#Texas data center

[bitcoinversus]

Cipher Mining Expands with 1.5 GW Data Center Sites Option in Texas

Cipher Mining Inc. has secured option agreements to acquire 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of data center sites in West and North Texas. This strategic move strengthens the company’s presence in large-scale infrastructure, focusing on both high-performance computing (HPC) and Bitcoin mining. Breaking: @CipherInc expands with a 1.5 GW option agreement for data centers across Texas, targeting scalable growth…

[phonesuitedirect]

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the key benefits offered by a modern VoIP system associated with data centers and why it’s important to make sure yours delivers reliable performance. Read More....

[batwynn]

I mean… 😬

[innonurse]

Study: Data shows that AI can accurately track therapy progress, assisting therapists in improving mental health treatment

- By InnoNurse Staff -

Eleos Health's AI operates in the background, offering insights on the application of evidence-based treatment without interfering with the clinician-patient relationship. 

Large-scale AI data analyses may be undertaken across enterprises, adding value through previously underused measurements and enhancing patient care.

Read more at Eleos Health/PRNewswire

///

Other recent news and insights

TMC Innovation kicks off semiannual accelerator bootcamp for 12 health tech startups (InnovationMap)

India: Genefitletics, a health tech startup, has closed pre-seed funding at a valuation of Rs 7.5 Cr (BioSpectrum)

[wilwheaton]

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds. From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

Pregnancy deaths rose by 56% in Texas after 2021 abortion ban, analysis finds

Republicans hate women. Vote blue.

[usacounselingcredit]

Houston Texas Appliance Parts: Harvesting Data Center Heat: Opportunity or Obstacle?

Houston Texas Appliance Parts

Harvesting Data Center Heat: Opportunity or Obstacle?

by Houston Texas Appliance Parts on Tuesday 31 January 2023 09:23 AM UTC-05

At first glance, the megawatts of heat given off by data centers (server farms) seem like a real waste of energy, yet they also represent a unique opportunity for recovery, harvesting and reuse—an opportunity that companies like Facebook's parent, Meta, have taken in full stride.

Since 2020, Meta has been recovering excess heat from its data center in Odense, Denmark (there's an interesting BBC video tour of Meta's facility here). Similarly, there are about 10 other full-scale projects from other data center operators in Holland, as well as others primarily in Europe.

The industry giant describes the heat-recovery approach (see Figure 1) in simple terms: "The process to deliver heat to the community begins with a wind turbine. Multiple wind turbines create and add renewable energy to the electric grid powering our facility, including our servers. We will direct air heated by the servers over water coils, which recover the heat by raising the temperature of the water. A heat-pump facility powered by renewable energy raises the temperature of the water even more. The hot water is then delivered to the district heating network and distributed to the local community."

Figure 1: The path from the renewable power source to end-user water for area heating and faucet hot water involves many conversion and energy-transfer stages. (Source: Meta)

The system recovers 100,000 MWh of energy per year, which is enough heat to warm 6,900 homes in that immediate community, according to Meta. The additional public-relations angle is also unique: Besides the fact that it will save energy, the pitch is that "every post warms a Dane," because whenever someone sends an email, posts to a website or surfs the web, they are not wasting energy; they are helping heat homes.

But a hot-air-to-hotter-water system is complicated to implement. The heat is collected by circulating water through the data center via insulated steel pipes, which pass through copper coils located inside each of the data center's 176 cooling units. The water picks up low-temperature heat at about 27˚C (80˚F) via a heat exchanger and channels it to a co-located heat-pump facility. There, the heat pump "amplifies" the warm water's temperature—and thus its heat-based energy density—to about 70˚C to 75˚C (about 160˚F to 170˚F). If it sounds complicated, it is.

What makes such a system viable is that Denmark and other Scandinavian countries often already have a centralized hot water system in place for community heating, along with the associated underground piping—houses do not have to have their own area- or water-heating system. Note that many university campuses around the world also function this way, with a central hot water and steam plant supplying buildings around the campus with heat via insulated pipes and tunnels. This is less expensive than having independent heating units in each building and makes maintenance easier thanks to a centralized design.

Data centers, which are in proximity to these district heating systems, have the potential to provide as much as roughly 50 TWh a year of excess heat, according to a study from ReUseHeat, an EU-funded project aimed at promoting waste heat reuse. That would work out to between 2% and 3% of the energy that EU households used on space heating in 2020.

