George Dubya
@itisgeorge.bsky.social
300 followers 47 following 3.9K posts
A mishmash: Middle East stuff, development stuff, organizational dysfunction, crisis response, carbon transition dynamics, silly sports things. Mostly here to read smarter people than me.
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itisgeorge.bsky.social
Ohh yeah. My experience is being downwind from a wildfire that tore through a small town. Burning trees smell one way; when the insulation and wiring and plastic in a bunch of people's houses and the foam in their furniture and the weed killer in their garages etc etc burns, it smells very different
itisgeorge.bsky.social
Swear to God, Stephen Miller could claim Portland got nuked and NYT would write one of these "what is the nature of reality, who's to say if a nuke blew up or not, certainly not a newspaper!" articles like only they can write
itisgeorge.bsky.social
This is all so stupid and dishonest, but just for the record I've been downwind from a city on fire, and if more than like a block or two was burning everyone for miles around would have no fucking doubt. If you're walking around a city and you can breathe then IT'S NOT ON FIRE.
itisgeorge.bsky.social
There's an old quote supposedly by the founder of Honda: "When Congress passes new emissions standards, we hire 50 more engineers and GM hires 50 more lawyers." Sounds like the Euro automakers do the same bullshit, and sounds like more or less the same result
aukehoekstra.bsky.social
If you want an explanation of why China is kicking the EU car industry to the curb, look no further than the criminally knuckle dragging EU car makers demanding new loopholes so they don't have to meet any meaningful low emission targets for cars in the EU.
www.ft.com/cIfontent/5a...
Carmakers demand EU eases ‘rigid’ 2035 petrol car ban
Environmental groups say carmakers’ demands risk halving electric vehicle sales in Europe
www.ft.com
itisgeorge.bsky.social
(The hotel day shift comes in) "Anything happen overnight?"

"Some Americans stayed up all night watching that weird game they have where you try to hit a ball with the stick and it takes forever. Otherwise pretty quiet."
volts.wtf
7:15am. Off to bed. Once I stop watching this replay.
itisgeorge.bsky.social
See, this is why living on the west coast is best. We can watch a marathon like that and still have our Friday might and/or get to bed at a decent hour
Reposted by George Dubya
leahsottile.bsky.social
It's gonna fuck him up if he finds out we have a store called Mr. Plywood.
atrupar.com
Trump: "Portland, I mean -- every time I look at that place it's burning down. There are fires all over the place. When a store -- there are very few of them left -- but when a store owner rebuilds a store they build it out of plywood. They don't put up storefronts anymore. They just put wood up."
itisgeorge.bsky.social
lol "adult content" sorry for the smut
itisgeorge.bsky.social
Going out on a limb to guess that the Raw Egg Nationalist does not look like this in real life
itisgeorge.bsky.social
And here's the same dude last year promising to send Trump a thank you note if he killed solar. I mean, this kind of self-indulgence is just really hard to abide

macskamoksha.com/2024/12/gree...
itisgeorge.bsky.social
This cuts in a lot of different directions. Here's a guy who has been fighting solar/wind/transmission in the desert for years, happy as a clam about this
itisgeorge.bsky.social
On the other hand, maybe spreading democracy would freak out Israel to the point where they embrace mass murder a few years earlier
itisgeorge.bsky.social
IMOH one of Obama's greatest mistakes was not telling Sisi and the Saudis to fuck off and let Morsi work. If he sucked (and he did) he would lose the next election, you didn't need to overthrow him. That was the nail in the coffin for democracy in the region
itisgeorge.bsky.social
Do farmers just grow something else, or do they abandon go back to buying a lot of fertilizer? If it's extra fertilizer that will cause more environmental damage but I don't know enough about farm economics to know if that strategy makes any sense
itisgeorge.bsky.social
c) farmers make $ selling soybeans to China, d) China gets cheap beans, e) less fertilizer running off into rivers and causing climate impacts (see this good article about this). But what happens if the soybean market is nuked?

bsky.app/profile/glob...
itisgeorge.bsky.social
Curious what happens re: soybeans and I suspect there's a huge environmental story here. My understanding is corn farmers do one year corn/one year soybeans, which means a) beans recharge the soil by adding nitrogen for corn to use next year, b) farmers don't need to buy (as much?) fertilizer... 1/
sarahtaber.bsky.social
Farm bankruptcies are back in the news, so it's time to pull this chart out again.

Hey look they kept rising during Trump's first term. Then they went way down under Biden.

Now they're up again? So weird. Thanks Farm Bureau for the graphic
Screenshot from Farm Bureau article on farm bankruptcies. It shows farm bankruptcies climbing steadily 2014-2020, falling by half in 2021, & continuing to fall through 2023.
Reposted by George Dubya
itisgeorge.bsky.social
The thing is, CMS doesn't have to do this and it would be easy to just say the two hospitals are more than 35 miles apart and leave it at that (if you needed documentation, you could just leave a footnote that says “I mean, come on.”) If CMS made this move it means they wanted to. 11/20
Reposted by George Dubya
itisgeorge.bsky.social
WTF is this. if this is true it's huge news. 13/20
Reposted by George Dubya
itisgeorge.bsky.social
This almost certainly won’t work. From their website, the Willows fire dept. has 4 paid staff and 30 volunteers. If they could have afforded ALS status they would have got it already. A volunteer FD with no money and a new EKG cannot replace a 25 bed hospital. 14/20
Reposted by George Dubya
itisgeorge.bsky.social
Although it might not, because most small towns aren’t close to a city, so if your town’s CAH hospital closes the next closest hospital is likely in another small town and also has CAH status. CMS pays the same $ regardless of which CAH hospital you visit, only you’re more likely to be dead 18/20
itisgeorge.bsky.social
The replies to this are excellent but I suspect part of it is that Trump is stuck in the 80s and probably saw Rain Man once and hated it (and spent most of the movie feeling horny for Valeria Golino) and he thinks America is full of people who took tylenol and turned out like Dustin Hoffman
theferocity.bsky.social
I don’t exactly how to phrase this, but like… is autism that bad???? Like, why is it such a source of fear??? Of course there are challenges but you can be autistic and have a rich, fulfilling life! Many people do! I don’t understand the preoccupation.
itisgeorge.bsky.social
I’m not a medical historian but I’d love to know more about this. My gut says this is one of Ronald Reagan’s Greatest Hits but I don't know 20/20/end
itisgeorge.bsky.social
It would screw rural towns over but they already did that with the BBB. Selectively messing with CAH status, especially on the 35 mile rule, could be a way to boast (fake?) big savings and damage blue states. The red victims living in those blue states would just be collateral damage. 19/20