State Electricity Use Per Capita

From Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Atmos/Energy Program:

Red states appear to intentionally waste electricity by not making efforts to reduce electricity use through better insulation, appliance standards, etc.

The nine states with the lowest per-capita electricity use are all blue.


[Click to enlarge.]

The 12 states with the highest per-capita electricity use are red.

The ratio of per-capita electricity use of the bottom-12 red states to the top-9 blue states is 2.60:1. In other words, these 12 red states use 2.6x the electricity per person as the 9 blue states.

Similarly, the per-capita electricity use of Texas is 2.67x that of California.

Those cutoff numbers Jacobson uses are where the first red/blue breaks are located. 

The 10th lowest per-capita state is Alaska, a red state. There are four more blue states before another red state is listed (Utah). 

The 13th highest per-capita state is Virginia, a blue state. Two more red states are listed before another blue state comes up on the high end: New Mexico. Then two more red states, and by that point, the list is at about the average usage. 

Wyoming and North Dakota are particular outliers with extremely high usage compared to all the other states, even the other red states. I don't know which states' residents are most likely to use electricity for heat, though I know the Northeast is most likely to use oil and the Midwest to use natural gas, while of course California and the Pacific Northwest states have less need for heat or air conditioning, on average, than most states. 

North Dakota, I would think, probably follows the natural gas (or maybe LP gas in rural areas) pattern and does not generally use electricity for heat. I don't know anything about Wyoming's heat sources. Louisiana, I imagine, uses a lot of air conditioning in badly insulated buildings, compared to, say, Florida or Arizona, which are both closer to average usage despite being very hot places.

 

At Least It Was Short

Sometimes I think I'm not discriminating enough in my reading, especially of fiction. I tend to like most things I read. I can count on one hand — or maybe two — the number of books I've read that I despised, or had to stop reading because I disliked them so intensely. 

Well, it just happened again, and in some ways it makes me feel better. I'm not a patsy for a pretty face, or an award-winner!

This time it was This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I picked it up because the edition I saw was beautiful, and it was the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novella. 

I did finish the story this time, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something in how it would develop. Nope.

I have great patience for science fiction that throws you into the deep end of incomprehensibility. I've been reading the genre since I was 10. Generally, I catch on to the world the author is building at some point and that's all it takes. 

But that never managed to happen for me with this story. Sometimes there were glimpses of it beginning to make sense, but I didn't care enough about the world or universe they were describing to try to figure it out. The writers were so wrapped up in their precious inter-textual cleverness and the epistolary form of the story that there was, as Gertrude Stein said, no there there. 

I'm not a Goodreads member, but I do check it once in a while. This book had the most divergent reviews I think I've ever seen. It has many five-star reviews, but there are also a substantial number of one-star reviews, often with dozens and dozens of comments in agreement. 

The fact that this story won those three awards makes me doubt the judgment of the people who award them.

Ode to a Vacuum Cleaner

We bought our vacuum cleaner in 1988 or maybe 1989. It's a Sears Kenmore with a HEPA filter. It still works great.

We bought it from the giant Sears Roebuck store that was on Lake Street in South Minneapolis. The building's tower is now condos, and the first floor is partly AllinaHealth and partly the Midtown Global Market.

I wonder if any consumer-priced vacuum cleaner you could buy today would still be in good shape after 36 or 37 years of use.

I love you, vacuum cleaner, even though I have an inherent dread of using you. That's not your fault. You do your job.

Please don't quit us.

Just Waking Up

I dared to take a 2.5-hour nap late in the day after a large Thanksgiving meal, and now I am hopelessly behind on the day's news. 

But I know that the 20-year-old National Guard soldier shot in Washington, D.C. yesterday has died of her wounds. That some information on her killer has come out. And that Trump talked to some of the remaining White House Press Corps.

More will continue to be known or understood as being true about the killer. (I use the passive voice — "come out" and "be known" — intentionally because I don't trust whether the information on him is being released in good faith, or being manipulated in some way by this regime.)

At the moment, there is this from the press event, Aaron Rupar transcribing:

Q: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was vetted & it came up clean

TRUMP: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no vetting

Q: Actually, your DOJ IG [inspector general] says there was thorough vetting of Afghans. So why blame Biden?

TRUMP: You're just asking questions because you're a stupid person 

Which brought to mind this existing cartoon for one respondent:

The killer was, it appears, part of a CIA unit in Afghanistan. He was brought to the U.S. after our withdrawal. (A New York Times story from this evening documenting that here.)