However attractive this data-center–harvesting process seems due to its perceived cost savings, it's not an easy or wide-scale solution for several reasons. First, many locales do not have the community-based hot water and heating systems with pipes running underground to each house. Second, it takes a lot of distributed hardware and expense to capture and channel low-temperature heat, especially when it is spread out over a large area, such as a data center. There are a lot of moving parts in this approach, both literally and figuratively (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: It takes a lot of piping and plumbing with heat exchangers, heat pumps and more to make a centralized heating system work—blue pipes designate cooler water, while red pipes signify hotter water. (Source: Meta)

The laws of thermal physics dictate—in a manner somewhat analogous to electrical energy and voltage/current levels—that energy capture, transfer and conversion is much more efficient at higher temperatures. While industrial facilities and even some offices have been using "co-generation" for many years to capture and reuse heat thrown off by equipment, that heat source is often highly coalized, as is the load being supplied by the recovered energy.

It would be nice if there was a way to effectively transform waste heat at relatively low temperatures directly to electricity at the source. Then it could be converted and regulated using electronic systems like those used in battery-based energy-storage systems, for example, and transmitted via power lines rather than as heated water. An all-electronic system would have few or no moving parts, whereas the water-based system needs pumps, heat exchangers and all sorts of bulky, maintenance-prone facilities.

What's your view on the actual wider practicality of energy harvesting and recovery using waste heat from low-temperature sources for a wider set of users? Are these economically and technically attractive installations, or are they really "showcase" projects that enable favorable public relations and attention but will require considerable and costly support over the years to continue? It's the inevitable real-world question: Is the pain worth the gain?

References

Ramboll Group A/S, "World's largest heat extraction installation for a hyperscale data centre"

Datacenter Forum, "BBC: How Meta's datacenter gives Denmark's Odense heat and hot water"

Meta, "Odense: Meta Data Centers"

Meta, "This data center will warm their hearts, or at least heat their homes"

Meta, "Facebook's hyperscale data center warms Odense"

Data Center Dynamics, "Facebook plugs its Danish data center into Odense district heating system"

The post Harvesting Data Center Heat: Opportunity or Obstacle? appeared first on EE Times.

Pennsylvania Philadelphia PA Philadelphia January 31, 2023 at 09:00AM

Hammond Louisiana Ukiah California Dike Iowa Maryville Missouri Secretary Maryland Winchester Illinois Kinsey Alabama Edmundson Missouri Stevens Village Alaska Haymarket Virginia Newington Virginia Edwards Missouri https://unitedstatesvirtualmail.blogspot.com/2023/01/houston-texas-appliance-parts_51.html January 31, 2023 at 09:25AM Gruver Texas Glens Fork Kentucky Fork South Carolina Astoria Oregon Lac La Belle Wisconsin Pomfret Center Connecticut Nason Illinois Roan Mountain Tennessee https://coloradovirtualmail.blogspot.com/2023/01/houston-texas-appliance-parts_31.html January 31, 2023 at 11:44AM from https://youtu.be/GuUaaPaTlyY January 31, 2023 at 12:48PM

[lily0819]

ACPmember SB Energy has announced the commercial operation of the Orion Solar Belt project in Texas with SecGranholm in attendance. The 875 MWdc solar project will help power Google’s data centers in the area & represents Google’s largest solar energy investment in the

[iww-gnv]

American workers are dying, local businesses are reporting a drop in productivity, and the country's economy is losing billions all because of one problem: the heat. July was the hottest month on record on our planet, according to scientists. This entire summer, so far, has been marked by scorching temperatures for much of the U.S. South, with the thermometer reaching triple digits in several places in Texas between June and July. In that same period, at least two people died in the state while working under the stifling heat enveloping Texas, a 35-year-old utility lineman, and a 66-year-old USPS carrier. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 36 work-related deaths due to environmental heat exposure in 2021, the latest data available. This was a drop from 56 deaths in 2020, and the lowest number since 2017. "Workers who are exposed to extreme heat or work in hot environments may be at risk of heat stress," Kathleen Conley, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Newsweek. "Heat stress can result in heat stroke, heat exhaustion, heat cramps, or heat rashes. Heat can also increase the risk of injuries in workers as it may result in sweaty palms, fogged-up safety glasses, and dizziness. Burns may also occur as a result of accidental contact with hot surfaces or steam." While there is a minimum working temperature in the U.S., there's no maximum working temperature set by law at a federal level. The CDC makes recommendations for employers to avoid heat stress in the workplace, but these are not legally binding requirements. The Biden administration has tasked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) with updating its worker safety policies in light of the extreme heat. But the federal standards could take years to develop—leaving the issue in the hands of individual states. Things aren't moving nearly as fast as the emergency would require—and it's the politics around the way we look at work, the labor market, and the rights of workers in the U.S. that is slowing things down.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stopped counting Covid-19 cases, according to wastewater data—which emerged early on as an accurate tracker of the ebbs and flows of the virus—we are currently in one of the biggest surges of the pandemic, amid the spread of a new variant, JN-1, as the virus keeps mutating. More than three-quarters of U.S. hospital beds are currently in use due to Covid hospitalizations. Uptake of the most recent booster shot, which should help to protect against the new variant and lower the risk of severe cases and the odds of getting long Covid, hovers around 19 percent. Meanwhile, the most recent White House response to a question about whether they had any guidance for hospitals, some of which have brought back mitigation protocols in response to the most recent Covid spike, came courtesy of press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “Hospitals, communities, states, they have to make their own decisions. That’s not something we get involved in,” she replied, appearing exasperated. “We are in possibly the second-biggest surge of the pandemic if you look at wastewater levels,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, who runs a long-Covid clinic at the University of Texas, San Antonio, and has had ongoing Covid symptoms since August 2022. “There is no urgency to this. No news. No discussion in Congress. There is no education.”

