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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 5th, 2024

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  • Relevant text below:

    District 19 represents 8,000 machinists who repair locomotives and heavy equipment for freight rail carriers including CSX, BNSF, and Union Pacific.

    The Department of Labor and the Machinists entered into an agreement to rerun last year’s election—which Murtaugh lost by just six votes—after the challengers filed charges over irregularities with member addresses. It is extremely rare to have an election redone in this way. Fewer than 0.3 percent of union elections lead to a rerun supervised or ordered by the DOL.

    Ballots were cast—or due in the mail—on May 3, but then had to be sealed and shipped to a central location to be counted under DOL direction.

    Murtaugh and Rosato campaigned on a platform of increased transparency and a more militant posture toward the employers.

    “The members have voted in a working member, because they’re tired of the ways things have been run,” says Murtagh. “I campaigned on having members engaged in the contract negotiations—no more closed doors.”

    Negotiations for the next national rail contracts are expected to begin later this year. Contract negotiations under the Railway Labor Act, which covers railroad and airline workers, often take years.





  • Relevant Section on the genetics:

    For the study, the researchers took blood from five of the cats, which had been adopted, and conducted a DNA test on four of the felines, which turned up no genetic mutations associated with white fur.

    They then performed a whole genome sequencing for two of the cats, and this step turned up a deletion in what’s called the KIT gene, which can encode whether white will turn up in a feline’s coat (scientists have also connected variations in the KIT gene to piebald patterns in various animals like horses and mice.)

    “In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats,” the researchers conclude.



  • Relevant section of the article where it lays out what has been changing and what still needs to change:

    … graft has been all but exterminated in some of the worst affected areas - for instance, government services such as issuing passports, permits and licences.

    He also tells the BBC that significant progress had been made in reforming education and police.

    Problem areas

    Mr Kalmykov admits, however, that the government has been less successful in eradicating corruption in using natural resources (e.g. in mining and forestry), regulating monopolies and in large infrastructure projects.

    “Progress has been slowest where big interests and big players meet,” he says.

    According to him, “in the next five-ten years the government should focus on cleansing the judiciary, which will make the general system of public administration healthier”.





  • I think this information was already posted a week or so ago, but if you haven’t seen it yet the relevant text is:

    Chinese battery giant CATL, supplier to some of Australia’s biggest grid-scale project developers, has unveiled a new containerised battery energy storage system promising a one-third increase in energy density, a 20% reduction in overall footprint and a longer service life.

    Stored in a 20-foot TEU container, the mass producible Tener has a 6.25 MWh capacity which CATL says represents a 30% increase in energy density per unit area and a 20% reduction in the overall project footprint.

    The new battery also claims to provide zero degradation of capacity over the first five years of use, “a significant advancement”, which CATL says increase the lifespan of batteries.

    “Tener is equipped with long service life and zero-degradation cells tailored for energy storage applications, achieving an energy density of 430 Wh/L, an impressive milestone for LFP batteries used in energy storage,” the company says.



  • The text is a bit vague about if this is an 80% cut from the total or 80% cut from the remaining, previously cut fees. Good news regardless though.

    Article Text:

    The [Biden] administration on Thursday finalized a rule that cuts costs for developing solar and wind energy on public lands.

    The rule was expected to cut by 80 percent fees that are based on how much energy is produced through the year 2035.

    A partial reduction is already in place based on [2022 guidance], but the administration said that the new rule contains further cuts and codifies them into the federal register.

    The fee cuts become less dramatic after 2035 and will ratchet down in the following years to be just a 20 percent cut in 2038 and beyond.

    The rule also seeks to expand energy production in designated “priority areas” by simplifying the process for issuing new rights to build wind and solar projects.

    The administration announced additional milestones alongside the rule, saying that the Interior Department has now given the OK to enough renewable projects on public lands to power 12 million homes.

    Interior Secretary [Deb Haaland] told reporters on a press call that the Biden administration has approved more than double the number of renewable energy projects than the Trump administration did during its four years.

    “The previous administration did everything they could to hobble our department’s clean energy program, but we’re making up for lost time,” she said.

    In addition to the cost cut and milestone, the administration announced that two major solar projects in California were now fully operational.


  • That’s a good point about disease and I think it could be a potential cause of the low genetic prevalence.

    I don’t know about your roaming free option. I think if that were true, there would still be wild packs today or there would have been roving dog packs mentioned in historical text (possible but I don’t recall any mention of them). Alternatively, they would have inter-breed with European varieties and had a more significant impact on genetics, but that’s not seen.

    While I agree that Europeans liked to remove/exterminate “uncivilized” things, that mostly applies to people. I suspect if the American dogs were significantly useful they would have made use of them.

    This conversation allowed me to recall that the plains tribes utilized dogs as pack animals. Then once horses made their way onto the scene those tribes switched from dogs to horses for that role. I’m not sure what other “jobs” American dogs performed but I suspect if they were significantly utilized as pack animals they were probably breed for such and with that niche gone they may not have performed well in other “dog” tasks, compared to European varieties.

    To conclude, for American dogs to be such a small percent of the current dog genome, I think, the European varieties had to significantly outlive their American counterparts. Whether because they were replaced by better performing European varieties/horses, because they died from European diseases, or a combination of those options.