Our money is being depreciated at a rate of 3% per year and up to 25%-30% during the last inflationary cycle and is now to the point where coins are nearly useless. At the current trajectory, the one dollar note will also be obsolete in our lifetime.
I would pay for a way to block YouTube entirely. Every smart tv, tablet, game system seems to have a non-removable YouTube app preloaded. I ended up setting up having to set up a piehole and blocked it there, but the kids will eventually figure out a work around.
I take no position on whether the books are pornographic--I haven't read them or investigated them at all.
But at least for young children, exposure to pornography is well-recognized as harmful. Not just morally, but psychologically. Maybe even as a form of child molestation.
For the same reason a 17 year old can't go to a movie theater and watch an R rated movie by themselves. Society has said certain aspects of life (violence, sex, language) need to be restricted until people reach a certain age.
I'm not confident that all kids could be like you, though. Even as an adult, I'd find it pretty disturbing if I were flipping through a book I liked, starting to identify with the main character, and then turned a page to see some side characters discussing their graphic sex fantasies about her.
What a horrible article. First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics. Electricty travels at the speed of light so a continuous grid from coast to coast would get out of sync on phases just by travel distance. Texas just happens to be physically in the middle and large enough to have trouble by being supplied by either east or west grid. Second, ERCOT manages when utilizes can take assets out of commission to do maintenance. Texas peak demand is in the summer so if you have to take a power plant off line you do it in the winter. So there are a lot of utility assets under maintenance outages right now. One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here. Several gas pipelines in the state are having freezing issues causing the gas price to spike. ERCOT controls rates so if gas prices spike and utilities are forced to sell power for less than it costs to make, they would rather shut down and did until ERCOT stepped back in and let them charge real rates. People on variable rate power contracts are now basically screwed this month. And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well. Somee have frozen or iced up enough to be out of commission and the rest are operating at severely reduced capacity. So basically a varatiy of these went wrong and everything will be back to normal in a few days, but ERCOT has some work to do to make sure this doesn't happen again.
Just about every sentence in your comment is wrong:
> First, Texas has its own independent grid as a matter of physics.
Except that every state directly north of Texas is either on the East or West interconnects. ERCOT having its own grid is solely a matter of political desire.
> One top of that reduced capacity, not all equipment is prepared for ice storms because it doesn't really happen here.
Except a very similar event happened in 2011, and a specific set of recommendations were made by FERC to winterize power producers, and the recommendations were promptly ignored. Better discussion on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/ll2slh/texas_failed...
> And finally, the wind farms are not handling the ice well
Why do you say that? Texas has had its own grid basically forever. There are, and have been, some small connections to the other grids, but nothing that substantial.
To your first point, it's not about supply, it's about borrowing during periods of scarcity. There are plenty of wholesale markets that are "in the middle". Texas simply chose to not be apart of it.
You come back from that by honestly addressing their concerns and issues. What you dont want to do is purposefully misrepresent their perfectly valid concerns and then censor and banish them from the discussion because then they will just go create their own platform leaving both groups in their own echo chambers.
The go somewhere else thing doesnt end well. If half the country has to recreate their own social networks, web hosting, payment processing, banking, and even retail locations you end up with two separate societies competing for the same physical space and thats not going to end well for anyone. This is the very thing we should be trying the hardest to avoid but we are already moving down this road.
Half the country isn't going to out looking for conspiracy theory garbage. They just want to see pictures of their grandkids. But if you expose them to the conspiracies they can get drawn in.
