I’d say the big three are California (fire, potential earthquakes), Florida (hurricanes with tidal surge), and Texas. But as you say, Texas is the one that refuses to do anything to mitigate their risks, even those of their own making - and it does seem that so many of the disasters Texas has are massively exacerbated by their refusal to mitigate risks.
A friend of mine suggested that Texas’ nickname should be “The One Star State”.
Campers were not allowed to bring mobile phones, and counselors were made to surrender theirs, leaving them unable to see the emergency alerts themselves
The kids, I understand, but I think the counselors should have been allowed to keep their phones, at least after hours.
The Post said the NWS alert did not contain an order or recommendation for evacuation, a power it said rests with local government officials.
Yeah, the local government officials that debated a flood warning system for over a decade because they didn’t want to pay the $1 million themselves, then were given $10 million in pandemic funds and re-directed most of it to the sheriff’s department, and a footpath.
“We’ve heard accounts of trailer after trailer after trailer being swept into the river with families in them. [We] can’t find the trailers, we don’t know how many of them there are,” the county judge, Rob Kelly, said. One trailer was found “completely covered in gravel” 27ft below the surface of the river, he said, adding that sonar crews were searching the river and local lakes. Two reservoir lakes attached to the river would be drained to aid the search, officials said.
The more I hear, the sicker - and angrier! - I feel.
To my mind, that just makes it worse: he knows he’s in a flood plain, he’s got repeated exemptions to expand his camp in excess of normal regulation and procedures, be gets a flash flood warning, and he still doesn’t evacuate?
3.5% for a sustained protest posting several days. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that yet.
I was going to add in “bragged about just grabbing random women ‘by the pussy’ on tape” but then I went to look something else up, so I’ll just add to your list:
* For those of you who don’t remember from school, one double-spaced page contains about 250 words. So this is roughly a 64 page paper on his sexual assaults.
What happens if Paxton wins the primary against Cornyn? Texas becomes a COMPETATIVE STATE for the 2026 midterms.
I don’t understand why Texas would become competitive.
And growing plants that we eat.
will there be huge power plants just dedicated to AI all over the world soon?
It takes time to build a power plant. A more realistic scenario is that we’ll continue as we have: AI centers will be built wherever local governments approve them for the taxes, without regard for the strain they put on the aging electrical grid and, given the massive amount of electricity they need, everyone’s electrical bill will just massively increase.
They’ve been building a large number of data centers and AI centers in Virginia, and it’s been straining and raising prices across the entire PJM interconnector region, to the point where at least a couple states are considering leaving it. Microsoft has bought the rights to and is reactivating part of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, because they wanted dedicated power, and they’re still going to be pulling power from the grid.
USC law students have set up a hotline to help move immigrants move their in-person hearing to online format, reducing the risk of getting kidnapped.
He’s just absolutely determined to break the healthcare system, isn’t he?
In May, there were relatively elevated shares of delisted homes in metro areas including Miami–Fort Lauderdale–West Palm Beach in Florida, Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler in Arizona, and Houston–Pasadena–The Woodlands in Texas
When Trump was threatening to annex Canada, as well as having his goon squads kidnap people off the streets, there were a lot of Canadians who decided not to vacation in the States and more. And there were a bunch who owned summer homes in Florida and Arizona who decided to sell.
The economic uncertainty provoked by the massive layoffs, the tariff threats and the cratering value of the dollar, is also making people less secure, making them less likely to make big-dollar purchases.
There won’t be any. You saw that lack in his last administration, everything wrong was “sabotage by the Deep State”. Now it’s that he’s doing the right things, they’re just “being implemented wrong”.
I keep thinking back to something I heard during the election: Republicans get to be lawless, Democrats have to be flawless.
Not that I’m bitter …
RFK wants to open “wellness farms” where people with “mental health” and addiction issues can “raise their own food”.
It’s always the same: “We can’t take because we’re busy focusing on the issue at hand” —> “We can’t talk because we’re busy investigating the problem” —> “Why are you talking about old news, we’re focused on something else that’s more important”.
CDC site showing current variants, their lineages, and percentages. Also possibly a NowCast for your state or region.
Wastewater scan for covid and other infectious diseases. Filter by state or selected individual sewage processing plants that are part of the wastewater scan project (note that not all plants test for all diseases). Tells you how prevalent those diseases are in that area, potentially before diseases start to surge. May also have variant information.
PMC data dashboard. Lots of potentially useful stuff.
Which is also part of the problem. If they’re cautious and issue “too many” alerts or are “too alarmist”, people ignore them.
The point is that the people of Kerr County made a deliberate decision that they didn’t need a local system to reach out to people living there. They decided they whatever information and warnings they were getting from the state and the feds was sufficient. It’s easy to point to the NWS/NOAA firings as “the culprit”, but where’s the local responsibility?
They’ve said repeatedly that there was a list and a bunch of documents, and they’re going through everything very carefully to “protect” the hundreds of victims (yeah, right), etc. And now suddenly none of that exists?
Also, I don’t understand why Biden didn’t release the list.
Also, given Musk’s repeated obsession with pedophiles …
There’s all this focus on the NWS/NOAA not sending warnings early enough. Not from what I can tell, they were sending out warnings. And Kerr County, where many of the deaths have been, doesn’t have a local flood warning system because they didn’t want to pay for it.
I’m on Android and turned off all Gemini features on my Google accounts. Now it refuses to let me do reverse image searches, claiming I “don’t own” the images I’m trying to reverse search. It looks like (I haven’t checked) they want me to upload the images to Drive and give Google permission to access everything again before they’ll agree to do a reverse image search for me.
Fortunately, there’s still TinEye and Yandex.