 when the normal price of a footlong was $6, by a single franchisee. By the time the promo went national, supported by the chain itself (and a national ad campaign), in 2008, that became a big enough deal to really move sales. And they watered it down at some point (by late 2010 when I was working next to a Subway and no other lunch options, I remember it only being a specific sandwich that rotated monthly, with all other footlongs regularly priced). And it was eventually discontinued in 2012.

It’s hard to pin this particular promo and call it totally representative of all pricing in the mid 2010s.

$5 in April 1980 dollars is the inflation adjusted equivalent of $20 in December 2025:

https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5.00&year1=198004&year2=202512

Resistance takes many forms.

Completely lawful resistance can include social pressure or ostracism, economic influence (boycotts, refusal to serve as customer, etc.), messaging/speech/persuasion, protests, strikes, etc. Keeping the cameras rolling, telling them how you feel about them being in your neighborhood, warning your neighbors about them.

Civil disobedience goes up the ladder a bit, and can cause disruption and might be nonviolent, but might at times actually be illegal. Generally speaking, this type of resistance is designed to clog up the system without being violent, and doesn’t even require anonymity or evasion from authorities.

Sometimes simply playing dumb can slow things down without actually committing a crime of putting yourself at much risk. Apply for a job at ICE with 1000 of your closest friends so they waste resources on your application. Forget to put in their order when you’re their waiter, or give them the shitty hotel room when they check in at your hotel, and program their keys incorrectly. Give them the wrong bay/spot when they’re renting a car from you. Call in tips for everything you see and flood their lines with bad information.

Most people jump from that category to outright violent resistance, but there are other tactics available, too. Sabotage, property crimes, plain old financial crimes, fraud, impersonation, hacking or denial of service, even things like theft, embezzlement. Locking a fence with a bicycle lock, blocking a driveway with a van, flooding a field with mud, impersonating their boss and giving them fake orders, sending them on a goose chase with a bad tip, etc.

If you shoot an ICE agent you might turn them into a hero. Steal their badge or ID when they’re drinking at the bar, though, and you might actually hurt them in ways that they won’t feel like a martyr, and will actually sap resources from their management.

Everyone is in a different situation, with different capabilities. Every war has plenty of roles, many of them nonviolent. There’s probably something you can do today to contribute to the cause, from your unique position.

Little bit longer than 27 hours. He died after 27 hours, and the authorities never figured out a practical way to retrieve his remains, so he’s been there for 16 years and counting.