[...]

Since the Biden administration declared the end of the national emergency in May, Americans across the political spectrum have largely followed the example set by the government and entirely disposed of any level of Covid precautions. Liberal and left-wing outlets have participated in the normalizing of Covid too, dismissing or even ostracizing people who still take precautions as if they are tin-hat conspiracy theorists. “We can’t be in lockdown forever,” has become a common refrain, as if wearing a mask on the subway constitutes “lockdown.” In September, Biden himself participated in the spread of this kind of harmful disinformation when he declared the pandemic “over” on 60 Minutes. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks,” he said. “Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape.” This is, essentially, governing via “vibes”—so much for “following the science.”

[...]

The consequences of discarding all Covid precautions are becoming clearer, as more people get repeated infections and long-term symptoms, amid an alarming spike in heart problems among healthy young people. People are getting sick more often not due to the myth of “immunity debt,” which posits that the lack of exposure to other people during lockdown has made people less able to fight off infections (three years later), but because Covid weakens the immune system. Each time someone contracts Covid, the odds of long-term complications increase.

[anghraine]

I'm trying to redirect my political thoughts from my fandom escape blog again, but I found something interesting enough that I thought I'd talk a little about it.

Occasionally I choose suffering (looking at the more granular 2024 exit poll breakdowns rather than the summaries that I mostly don't trust much at this point). Anyway, I did find something intriguing, if not particularly surprising, in the CNN exit polls, which were done in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin with a sample size of 22,914 voters.

(I mention the specific states forming the sample because this pretty notably excludes any blue states while including some reliably Republican ones.)

Anyway, most exit polls including CNN's let respondents identify their place on the US political spectrum: conservative, moderate, or liberal (reminder that "liberal" in US usage can be a pejorative for "less leftist than me" but also a shorthand for "radical leftist" but also for "anyone who doesn't seek a cishet white Christian ethnostate", but also can be a more neutral synonym for progressives and/or leftists and is often used that way, as here). So you can look at the election results for each of these ideological factions and what share of the overall sample size they represent.

The interesting thing: this "liberal" category accounted for very similar proportions to 2020 of the overall vote in the sample (24% in 2020, 23% in 2024—a difference well within the margin of error of exit polling). There is no need to explain liberals/leftists staying home in 2024: at least in terms of proportions of the overall electorate, they didn't. Just under 1/4 of voters in 2024 were liberals or leftists, just as in 2020.

Okay, if the most leftwards faction of the US political spectrum actually formed a similar proportion of the electorate, then who did they vote for?

Harris. In CNN's own exit polls from 2020, 89% of this faction voted for Biden, and (surprisingly!) a full 10% voted for Trump. God knows what motivated that 10% Trump share after four years of his hellscape of an administration at the height of COVID, but in any case, that support cratered in 2024. 91% of this group voted for Harris and only 4% for Trump. It's an estimate, but it looks like these very peculiar Trump voters had enough of him in 2024 and around half either voted third party this time or for Harris.

So which faction is Trump's victory coming from? Further consolidation of the far right?

In part, yes! 90% of conservatives voted for Trump in 2024, vs 85% in 2020—likely, some conservatives who voted third party or even for Biden in 2020 came "home" this year. However, conservative turnout was actually a little down in 2024, proportionally speaking: conservatives dropped from 38% of the sample in 2020 to 34% in 2024.

But there's one more major faction in all this: "moderates" or centrists. To be clear, we're talking about the US version of centrism, given that this is a US organization polling US voters about US politicians, not "Bernie would be center-right in Denmark" or whatever. This moderate faction jumped from 38% of the overall sample in 2020 to 42% in 2024, and they swung hard towards Trump, though Harris still won a plurality of them. In 2020, 64% of moderates voted for Biden vs 34% for Trump. In 2024, 57% of them voted for Harris vs 40% for Trump—that is, the Democratic lead among centrists dropped precipitously from +30 to +17.

