Alvaro Papa Silva

you've gotta admit the NCAA has an incredible sense of comic timing

Time for 2025 updates to my annual “opinions about solar” thread. If you like these, you might like the second edition of my book, Solar Power Finance Without The Jargon. A 30% discount code WSQ0437 is valid on publisher website until end of November 2025.

www.worldscientific.com/worldscibook...

Department of State v @StateDept g.. The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans. The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.: 5:55 PM • Oct 14, 2025 • 34.1K Views

BREAKING: Marco Rubio's State Department announces publicly that it is exercising unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in revoking people's visas based on comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk.

“Living car-free is the most impactful behavior by far in terms of reducing emissions.”

I'm at the scene where ICE abducted multiple people from Lincoln and Foster this morning.

A WGN producer was among the people taken, allegedly because she was among a group of bystanders who tried to intervene. ICE agents hit this car while making their getaway.

We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.

Pope Leo, after Trump critique, urges Catholics to help immigrants Pope Leo urged the world's 1.4 billion Catholics on Sunday to care for immigrants, pressing ahead with a message of welcome for migrants days after criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump's hard-line anti-immigration policies.

Pope Leo urged the world's 1.4 billion Catholics on Sunday to care for immigrants, pressing ahead with a message of welcome for migrants days after criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump's hard-line anti-immigration policies. For @reuters.com:

Wildfire activity has increased in the US and is projected to accelerate under future climate change. However, our understanding of the impacts of climate change on wildfire activity, smoke, and health outcomes remains highly uncertain, due to the difficulty of modeling the causal chain from climate to wildfire to air pollution and health. Here we quantify the mortality burden in the US due to wildfire smoke fine particulate matter (PM2.5) under climate change. We construct an ensemble of statistical and machine learning models that link climate to wildfire smoke PM2.5, and empirically estimate smoke PM2.5 mortality relationships using data on all recorded deaths in the US. We project that smoke PM2.5 could result in 71,420 excess deaths (95% CI: 34,930 - 98,430) per year by 2050 under a high warming scenario (SSP3-7.0) - a 73% increase relative to estimated 2011-2020 average annual excess deaths from smoke. Cumulative excess deaths from smoke PM2.5 could reach 1.9 million between 2026-2055. We find evidence for mortality impacts of smoke PM2.5 that last up to three years after exposure. When monetized, climate-driven smoke deaths result in economic damages that exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the US. Our research suggests that the health impacts of climate-driven wildfire smoke could be among the most important and costly consequences of a warming climate in the US.

In the US, PM₂.₅ from wildfire smoke already kills about the same number of people as guns and cars (~40k each), but this will increase significantly with climate change. 😐

The U.S. added just 22,000 jobs in August, confirming dramatic slowdown in the labor market The August report is the first since President Donald Trump fired a top Labor Department official over accusations of releasing inaccurate data.

People have historically invested in the US because we attract the best and brightest, have robust contract law protections and a stable, independent monetary policy. Trump has reversed all of that. www.nbcnews.com/business/eco...

top five all time Dudes Rock clip

A map showing the southern tip of Lake Michigan along with portions of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The map shows elevation relative to the surface of Lake Michigan.

Chicago is pancake flat because it rests on what was once the bottom of Lake Michigan (or rather, the proglacial lake that preceded Lake Michigan). The ancient lakeshore is easy to see in this "elevation" map that I made by joining the lake's bathymetric data with a digital elevation model.

Not at all a coincidence that this type of clean-energy comms - which presents a positive case in forceful terms rather than trying to dance around the issue - is coming almost exclusively from non-US firms. The comparison tells us a lot about why the IRA failed. More below:

1/9

June 21 is Show Your Stripes Day—a time to spark conversation about how our world is warming.

This video shows how @noaa.gov temperature data for the U.S. is turned into the iconic stripes visualizations you may see shared today and tomorrow.
@edhawkins.org

I suspect that fact that the vast majority of LLM users don’t seem to have received this (really very simple!) message is because the AI companies have a vested interest in us not understanding it. “ChatGPT is smart, it just makes mistakes sometimes” is much more marketable than the truth.

The breakaway GWCA region urgently seeks recognition by Lincoln Square to form an independent Ravenswoodistan before sectarian NIMBY violence spreads further from the capital

One of the USA's superpowers has been the ability to attract the brightest from around the world to study here, many of whom then stay and add so much to our country. This new overt hostility to international students and universities in general is already destroying this remarkable advantage.

A chart showing the change in child and adult population in Chicago since 1970. The adult population in 2020 was 3.7% smaller than in 1970, but the child population was 49.6% smaller.

The story of Chicago's population decline is a story about children. Since 1970, the adult population has been relatively stable and may even be rebounding. But the drop in children is remarkable; it seems to be in freefall. People under 18 make up 86% of the city's total population loss.

United States' capital markets used to be the envy of the world.

Thanks to Donald Trump, investors are losing confidence and are taking their money elsewhere.

Exclusive: DOJ memo offers blueprint to Tren de Aragua deportation plan Trump administration officials directed police to circumvent courts and pursue gang members into their homes without a warrant, a new document shows.

Attorney general Pam Bondi authored a memo instructing ICE to utterly ignore the fourth amendment in conducting Alien Enemies Act arrests and “deportations” to foreign prisons.

love this for us

Actually. How the US benefitted from outsourcing its research interests to experts in universities.

Actions like these, on a permitted and contracted project, will contribute to erosion of trust in capital markets that make the United States more akin to a developing country. 🔌⚡

We’ve got less than 7 weeks to reach transit riders — and we need YOU to get in the fight with us!

Join us every weekend through the end of May to canvass at transit stations urging riders to contact their legislators in support of the Metropolitan Mobility Act

➡️ www.mobilize.us/betterstreet...

A US official said in a court filing that “many” of those 137 has no US convictions but still posed a serious threat. Those people along with 101 additional Venezuelans were sent to Cecot for a one-year term that can be renewed, Bukele said. The US government paid El Salvador about $6m to receive the deportees, the White House said.

Ask yourself what word of this definition does not apply.

—

Now:

The Holocaust Encyclopedia—produced by the US Museum of the Holocaust—explains that concentration camps differ from prisons in that:

1) Detainees have not gone through judicial review, and
2) Face indefinite sentences.

regular reminder that the genesis of 1-in-10 is lost to history and also a "well it seems to work pretty good" type of metric

cited paper is 1950, when the US was something like 85-90% electrified, but consuming only 24TWh across 43M households, or 566 kWh/yr compared to 10.5 MWh/yr today 🔌💡

Between treasury yields RISING during stock panic and the Broccolis selling creative control to Amazon, these are unprecedented times in the Bond market

Checking in on the group chat

Presidential Actions Archives

President’s Executive Orders fail to recognize that natural gas killed coal and if they aren’t banning fracking, none of this accomplishes much. 1/9
www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...