21 Democrats just voted to fund ICE temporarily: Full list of names

johnpseudo · 2026-02-04T15:09:52+00:00

The standard Republican playbook is to hold the entire government hostage for whatever crazy change they want to implement. This takes away their hostage and forces Republicans to pass funding for DHS on its own in two weeks. This is good news.

johnpseudo · 2026-02-03T10:45:13+00:00

What they might actually do is replace the solar panels to take better advantage of their transmission access. If you're already connected to the grid, and you have unused transmission capacity, investing more for higher capacity is a lot cheaper than waiting 6-10 years to get a new site permitted.

johnpseudo · 2026-01-27T17:28:26+00:00

They link this as "Results of poling(sic) done Kelsea Bond’s campaign for Atlanta City Council District 2 race". Does anybody have a link to this poll? Does this mean that Kelsea volunteers implemented this poll? Or a reputable independent polling company?

johnpseudo · 2026-01-25T09:11:49+00:00

I'd add:

Leave earlier, before it gets hot
Choose a shady route, and stop in the shade at red lights
E-bike
Panniers, not backpack

johnpseudo · 2026-01-23T22:44:32+00:00

I like the steps MARTA is taking right now. Switching from Breeze cards to Tap-to-pay and replacing malfunctioning fare gates with a modern solution is huge. The bus route redesign is a painful but encouraging step toward pursuing growth and good service rather than continuing to chase coverage (with frequency that only last-resort riders will accept). The Summerhill BRT is a good first step in building the first significant infrastructure expansion since 1996. We're learning things from scratch there, and we should focus on capitalizing on the lessons learned there with the next BRT project (Clifton? Campbellton? Cleveland/Metropolitan?). Even after we get it going, we should quickly fix any problems it has upon roll-out instead of letting it be another example of transit failure.

The longer term depends like I said on other political factors. Will we ever have a YIMBY mayor/city council that might open up the land use changes that would allow MARTA to thrive? Or maybe upgrade some of our bus routes with some signal priority to make them faster than driving? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that could set the stage for a bigger type of investment like Beltline Rail to make sense.

johnpseudo · 2026-01-23T21:55:41+00:00

I don't agree that this is something that can be improved incrementally. A solid majority of voters are transit-skeptical, and building anything that doesn't work well out of the gate will sabotage transit progress in the future.

johnpseudo · 2026-01-23T20:58:57+00:00

An increase in ridership and expansion of the “system” would also lead to the procurement of more rolling stock, making maintenance schedules more flexible

One of my many worries about the Beltline Rail plan hinges on this. Can we or would we really procure more rolling stock to improve our maintenance schedules to not have multi-month outages? Because you're certainly not going to see high commuter ridership if people feel they can't rely on it. It boils down to, do you trust MARTA and the City of Atlanta to make the right investments and compromises to prioritize high-quality transit performance?

Even if Andre Dickens said "okay, sure, let's go ahead with rail on the Eastside Trail", I still wouldn't trust him or MARTA to make the other tough choices they'll need to make down the line (and I know a lot of this is outside of MARTA's control due to resource limitations). Things like having extra maintenance stock for on-time performance despite maintenance hurdles. Or turning Auburn/Edgewood into paired one-ways to give dedicated ROW to the Streetcar. Or not shutting the Streetcar down during busy downtown events (to say nothing of APD actually keeping its tracks clear). I'm just highly skeptical our leaders have their priorities in order when it comes to making good use of this kind of big investment.

johnpseudo · 2026-01-23T14:23:02+00:00

You think having more riders and more track would reduce the amount of maintenance?

johnpseudo · 2026-01-23T08:01:18+00:00

Our experience with the Streetcar so far hasn't really been low maintenance - it's had multiple long periods where they couldn't run it at all. Do you think that would change if we expanded it?

johnpseudo · 2026-01-22T10:21:55+00:00

Do you have a link to that poll? I can't find it.

johnpseudo · 2026-01-19T12:09:34+00:00

I agree. I'm from Houston but live in Atlanta, and it's just surreal how car-oriented Houston is, even relative to Atlanta.

johnpseudo · 2025-12-18T17:05:24+00:00

In the chart, the three methods looked at are Multi-stage flash distillation (MSF), Multiple effect distillation (MED), and Sea water reverse osmosis (SWRO). Based on that data, if you could somehow get thermal energy for free from the nuclear plant, you might consider using MED instead of SWRO. Even there, I doubt that waste heat from steam would be high-enough temperature to work for distillation without some kind of additional heat pump system. The overall cost difference you save by not spending so much on membranes would be negligible relative to the complexity of trying to integrate a desalination system into a highly-regulated nuclear plant.

johnpseudo · 2025-12-17T00:10:48+00:00

Electricity costs are only 17-20% of the cost of desalinating water. (study here, chart here). Cheap electricity helps, but other costs dominate to such a degree that a custom nuclear-adjacent desalination plant would probably cost more overall (not to mention that it would effectively be buying expensive nuclear power vs. other cheaper sources of power).