This post from X is by the Fox News chief national security correspondent:

Gillian Branstetter wrote:

From a 2022 ProPublica report on CIA-trained "Zero Units" in Afghanistan, a former member of which shot two National Guard troops in DC yesterday:



[Quoting ProPublica] "I cataloged hundreds of night raids by one of the four Zero Unit squads, which was known in Afghanistan as 02 unit, eventually identifying at least 452 civilians killed in its raids over four years."

So... What is the speculation as to his motivations for the shooting? The simplest is that he was mentally ill, perhaps in part because of guilt from his own actions in the war. Second is that he understood the Trump regime's plans to return asylum-claimants to their countries of origin and knew that would be a death sentence for him. Third, and wildly speculative, coming from the conspiracy-minded: he was induced to do the shooting by Trump allies in the CIA to further destabilize the U.S. — whether they intended death or not. 

As we all know, it is still early in all of this. Not enough is known, and it will likely be impossible to ever know enough to be sure. But it has to be said, since it is being said.

Thoughts in the Night

Somehow, I missed this F Minus cartoon when it ran originally:

I guess I'm not the only one who does this. 

I'll dream (or semi-dream? it seems like I'm awake) of some aspect of a real problem in my life that I have to remember to deal with, and keep myself awake — or at least from sleeping soundly — for a while as I worry about it, and wonder if I'll remember it in the morning. 

Sometimes I sit up enough to send myself an email from my phone. That means I can forget about it and go back to sleep, so it's a good solution. I just include a few words to describe it in the subject line.

When I wake up in the morning and look at my emails, what I see there sometimes makes sense, and sometimes has no basis in reality. 

I've heard that cortisol, the stress hormone, peaks in the middle of the night. That checks out, in my experience.

Grifters and Ideologues

Denali Dasgupta, a Chicago-based early childhood and public systems researcher who ran for alderman in that city at some point, posted this today.

May I present my Brief & Speculative theory of Federal Agency Leadership (2025)...

She posted this in the context of Pete Hegseth tangling with Senator Mark Kelly. Hegseth, of course, is a grifter in her analysis.

She doesn't give an example of an ideologue in the post, just some general description.

Winter Is Coming

It seems as though a lot of local people keep complaining that it's going to be so cold for Thanksgiving in these parts. 

This is the forecast:

I know I'm getting old, and I've been here in Minnesota close to 40 years... but geez, people, the mid- to high 20s is not cold, even for late November. It's pretty average. Those highs are barely below freezing. 

Their reaction is indicative of how mild the past few winters, and especially our fall seasons, have been, and mine is about how long I've been here. While I don't remember the true "Minnesota winters" that long-time residents talk about — since I only got here in 1986 when temperatures had already starting to warm a bit — I do remember winters that were colder than the ones we've had lately. Winter warming has accelerated noticeably in the past 10 years, which has meant inconsistent snow cover and more freeze-thaw cycles. The USDA finally changed the Twin Cities' planting zone from 4b to 5a, for instance, recognizing that we hadn't gone below –20°F in 30 years.

We don't yet have the frequent ice storms that are common in the lower Plains states. It's still a bit too cold for that. But look at those rain predictions on the forecast when it says the high is 25° or 24°F. Something to look forward to.

Four Threads

There have been several involved threads over the past couple of days that I'd like to share. Some are funny, or at least funny/outrageous, or just... part of the current hellscape.

First: These two guys from North Texas decided to invade an island off the coast of Port au Prince, Haiti:



They wanted to kill all the men, then rape and enslave the women and children. That sounds terrible, I know, and it is, but get this:

"Gonâve Island has a population of about 87,000." Two guys? They sure do dream big.
prefect.bsky.social

Guy who couldn’t even make it through Air Force Basic Training thinks he’s going to take on an island of 87,000 people.
 @jenne.myatproto.social

No, no, they also were recruiting homeless people in DC to help with the coup.
Eukaryote @eukaryotex.bsky.social

Will their defense be that they are too stupid to be guilty of the attempt to coup?
jayhawkshannon.bsky.social

Oh, to have the unearned confidence of a racist white man…
tawdryhepburn9.bsky.social

JFC. No wonder American women are saying "no" to this version of American manhood.
AnneC @annecw.bsky.social

cannot believe they were named Gavin and Tanner, cosmic writers room just phoning it in AGAIN
Paz Pardo @pazsays.bsky.social

They probably thought getting a point off Serena Williams was too easy. Wanted a challenge...
Forza Bahab

Then there's Elon Musk's attempt to label where tweets on X/Twitter originate from. This has been happening over the past day or so, and resulted in unmasking a lot of right-wing/MAGA accounts as coming from Eastern Europe, India, and just about every country except the U.S.