Tl;dr—ideologically speaking, this data suggests that Trump owes his victory to gains among both right-wing and centrist voters rather than some faction of would-be leftists or progressives apathetically staying home or voting third-party or otherwise deserting Democrats (because they're insufficiently radical or for any other reason).

Oh, and if you're curious as to how this compares to CNN's 2016 exit polls, I also checked those! Harris's 84-point lead among the most leftwards faction is a significant improvement from HRC's 74-point lead in 2016. Trump also got 10% of that group in 2016, as in 2020, so it's this campaign—not Hillary's or Biden's—that managed to eat into whatever the hell is going on with that group.

Harris's +17 with moderates is actually a slight improvement on Hillary's +12 in 2016. Biden's jump to a +30 lead among centrists in 2020 represented either a backlash against Trump from centrists, or Biden's own rapport with that group, or some mysterious issue some of those voters had with both HRC and Harris (I wonder what it could be!!), or some combination thereof. Regardless, there are a lot of actual ideologically centrist voters in the USA and not just would-be leftists who haven't heard the good news of Marx yet. And Trump has an iron grip on the right wing at this point: he beat Hillary with conservatives by +65 in 2016, then beat Biden with an even larger margin of +71, then leapt to a 81-point lead over Harris with right-wing voters this year.

[bitcoinversus]

Core Scientific Announces $4B AI Data Center in Denton

Core Scientific, a prominent player in the cryptocurrency mining sector, has announced plans to transform its Denton, Texas, Bitcoin mining facility into a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) data center. The $4 billion project aims to repurpose existing infrastructure to meet the growing demand for AI computing power. This strategic move reflects a broader industry trend where…

[covidsafecosplay]

The People’s CDC COVID-19 Weather Report: October 14, 2024

The People's CDC has released another updated report on COVID-19 data and action items for the United States of America.

Highlights:

According to data last updated 10/5/2024, the CDC’s national wastewater map shows 16 states with “High” or “Very High” wastewater levels.

According to the Wastewater COVID-19 National and Regional Trends dashboard, all regions continue to show a downward trend over the last several weeks.

Many Bay Area counties are set to reimplement mask mandates in hospitals from November 1 through Spring 2025. Some of the rules apply to only certain healthcare staff while others include visitors and patients. Though these mandates are limited in scope, duration, and geography, a few are expanded compared to last year’s Bay Area mask rules, a sign that pressure on decision makers is working. 

In the past week, the California Department of Public Health reported that 6 new cases of bird flu (H5N1) were confirmed in dairy workers in California, with each case being connected to contact with infected cattle in California’s Central Valley. While there is yet no documented human-to-human transmission, each new case presents a greater risk of the virus mutating to spread from human to human.

The Texas State Affairs Committee posted notice of a hearing at the Capitol on October 16 to discuss, among other things, “Unmasking Protestors.” Opposition is mounting, and people are organizing.

Read the rest of the report here:

Please note that the CovidSafeCosplay blog and its admin are unaffiliated with the People's CDC or its management, and are simply sharing the resource.

Via the People's CDC About page:

The People’s CDC is a coalition of public health practitioners, scientists, healthcare workers, educators, advocates and people from all walks of life working to reduce the harmful impacts of COVID-19.  We provide guidance and policy recommendations to governments and the public on COVID-19, disseminating evidence-based updates that are grounded in equity, public health principles, and the latest scientific literature. Working alongside community organizations, we are building collective power and centering equity as we work together to end the pandemic. The People’s CDC is volunteer-run and independent of partisan political and corporate interests and includes anonymous local health department and other government employees. The People’s CDC is completely volunteer run with infrastructure support being provided by the People’s Science Network

[qqueenofhades]

I just read an article on The Conversation that states: "Today, most data has Trump narrowly beating Biden in the national popular vote, albeit within the statistical margin of error." (Source for that data: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/)

In your opinion, is that true? How can that be possible after everything Trump has done? After the Insurrection? I'm terrified 😕

(For reference, the original article can be found at https://theconversation.com/five-reasons-why-trumps-republican-opponents-were-never-going-to-beat-him-223288?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%202888329325&utm_content=The%20Weekend%20Conversation%20-%202888329325+CID_fceedfd21410eb8a7b6fd6e1124d9d54&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=five%20reasons)

Short answer: no, I don't think it's true.

Long answer: no, I really don't think it's true. Here's why.

