Turkeys are super cool, but it’s still a bit silly to apply human values to wild animals. Pretty much all animals are wired to survive while expending the least amount of energy and reducing risk to themselves. Stealing catches from other animals is quite common across species because it’s easier and safer. The reality is that it’s brutal out there. I don’t have diminished admiration for a bear because it found some food in a trash can instead of catching fish from a stream.

Raptors are awesome and they absolutely hunt and kill other animals. You don’t have to make up fake animal facts to dunk on the US.

Marginal cost is never zero though. That would imply truly free unlimited energy. There is a cost to build solar, wind, storage, etc. that needs to be amortized. We also want to incentivize folks to not waste energy, so a reasonably strong link between usage and price is helpful.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out for gas infrastructure as folks electrify and cut their gas service. Once the spiral starts, fixed costs will grow for the remaining customers and push more people to cancel their service.

But the size of the array, and therefore the cost of the array, are intimately tied to the production of said array. So there can’t be flat rate unless consumption never surpasses production, which is of course will when you have zero marginal cost.

I’m too lazy to look this up, but I believe death rates were higher out of cities vs in cities. Half the reason hospitals were packed in cities is because rural people went where the ventilators were. Everywhere had all the covid waves, they just hit cities first.

Elderly tend to be more R, and D folks were more likely to mask and vaccinate. But elderly vaccinated pretty well across the board and the divide was bigger in the young. Lots of factors, but my money is on D making out slightly better as a broad cohort. Tragic all around though.

Ok I did some searching and excess mortality points to higher rural impact, but official cause of death data is mixed (too lazy to link though).

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-sas-comparing-urban-and-rural-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic

That’s entirely the wrong denominator for this comparison. IRS doesn’t write the budget nor do they write tax law, they just collect.

I’m the opposite, I think a proper show with professional fireworks is super fun but clowns setting off tiny loud POS fireworks randomly over the course of several hours are just annoying. They don’t have the boom boom, they don’t make much light, and people just set them off in residential areas near kids/dogs.

What kind of ice are you riding on? Snow, even packed snow it usually ok, but turning/braking on ice is a disaster without studded tires. Source - I’ve crashed on ice several times despite being a very competent rider in all conditions for 3 decades.

Are we just going to ignore the millions of acres of vast grasslands that supported like 50 million buffalo in the US 200 year ago? Healthy grassland ecosystems and ruminants are a thing.

The real issue is one of attribution. “Traced to” isn’t the same as “responsible for”. I have a hard time blaming Saudi Aramco for massive volume of oil consumption in the US. Yes the oil companies are eco terrorists too but the binary take is absurd.

I recently picked up a Lenovo 7i 2-in-1 (I got the Intel Evo version due to a nice sale, but wanted AMD) and am currently dual booting with it. No issues with Ubuntu at all that I’ve encountered.