I'm not sure if the feature is still live or not. It sounds like it has come and gone and maybe come again, or maybe it only shows up for some users? Whatever. The results have been extremely enlightening.

I gather that Musk just accidentally made the mistake of revealing how many “MAGA” accounts are actually posting from outside the US.
Patrick Chovanec

im crying literally what was he expecting to happen. i don't think this shit even lasted an hour. that's how fast it backfired
 @7thdragon2020.bsky.social

X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos were stolen from European models and posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people. [Screen snapshots included in the original]
Benjamin Strick @bendobrown.bsky.social

Twitter pays people based on engagement (views, retweets, comments, etc). It appears that many MAGA accounts are based abroad and they use AI technology to generate low-effort rage bait. My guess is that this will get worse as AI tech improves. For instance, fake videos of minorities doing crime.
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

The irony of these people complaining about the invented dangers of immigrants and then welcoming brain pollution from overseas hustlers.
Philip Bump

If I’m understanding this correctly, X is owned by a white nationalist who pays poor people of color in developing countries to pretend to be working class white Americans to scare other white Americans into being afraid poor people of color from developing countries are going to ruin America?
Max Berger

If you’re a journalist who’s still on Twitter, from now on in your writing you have to replace “the American people want” with “troll bots in Eastern Europe demand.” Being there makes your judgment suspect. I don’t care how savvy you think you are, you’re marinating in a disinformation campaign.
Kevin M. Kruse

Now for some comic relief, this morning there was a thread responding to a person who confused the term "open source" and "public domain," and also was not... very... well-read...

the faerie queene has answered "YES" with alarming enthusiasm to the question
Blue Eyes White Macron @antitractionist.bsky.social

On the other hand, copyright licensing may as well be of the fae
toadescope

i watched two movies and they both were about people falling in love. is that allowed?
fatty pinner

Clearly they haven't seen the Fae license agreement. Thank them the wrong way and they might own your baby.
Swarm of cheese @stoney.monster

Finally, on a more serious note, there was a short thread on our incipient bubble, due to be bursting:

NVIDIA earnings were a mirage. The market figured it out surprisingly fast. NVIDIA bump evaporated. I don’t know how this information can enter the system without exploding the bubble. But sometimes bezzles are visible for months before crash. AirBnB's CEO is calling it “vibe revenue”... The underlying cause of every bubble — debt masquerading as financial innovation — depends on not just short financial memory and speculative neophytism, but reinventing jargon of finance, like how each generation of kids has new ways to say same things.
Matt Seybold

Someone is going to have to write the thing about how “vibe” has become a substitute for meaningful theory in a world where the theory is so clear — grift and power — but we collectively refuse it because it isn’t sophisticated enough to generate make-work for empiricists.
Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.
Joyce Park @troutgirl.bsky.social

Gag Gifts at the Ginkgo

You never know when you need a gag gift this time of year. 

The Ginkgo Coffee House on Snelling Avenue in the Hamline-Midway neighborhood has always had an assortment of unnecessary but fun things for sale, but lately the variety seems a lot greater.

Here are three I saw last night when I was there to listen to some music.

The first thing that caught my eye were the multi-colored, miniature rubber chickens:

Then there were the handerpants:

I suppose those might have the added benefit of helping to keep your hands warm in a cold office. 

Last, there was the shelf of office squirrels:

I have enough real squirrels around my house, so I don't feel a need for those, despite the cuteness factor.

Test Your Pee for Hidden Heart Risk

Highway 280 in Saint Paul is lined with billboards, some of which I've written about before. Currently, there's a billboard on the east side (northbound) that probably has the worst design of all time. 

There's an unwritten rule about billboards: they shouldn't have more than seven to 10 words at most. And I would add, their visual elements should be clearly understandable to the viewer. 

This photo is slightly blurry (my apologies) but even if it wasn't, that wouldn't help much:

I've been trying to figure out what this billboard image is for weeks when I drove past, or even what the words say. After a few tries, I figured out it had something to do with kidneys and getting tested for something, but until I took this photo and squinted at it, I had no idea that:

• The red stuff in the middle is red smoke sent up from a flare, held by a hand at the bottom center of the billboard. We had speculated they were flower petals, or maybe blood.
  