Broader context. A Republican has won the popular presidential vote only twice in the 21st century, and in the first of those occasions -- 2000 -- I use "won" very advisedly. We all know, or at least we should, about all the fuckery that went down in Florida with Bush vs. Gore and SCOTUS stepping in to stop the recount (which almost surely would have gone to Gore) and handing Florida, and thus the presidency, to George Dubya Bush by a mere 537 votes. Dubya then did win re-election and the popular vote/EC in 2004, in the throes of patriotic war fervor and the GOP's Swiftboating of John Kerry (who was a pretty terrible candidate to start with). Other than that? None. Zip. Nada. None. Even in 2016 when Trump squeaked out a win (and thus the presidency) in the Electoral College, he lost nationwide to HRC by over 3 million votes. He lost to Biden by 7 million votes nationwide last time. Also, the reason the GOP loves the antidemocratic Electoral College is that it always works in their favor, and because red states with relatively scant population are given the same power in the Senate. That's why California, with 40+ million people, gets two (Democratic) senators, and Wyoming, with 400,000 people, gets two (Republican) senators. There is just no way that red states can get the actual raw numbers to win the popular vote against heavily blue urban population centers. The only one that comes close is Texas, and while it's something of a white whale for Democrats who think fondly that it'll surely turn blue this election cycle (and then it doesn't), it's not giving all its votes popular-vote-wise to Republicans. So yeah. The numbers aren't there. Biden is about 99% certain to win the popular vote, but because this is America, the question is whether the EC will follow.

(Although, I gotta say. In the deeply unlikely event that Biden loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College -- i.e. the exact same thing Trump did in 2016 -- the right wing would lose their fucking minds and it would be incredibly hilarious. Also, we might finally get some red states willing to sign up to the National Popular Vote Compact, which is just a few ratifications away from going into effect. As noted, the Republicans will cling onto the Electoral College with their last dying breath because it's the only thing that makes them competitive in nationwide elections. If it fucked Trump, they might finally listen to ideas about changing it.)

The media are incredibly biased, and so is Nate Silver. Silver first rose to prominence as an independent geeky Data Guy elections whiz-kid, and was relatively good at being unbiased. That is not the case anymore. He's now affiliated with the New York Times and has started echoing the smugly anti-Biden framework of both that paper and the mainstream media in general. I'm not necessarily saying his data is total bunk, but he's extremely eager to frame, narrate, and explain it in ways that artificially disadvantage Biden (in the same way the NYT itself is all in on "BUT HIS AGEEEEE," just as they were with "BUT HER EEEEEEMAILS" in 2016) And that's a problem, because:

The polls are shit. Like, really, really shit. Didn't we just go through this in 2022, where everyone howled about how All The Data pointed to a Red Wave and then were /shocked pikachu face when this was nothing more than a Red Dribble of Piss (and frankly, the best midterm election result for the ruling party since like, the 1930s?) We've also had major, real-time proof that the polls are showing a consistent pro-Trump bias of 10 or more points, which is a huge error and keeps getting corrected whenever people actually vote, but the media will never admit that, because TRUMP IS WINNING WE ARE ALL DOOMZED!! We heard about how Biden might lose New Hampshire because he wasn't even on the ballot and that would be a critical embarrassment for him. He cruised easily with 68% (all write-in votes and FAR more than any other Democratic "candidate.") Meanwhile, Trump won New Hampshire by about 15% under what the polls had predicted for him (after doing the same and barely squeaking over 50% in Iowa, one of the whitest, most rural, most Trump-loving states in the nation). The number ballparked for Biden in the NV Democratic primary was something like 75%; he got over 90% (and twice as many votes as any candidate in the Republican Primary/Caucus/Whatever That Mess Was). The number for what he was supposed to get in the SC primary was in the high 60% (driven by the media's other favorite "Black voters are abandoning Biden" canard); he absolutely crushed it at 97% statewide. When Biden is winning by whopping margins and Trump is underperforming badly, in both cases by gaps of ten percent or more, it means the polls are simply not showing us an accurate state of the race. This could be because of media bias, bad data, selective polling, inability to actually connect with voters (especially young voters, who are about as likely to eat a live scorpion as to pick up an unsolicited phone call from an unknown number). This also shows up in:

