A good read from the BBC.

One win, 17,000 defeats – life as a Washington General

Saw these today at SMoCA. Great stuff.

Concerned but Powerless

I made some red beans with the induction cooker yesterday. I have had a hard time articulating why this is such a better way to cook. I never took to the Instant Pot. You can’t stir easily and can’t see what is going on inside. It also isn’t good for cooking off liquids.

The induction cooker is pleasant in that you aren’t bombarded with a blast of heat from the stove flame every time you get near the pot. And all that heat isn’t heating up the house and driving up the air conditioning bills, at least in the summer.

After some use it is clear that the real advantage is actual temperature control. With a gas stove you control the size of the flame, but the flame is always the same temperature. If you have a heavy pot it (sorta) spreads out the heat. But a long slow cook for something like red beans needs lots of stirring and you still get burning and sticking on the bottom. With the induction cooker you are literally setting the temperature of the bottom of the pot. This sort of control is great but a bit novel and took some getting used to. By the way, this induction cooktop only has like six different settings. Enough I suppose but more would be better. I can see maybe 25F increments as being useful.

I spent the end of my career doing tech work for some large financial services firms. Everyone had to do regular money laundering training. Basically how to spot it and what to do about it if you saw it. All of this was aimed at low level, cash transactions. It was also mentioned that US real estate was the primary vehicle for large scale money laundering worldwide. The basic reason was the ability to hide ownership in real estate.

Of course, all this money sloshing around was good for people in real estate and, truth be told, in the finance sector. And I suppose the economy at large, though I’m not really so sure that any of these ill gotten billions ever really trickled down to middle and lower class Americans in any form.

This law is long overdue. But, if done correctly, this will lead to serious declines in high end and commercial real estate. It will be interesting to see what effect enforcing such anti-money laundering laws will have.

US set to unveil long-awaited crackdown on real estate money laundering

A long read from Al Jazeera.

As Louisiana’s coast washes away, the dead are the first to go

When I worked in tech the standard thing to do when then competition got the upper hand was to FUD. Spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. I see so much of this surrounding EVs these days. The latest ongoing FUD is that it costs more to fill up an EV than a gas ICE car. Not in this universe. Not even close really.

Here is the way it works, apples to apples. The size of your battery is like the size of your gas tank. The cost of electricity is just like the cost of gas. How much does it cost to fill your gas tank? Multiply the size for the tank by the price. A car with a 20 gallon tank filling up with gas at $3 a gallon will take $20 x 3 = $60 to fill up.

Now take an EV with a 75 kWh battery and power at $0.10 kW (the actual top tier here in Austin). 75 x $0.10 = $7.50 to fill up. That’s it. Everything else is a distraction.

In fact, it could be half this much using one of the lower tiers. I can’t fill up my lawnmower with gas for that. Can you pay more for electricity? More than retail? Yes, but you can also pay a lot less. The WaPo takes aim at this, misses and gives voice to FUDders everywhere.

Is it cheaper to refuel your EV battery or gas tank?

Despite the recent success of renewables, or perhaps because of it, the Texas electrical grid keeps coming up with new ways to thwart their ongoing growth. Recently, rules about reliability and “dispatchable” power have been passed. Similarly attempts to limit power line construction that would benefit renewables has been noted. This one seems particularly dangerous, with requirements on existing (renewable) resources that may be difficult to achieve. Anyone else concerned about taking 50 GW of otherwise very inexpensive and reliable power off line when demand is 80 GW?

How a grid rule change could derail Texas renewables

We just had the hottest July on record here in Austin, surpassing last year’s record July. The rest of the country and the world seems to be in a similar situation. Yet I only see lots of disconnected stories about the weather in the media. I suppose we can put the pieces together ourselves, but I can’t say I’ve seen a single chart of historical CO2 levels anywhere in the mainstream news. I did hear on the BBC that the is flooding in China and the Beijing subways are flooded. Over 30 inches of rain in a place that seldom sees significant rainfall.

it is difficult to watch the slow motion foolishness of an entire planet. Even economically the costs of doing something, anything to fight climate change is dwarfed by the costs of doing nothing. How bad does it have to get? I suppose we are finding out.

Heatwave sees hundreds fall ill at World Scout Jamboree in South Korea