• The first line of centered type says (I think! I still can barely read it) "For those with high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes"
• The slightly more readable reversed white bars say, "Are your kidneys sending an" and "for hidden heart risk?"
• In between the two white bars are the partially obstructed letters SOS, with a cutesy heart in the letter O. Because there has to be a second heart to go with the larger smoke heart (you know, the one you couldn't tell was a heart in the first place).
  
• Then there's "Talk to a doctor about the uACR* urine test" down in the dark reversed bar near the bottom. Now that's a memorable name for a test. Once I realized that wording referred to a test, I've tried to remember the test's name several times and never managed it. 
• Finally, I only realized there was a little logo for "Detect the SOS" at bottom right and the name of a drug company, Boehringer Ingelheim, at top left when I looked at the photo. I never even noticed them while I was trying to decipher the many main parts of the message.
• At bottom left is something I still can't read, just above the dark bar across the billboard. There's also some tiny type at bottom left, below the dark bar. Maybe that relates to the asterisk after the name of the uACR test. Lawyers must have insisted on those, since there's no way anyone could possibly read them. 

And isn't it so great how they wasted so much space on empty blue sky, while cramming all those words in too small a size into the center of the billboard?

For those wishing to count, there are 20 words in the four parts of the main headline, and nine words in the "talk to your doctor" call to action. I have no idea how many words are in the two other small lines.

There Were No Nails and the Shields Were Mostly Cardboard

If it wasn't already obvious, Greg Bovino, CBP, and DHS generally are a bunch of lying liars. This is now documented extensively from Bovino's testimony in a Chicago courtroom, vs. multiple videos, including DHS's own body camera footage. The judge in the case set it all out in writing today.

This BlueSky thread by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, summarizes the most outrageous findings, and in the thread, provides a screen snapshot of the various conclusions by the judge:

On October 28, DHS's social media account claimed that on October 23, "rioters" had "shot at agents with commercial artillery shell fireworks," thus forcing agents to deploy tear gas and riot munitions.

Judge Ellis reviewed the video. This was completely false. The explosions were DHS's flashbangs!

DHS claimed that agents were forced to use riot munitions to disperse an "unruly mob" on September 19.

In fact, "the scene [was] quiet," and then "almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls, stating 'fuck yea!' as they do so."

DHS claimed that on September 26, a DHS officer claimed they were forced to deploy riot munitions because protestors were "becoming increasingly hostile."

In fact, "the [Body Worn Camera] video shows that the protesters were simply standing there when agents first deployed any force."

DHS claimed an incident on Oct. 3 showed agents were in danger of being "rammed."

In fact, body cams "suggest[] that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force."

Judge Ellis says all these errors, no matter how minor, add up. "[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that [DHS] represent[s]."

E.g., a top officer testified protestors had shields with nails in them; there were no nails and mostly [the shields were] cardboard.

In another incident, DHS officers wrote in an incident report, which DHS again publicized, that protestors had throw a bike at federal agents.

In fact, body cams showed that it was the agents themselves that "actually took a protester's bike and threw it to the side."

When she gets to Gregory Bovino, she finds him completely uncredible, and says he was evasive or outright lied multiple times across three days of testimony — and not just any falsehoods, he was not telling the truth about multiple things which were all captured on video, making it all very obvious.



For example, the incident on October 23 where DHS claimed that Bovino was hit in the head with a rock before he deployed tear gas at protestors?

That didn't happen. He fired tear gas and then AFTERWARDS, someone threw a rock. He went back and forth on this under oath, repeatedly changing his story.

On top of all that, Trump's Department of Justice [sic] today dropped all charges against a Chicago-area woman who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent. DHS had claimed she rammed agents with her car and pulled a gun on them. But her attorney quickly came out with information about videos that did not support that story, and now this dismissal strongly suggests DHS couldn't prove its version in court.

I have no idea if the injured woman, Marimar Martinez, will be able to sue, or if Chicago or Illinois will be able to criminally charge the agents involved. Everything is upside down and backwards in this time of lying liars in charge of the government.

Now That's a Toy for a Tot

I generally don't shop at Menard's (a regional mega-hardware store in this area, owned by a Wisconsin conservative family), but I needed 4x8' sheets of polycarbonate, as you would use on a greenhouse, and that's not the kind of thing my local hardware store stocks.

On the way out of the store, I saw this in a big box located off the end of the cash register area:

I don't know quite what kind of animal it's supposed to be, since it had a long tail. But it was sure big, and it may impress whatever child it's given to, as long as the child is smaller than the animal.