Special elections. We've heard tons of Very Smart Punditry (derogatory) about how Democrats kicking ass in pretty much every competitive election since Roe was overturned in 2022 totally means nothing for the general election. (Of course, if the situation was reversed and Republicans were cleaning up at the same rate, we would be hearing nothing except how we're all destined for Eternal Trumpocracy... wait. no... we're still only hearing this. Weird.) In the last special election in early February, Democrat Tom Suozzi won back his old U.S House seat (NY-03) by over eight points, after polls had given him at most a two- or three-point edge. (Funnily, once again a Democrat did far better than the media is determined to insist, so Politico hilariously called a thumping eight-point win "edging it out.") This represents almost a 16-point blue swing from even just 2022, when The Congressman Possibly Known as George Santos won it by 7 points. On that same night, a Democratic candidate in a Trump +26 district in deep, deep red Oklahoma only lost by 5 points, marking another massive pro-blue swing. This has been the case in every special election since Roe went down. Apparently blah blah This Won't Translate to the General Election, because the media is very smart. Even when Democrats (historically hard to motivate and muster in off-year election cycles, or you know in general) are turning up in elections that don't involve Trump to punish terrible Trumpist policies, we're supposed to think they won't be motivated to actually vote against the guy himself? And not just them, because:

Trump is a terrible candidate. Which we know, and have always known, but now it's really true. We've had up to half of Haley voters stating they will vote for Biden over Trump if that is the November matchup (which it will be). Haley, amusingly, actually outraised Trump in January, because it turns out that the Trump Crime Family's open promise to send every single donor or RNC dollar to pay El Trumpo's legal fees hasn't been a terribly effective message. We had Republicans in NY-03 telling CNN that they voted for the Democrat Suozzi because they're so fed up with the GOP clown show in the House and don't think Republicans can govern (which uh. Yeah. Welcome to reality, we all knew that ages ago too). We have had up to a third of Republican voters saying they won't vote for Trump if he's convicted of a felony before the election (and technically he already has been, but we're still hoping for the January 6 trial to go ahead). Now, yes, Republicans are a notoriously cliquey bunch and might change their minds, but for all the endless bullshit BIDEN SHOULD STEP DOWN BECAUSE DEMOCRATS ARE DISUNITED narrative the media has been pushing like their kidnapped grandmothers' lives depend on it, Democrats aren't actually disunited at all. Instead, Trump is in chaos, the GOP is in chaos, sizeable chunks of Republican voters are ready to vote for someone else and in some cases have already done so, and yet, do we hear a peep about how Trump should step down? Nah. In related news, did you hear that Biden is old?!?! Why isn't anyone writing about this?!?!

Now, I want to make it clear: Trump's chances of winning are not zero, and they are not inconsiderable. We need to face that fact and deal with it accordingly. Large chunks of the country are still willing to vote for white Christian nationalist fascism. Trump still has plenty of diehard cultists and the entire establishment Republican party in his pocket, and it's been made very clear that Putin is bringing the full force of his malevolent Russian fascist machine to bear on this election as well. Case in point: we spent four years hearing about HUNTER BIDEN HUNTER BIDEN SECRET CORRUPTION GIANT SECRET BUSINESS SCANDAL, and it turns out that the GOP's "star informant" has been actively working with Russian spies the whole time and fed them complete bullshit disinformation, which they were eager to repeat so long as it might hurt Joe Biden. (And it would hurt Ukraine, so, twofer! I cannot emphasize enough how much it was all a deliberate collaboration by some of the worst people on earth.)

In 2016, people naively assumed that Trump could never win, and so they were especially willing to throw away, spoil, or otherwise not exercise their vote, or throw purity hissy fits over HRC (likewise fed at the toxic teat of Russian disinformation). That was exactly what allowed Trump to squeak out a win in the EC and put us in the mess we are currently in. If people act in the same way in 2024 that they did in 2016, Trump's chances of winning are drastically increased. So once again, as I keep saying, it's up to us. If we all vote blue, and we get our networks to vote blue, Biden is very likely to win. If we don't, he won't, and Trump will win. It's that simple. We had better decide what we're doing. The end.

[dadbodbuck]

fuck it chat i'm swinging the bat at the hornet's nest

911 characters and their political leanings*

* these are personal headcanons don't bite me unless it's sexy

bobby has been a registered democrat since the 90s. he believes in voting in every election, and since 2020 has made sure everyone in the station is registered to vote and votes not just for presidentials but also state, local, and school district elections (before 2020 he was too in his "i can't get attached this isn't a family this is a means to an end" feelings). he is very careful about not pressuring his subordinates into voting one way or the other, and believes in the power of impartiality and subjectivity.

athena is THE establishment democrat to me. she's pro-gay, pro-cop, law and order but ETHICALLY, please! she loooooves nancy pelosi.

may grant is a member of her college's YDSA. this is going to be the thing that makes athena go gray.

maddie is a white suburban democrat. this is entirely based on her vibes

i'm so sorry. buck is apolitical. he never feels like he knows enough on a topic to form an opinion. he asks bobby who to vote for in elections. he is an ally who thinks putting a rainbow emoji on his instagram is effective allyship.