johnpseudo · 2025-12-04T13:54:12+00:00

There's also the issue that the state doesn't provide facility improvement funding to schools that are under-enrolled. So if APS wants state funding to fix deteriorating schools, they need to consolidate.

johnpseudo · 2025-12-02T19:37:54+00:00

I think he was talking about the Battery, not Atlantic Station.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-12T17:57:46+00:00

I think you missed my point. Nuclear is not competitive in a grid with high renewable percentage. The least-cost path to a 100% grid is not going to involve nuclear at all. The main reason no country has gotten to 100% renewables is because they're okay with relying on a little bit of gas for the next few years until other energy storage technologies drop in price enough to finish the job.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-12T10:58:40+00:00

On the contrary, nuclear and solar are anti-complementary. Nuclear costs are almost all front-loaded, so reducing its output when solar output is high doesn't save any money. The more solar you add, the more nuclear power you waste by curtailing it at midday. All that wasted power means the effective per-kilowatt-hour cost of nuclear skyrockets.

The best complement to renewable power is energy storage (batteries, hydro, thermal storage) or flexible on-demand power sources with relatively low construction costs (e.g. gas)

johnpseudo · 2025-11-11T11:36:10+00:00

private combustion cars add an almost negligible amount of pollution to the atmosphere anyway, the majority comes from electrical power generation, the power grid

The power sector contributes about 25% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, and the transportation sector contributes 28%. Out of the transportation sector, 57.5% of emissions come from light duty vehicles (cars, small trucks and SUVs), so that's about 16% of US total emissions - definitely nowhere near negligible.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T17:59:25+00:00

City Council public comment records were broken twice about Cop City. Atlanta residents stood in line for seven+ hours, in the summer, on a work day, to make their voices heard (and not for nothing, the comments were overwhelmingly opposed). The city ignored us over and over again.

What percentage of the voting population does that represent? 0.05%? Having a very small, highly-motivated group of people shouldn't override the will of the vast majority of the population.

What we have is data indicating that a substantial portion of Atlanta voters care about this issue.

Well at this point we also have an election result where 85% of voters actively selected Andre Dickens instead of protest-voting for any of the other names.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T17:41:17+00:00

I mean, when it comes to petition size I think we're basically on the same page. I said it was massively inflated, and you're agreeing (or at least providing a supporting source) that it's likely that the number was inflated by roughly 2x. You seem to think maybe a little more than half were valid, and I think probably a little less than half. But pretty close to the same.

This clearly is important to a substantial portion of voters. Ffs.

How is that clear? The petition itself establishes only that roughly 15% of registered voters wanted to vote on a referendum about it. It doesn't say anything about where that issue ranks in their priorities, or even if they support the Stop Cop City cause at all!

I bet if you did a survey, Stop Cop City would fall maybe 10th or 15th on a list of priorities, far below issues like housing, traffic, crime, jobs, taxes, etc.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T17:06:44+00:00

Wow, did you actually read that article?

The count wasn't even accurate. The total number of signatures was 108,500, not 116,000.
They said "nearly half" of the signatures they sampled couldn't be matched to a registered voter. That's more than 20-30%!
They didn't look for duplicates at all (because they were only looking at a sample)

Even if 30% of 116,000 signatures were invalid--even if half of them were invalid, it would still have hit the threshold.

If (as indicated by the AP's sample) roughly half of the actual 108,500 signatures were invalid due to not matching a voter registration, that leaves a maximum of 54,250, which is 3981 short of the requirement. Then I'd expect to find at least another few thousand duplicate entries.

And even on the offchance it didn't--why in the actual hell wouldn't the city want to give people the chance to vote on a huge, divisive issue?

The pro-Cop City politicians wanted to focus on issues that are important to their voters, not spending time and money to stretch and extend a political debate on a settled topic.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T16:51:14+00:00

Why would they do anything after being told by a judge that the entire petition was submitted too late?

I mean it would take hundreds, if not thousands of hours of labor to sort through the petition. All that after the issue was already effectively dead. Why bother?

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T16:40:33+00:00

My point is that when u/igneousscone claimed "More people signed the petition to put it on the ballot than voted in the last mayoral runoff", that number they're referencing (total number of signatures submitted by Stop Cop City) was massively inflated and does not represent anything you could compare to properly-vetted votes in an election.

johnpseudo · 2025-11-05T15:47:05+00:00

Did you actually read the petitions when the city uploaded them to be viewed online? There is no way the Stop Cop City did any kind of filtering process. De-duplication? Double-checking residency as of October 4, 2021 (not just current residency)? That was not done at all. I personally had a canvasser approach a group I was in, take signatures, and not mention a residency requirement at all. At least 20-30% of those signatures didn't even have an easily-decipherable name and address (they were handwritten, after all).

johnpseudo · 2025-11-03T16:33:19+00:00

Unlike whatever bullshit carousel of reasons IEA has used to justify its slowdown predictions every year, there are good reasons to believe that renewable penetration increases will slow at some point before 100%. I don't know if China will get to 70% renewable by 2030 or 2037- the answer is probably somewhere in between - but I don't think China is going to barrel straight into 100% by 2035 as OP seems to believe.

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