Justin Gundlach

It's like they looked at a list of things that will be most valuable in the foreseeable future and blew those up.

Debased Rates: How Infrastructure Trackers Thwart Regulatory Scrutiny By Jamie Van Nostrand, Policy Director

New blog post from the Future of Heat Initiative. This one is about utility infrastructure "trackers." I bet that even those of you who frequent #EnergySky threads haven't heard (much) about those.

tl;dr: relying on trackers --> more spending, less oversight

basedrates.substack.com/p/debased-ra...

When I combine this price tag with my decidedly mixed experiences with their editors, the resulting cocktail tastes terrible.

Call off the search. We have found the leitmotif of this disaster.

This is the kind of photo that will appear in call out boxes in future history text books and on future AP Govt and/or US history exams.

Oh, right, she's the one who penned "The Globalist Delusion."

If she hadn't already self-immolated on camera, I'd suggest a Chotiner-ing.

If she had any self-respect, she'd defenestrate herself.

If upon reading the post below you think to yourself, "I wonder if that's something that will affect the [new nuclear-focused policy initiative] that our office is shepherding into reality?" I encourage you to consider the implications of the answer being YES.

These people are so cowed/terrified that they aren't just buying the same shoe but in a size that actually fits and if they're ever asked "of course these are the shoes he bought for me." Just an amazing level of Mad King and His Terrified Courtiers here.

Next time you see a car commercial, count how many cars there are.

With vanishingly few exceptions, there will be only one (1) car.

I mean, yes. But imagine your reaction to the student who shows up an hour late and explains, nonchalantly, "I reject daylight savings time. I think it's psychotic." And maybe even throws in "I'd prefer not to," in an effort to appeal to your literary sensibilities.

Some of the tough ones I've fielded (w/ age of kid asking):
- "will I die?" (4)
- "why does my best friend's mom not like Mamdani?" (7)
- "why did everyone want to fight? [in WWI]?" (8)

Just had some conversations about launching a law journal edited by professors and other professionals--maybe w student help for copy edits & cite checking. It's a real "but who will bell the cat?" situation. No one thinks the current approach is sound, but fixing it would be a lot of no-fun work.

Slow clap for the masters of strategy who set fire to Plan A (too slow but best we can manage) and then handed the Football over to warmonger man-children.

Not the most important part of this story, but dude's name is Chase Cain and he reports on (chases?) stories about climate change (a killer). He was born for this, is what I'm saying.

Also, yes, it's increasingly obvious that we're living in a Thomas Pynchon novel. How do those usually end?

Based Rates | Mike Bloomberg | Substack Commentary on Utility Regulation from The Future of Heat Initiative. Click to read Based Rates, a Substack publication.

Want to know what the Future of Heat Initiative is thinking? Read our blog.
basedrates.substack.com?r=58x233&utm...

Don't think of the problems we might solve for $1B per day. Don't do it. It'll just hurt. And then you'll have yet another problem.

Yes, demo that and then start saying, too loudly and with a worrisome intonation, "you all need to fix this!" at least 5 times.

Maybe it's my biases talking, but I think a major media outlet could in fact get eyeballs, clicks etc. for some sort of Legal Legerdemain column that covered stories like this. Professor Vladeck calls this one "technical," but it's quite easy to see the switcheroo and get how and why it's bad.

Entasis

[writhing in discomfort and, sometimes, pain]

I surprised myself by almost losing my temper when someone told me "but the private sector will do it" in response to an off-hand remark I had made about NSF/NIH funding being irreplaceable. I realized later that I wasn't angry at my interlocutor but at the context that caused them to think that.

List of states linked to primers about each: California, Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Oregon, Washington DC. Minnesota and New Jersey are circled in red.

Gas utility capital spending is the key driver of rising residential gas bills. (Yes, those are *also* rising. A lot.)

Follow the link below for Future of Heat Initiative 2-pagers; we've added two more states to its list:

#11 Minnesota

#12 New Jersey

thefutureofheat.com/publications

* quiet

Someday, I will post without typos. Someday.

Somehow, this and insect loss numbers are the things that cause me to feel panicked. Not SLR. Not estimated revisions to home values from flood loss. Not even estimated heat wave numbers for 2080. It's the quite erasure of life en masse that really gets me.

Did you know that you don't need to live in NYC to follow Dave Colon, local reporter extraordinaire? You can just follow him.

I don't think we (ie, society, which relies on the academy more than it tends to know) are going to encounter a better banner than this, Joe, for rallying faculty to counter moves from administrators.

Unfortunately for you & other faculty who would rather not have to do it this means organizing.

The one Balin died searching for!?

That's the biggest one on my list too

Might be time to start a thread / prompt / meme of (Wrong) Things the 1990s Taught Us

In my day, it was "like," which I'm pretty sure was worse.

Also, maybe what The Youth is trying to tell us is that the default setting on everything seems to them to be not-lowkey?