i'm even more sorry. eddie diaz is socially liberal fiscally conservative. he thought he was a raging liberal when he was living in texas because he didn't hate gay people. he hasn't quite unpacked us imperialism yet.

chris (disabled, latino, at least two dads) is cooking a WICKED leftist philosophy tho and when he does eddie and buck will be forever changed. insert whitney chewston mama let's learn meme

hen and karen are both progressive democrats, karen being a little further left than hen. they're especially interested in lgbt+ rights, racial equality, and healthcare access. they frequently go to community events!

chim is full socdem. his bio dad was conservative (fuck him), and the lees were probably some flavor of center left. chim took after the lees until he read the socialist manifesto while he was trying to get his business degree (he dropped out but kept the book) and then he reread it every time gerrard pissed him off. hen and karen do have to drag him to events because he's an introvert however. (yes this one is wishful thinking. this is howard chimney han to ME)

tommy kinard: not enough data. likely some flavor of "reformed right of center" liberal, maybe even leftist?

gerrard: most normal trump voter

ravi: libertarian :/

[mariacallous]

Anyone who has spent even 15 minutes on TikTok over the past two months will have stumbled across more than one creator talking about Project 2025, a nearly thousand-page policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that outlines a radical overhaul of the government under a second Trump administration. Some of the plan’s most alarming elements—including severely restricting abortion and rolling back the rights of LGBTQ+ people—have already become major talking points in the presidential race.

But according to a new analysis from the Technology Oversight Project, Project 2025 includes hefty handouts and deregulation for big business, and the tech industry is no exception. The plan would roll back environmental regulation to the benefit of the AI and crypto industries, quash labor rights, and scrap whole regulatory agencies, handing a massive win to big companies and billionaires—including many of Trump’s own supporters in tech and Silicon Valley.

“Their desire to eliminate whole agencies that are the enforcers of antitrust, of consumer protection is a huge, huge gift to the tech industry in general,” says Sacha Haworth, executive director at the Tech Oversight Project.

One of the most drastic proposals in Project 2025 suggests abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether, which would allow banks to back their money using cryptocurrencies, if they so choose. And though some conservatives have railed against the dominance of Big Tech, Project 2025 also suggests that a second Trump administration could abolish the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which currently has the power to enforce antitrust laws.

Project 2025 would also drastically shrink the role of the National Labor Relations Board, the independent agency that protects employees’ ability to organize and enforces fair labor practices. This could have a major knock on effect for tech companies: In January, Musk’s SpaceX filed a lawsuit in a Texas federal court claiming that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was unconstitutional after the agency said the company had illegally fired eight employees who sent a letter to the company’s board saying that Musk was a “distraction and embarrassment.” Last week, a Texas judge ruled that the structure of the NLRB—which includes a director that can’t be fired by the president—was unconstitutional, and experts believe the case may wind its way to the Supreme Court.

This proposal from Project 2025 could help quash the nascent unionization efforts within the tech sector, says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation. “Tech, of course, relies a lot on independent contractors,” says West. “They have a lot of jobs that don't offer benefits. It's really an important part of the tech sector. And this document seems to reward those types of business.”

For emerging technologies like AI and crypto, a rollback in environmental regulations proposed by Project 2025 would mean that companies would not be accountable for the massive energy and environmental costs associated with bitcoin mining and running and cooling the data centers that make AI possible. “The tech industry can then backtrack on emission pledges, especially given that they are all in on developing AI technology,” says Haworth.

The Republican Party’s official platform for the 2024 elections is even more explicit, promising to roll back the Biden administration’s early efforts to ensure AI safety and “defend the right to mine Bitcoin.”

All of these changes would conveniently benefit some of Trump’s most vocal and important backers in Silicon Valley. Trump’s running mate, Republican senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, has long had connections to the tech industry, particularly through his former employer, billionaire founder of Palantir and longtime Trump backer Peter Thiel. (Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founder’s Fund, invested $200 million in crypto earlier this year.)

Thiel is one of several other Silicon Valley heavyweights who have recently thrown their support behind Trump. In the past month, Elon Musk and David Sacks have both been vocal about backing the former president. Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, whose firm a16z has invested in several crypto and AI startups, have also said they will be donating to the Trump campaign.

“They see this as their chance to prevent future regulation,” says Haworth. “They are buying the ability to avoid oversight.”

Reporting from Bloomberg found that sections of Project 2025 were written by people who have worked or lobbied for companies like Meta, Amazon, and undisclosed bitcoin companies. Both Trump and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have courted donors in the crypto space, and in May, the Trump campaign announced it would accept donations in cryptocurrency.

But Project 2025 wouldn’t necessarily favor all tech companies. In the document, the authors accuse Big Tech companies of attempting “to drive diverse political viewpoints from the digital town square.” The plan supports legislation that would eliminate the immunities granted to social media platforms by Section 230, which protects companies from being legally held responsible for user-generated content on their sites, and pushes for “anti-discrimination” policies that “prohibit discrimination against core political viewpoints.”

It would also seek to impose transparency rules on social platforms, saying that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) “could require these platforms to provide greater specificity regarding their terms of service, and it could hold them accountable by prohibiting actions that are inconsistent with those plain and particular terms.”

And despite Trump’s own promise to bring back TikTok, Project 2025 suggests the administration “ban all Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, which pose significant national security risks and expose American consumers to data and identity theft.”

West says the plan is full of contradictions when it comes to its approach to regulation. It’s also, he says, notably soft on industries where tech billionaires and venture capitalists have put a significant amount of money, namely AI and cryptocurrency. “Project 2025 is not just to be a policy statement, but to be a fundraising vehicle,” he says. “So, I think the money angle is important in terms of helping to resolve some of the seemingly inconsistencies in the regulatory approach.”

It remains to be seen how impactful Project 2025 could be on a future Republican administration. On Tuesday, Paul Dans, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, stepped down. Though Trump himself has sought to distance himself from the plan, reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates that while the project may be lower profile, it’s not going away. Instead, the Heritage Foundation is shifting its focus to making a list of conservative personnel who could be hired into a Republican administration to execute the party’s vision.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive (Daily updates!)

Weird how this "endemic" German strain is poised to dominate worldwide... That almost sounds like a pandemic :O

By Ahjané Forbes

KP.3.1.1 is still the dominant COVID-19 variant in the United States as it accounts for nearly 60% of positive cases, but the XEC variant is not far behind, recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows.

"CDC is monitoring the XEC variant," Rosa Norman, a CDC spokesperson told USA TODAY. "XEC is the proposed name of a recombinant, or hybrid, of the closely related Omicron lineages KS.1.1 and KP.3.3."

The variant, which first appeared in Berlin in late June, has increasingly seen hundreds of cases in Germany, France, Denmark and Netherlands, according to a report by Australia-based data integration specialist Mike Honey.

The CDC's Nowcast data tracker, which displays COVID-19 estimates and projections for two-week periods, reflected that the KP.3.1.1 variant accounted for 57.2% of positive infections, followed by XEC at 10.7% in the two-week stretch starting on Sept. 29 and ending on Oct. 12.

KP.3.1.1 first became the leading variant between July 21 and Aug. 3.

The latest data shows a rise in each variant's percentage of total cases from Sept. 15-28, as KP.3.1.1 rose by 4.6%, and XEC rose by 5.4%. Previously, the KP.3.1.1 variant made up 52.6% of cases and XEC accounted for 5.3% from Sept. 15-28.

Here is what you need to know about the XEC variant and the latest CDC data.

COVID-19:Your free COVID-19 at-home tests from the government are set to expire soon. Here's why.

Changes in COVID-19 test positivity within a week Data collected by the CDC shows a drop in positivity rate across the board, while the four states in Region 10 had the biggest decrease (-2.7%) in positive COVID-19 cases from Sept. 29, 2024, to Oct. 5, 2024.

The data was posted on Oct. 11.

Note: The CDC organizes positivity rate based on regions, as defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Here's the list of states and their regions' changes in COVID-19 positivity for the past week:

Region 1 (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont): -2% Region 2 (New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands): -1.9% Region 3 (Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia): -1.3% Region 4 (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee): -0.6% Region 5 (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin): -2% Region 6 (Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas): -0.8% Region 7 (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska): -1.7% Region 8 (Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming): -1.2% Region 9 (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Marshall Islands, and Republic of Palau): -1.3% Region 10 (Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington): -2.7% The CDC data shows COVID-19 test positivity rate was recorded at 7.7% from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5, an absolute change of -1.8% from the prior week.

COVID-19 symptoms The variants currently dominating in the U.S. do not have their own specific symptoms, the CDC says..

"CDC is not aware of new or unusual symptoms associated with XEC or any other co-circulating lineage of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19," Norman said.

The government agency outlines the basic symptoms of COVID-19 on its website. These symptoms can appear between two and 14 days after exposure to the virus and can range from mild to severe.

These are some of the symptoms of COVID-19:

Fever or chills Cough Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing Fatigue Muscle or body aches Headache Loss of taste or smell Sore throat Congestion or runny nose Nausea or vomiting Diarrhea The CDC said you should seek medical attention if you have the following symptoms:

Trouble breathing Persistent pain or pressure in the chest New confusion Inability to wake or stay awake Pale, gray, or blue-colored skin, lips, or nail beds