Worst US POTUS in US history, he should be in a nursing home.

$1.326 billion Powerball jackpot won in Oregon, lottery says

MEREDITH DELISO, RILEY HOFFMAN AND JESSICA GORMAN

April 7, 2024 at 5:31 AM

 

A single ticket sold in Oregon won Saturday’s $1.326 billion Powerball jackpot, the lottery said.

The numbers drawn for Saturday night’s jackpot were 22, 27, 44, 52 and 69, with a powerball of 9, the lottery said.

The winner will have the option to take a cash payment of $621 million, Powerball said.

The drawing had been delayed, due to a participating lottery needing to "complete required pre-draw procedures," Powerball said earlier.

"Powerball game rules require that every single ticket sold nationwide be checked and verified against two different computer systems before the winning numbers are drawn. This is done to ensure that every ticket sold for the Powerball drawing has been accounted for and has an equal chance to win. Tonight, we have one jurisdiction that needs extra time to complete that pre-draw process," a statement from Powerball read.

The Powerball jackpot had ballooned to an estimated $1.3 billion ahead of Saturday night's drawing after a record-tying streak with no jackpot winner.

The Powerball jackpot hasn't been won since Jan. 1, when a ticket sold in Michigan claimed a $842.4 million jackpot.

 

MORE: Ticket sold in Michigan wins $842 million Powerball jackpot in 1st drawing of 2024

Saturday sees the 41st drawing in the current jackpot run -- which ties the lottery game's record for most consecutive drawings without a jackpot winner. Only two other previous Powerball jackpot runs have reached 41 drawings, before someone won the grand prize, according to Powerball.

 

PHOTO: A Powerball multi-state lottery ticket is shown at a retailer in Washington, D.C., April 2, 2024. (Will Oliver/EPA via Shutterstock)

The estimated $1.3 billion jackpot is the fourth-largest jackpot in Powerball history and the eighth-largest overall when factoring in Mega Millions jackpots.

If a player wins the Powerball jackpot Saturday night, they can choose between an estimated lump-sum, pre-tax payment of $608.9 million or annual payouts of the $1.3 billion, also pre-tax -- starting with one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments that increase by 5% each year.

MORE: Ticket sold in New Jersey matches all Mega Millions winning numbers for $1.13 billion prize

The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million, according to Powerball.

Powerball tickets are $2 per play. Tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

$1.326 billion Powerball jackpot won in Oregon, lottery says originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

The Electoral College question looming over 2024

Mark Murray

Sun, April 7, 2024 at 8:00 AM CDT·6 min read

There are two scenarios that could explain where the 2024 election stands right now. In one, President Joe Biden is locked in something close to a 50-50 contest with former President Donald Trump.

In the other, Biden is trailing by more — maybe much more — than the national polls suggest.

The answer depends largely on whether Trump and Republicans have maintained the advantage in the Electoral College that they held in the last two presidential elections.

In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2 percentage points — but Trump’s performance among certain demographics and in certain states meant he defeated her in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. (Because of “faithless” electors, the final history-book margin later changed to 304 to 227.)

In 2020, Biden bested Trump in the popular vote by 4.5 percentage points, getting him the same number of Electoral College votes Trump won four years earlier — 306.

And if that trend carries over to 2024, Biden might have to win the popular vote by 5 points or more to get the 270-plus Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency.

But a two-election trend is no guarantee of future results. And there’s another school of thought about 2024 that the GOP’s Electoral College edge may not be as pronounced, as Trump has made gains with Black and Latino voters, including in states like California and New York that won’t come close to deciding the presidential election. Even slightly better margins for Trump in those big, blue states could bring the national vote and the tipping-point state vote into closer alignment.

The question, however, is how sizable that decrease might be — if there is any. It’s an important piece of information to help gauge what the national polls really mean right now, but it’s also shrouded in mystery.

“With Trump’s improvements among Hispanic and Black voters, the pro-GOP bias may decline by 1 to 2 points — but it won’t be erased,” said David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.

“In other words, I think Trump could lose the popular vote by 2 points in November and still have an excellent chance of carrying Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Nevada — which is why I view Trump as a pretty obvious favorite at the moment,” Wasserman added.

The case for the GOP maintaining its Electoral College edge

When political analysts discuss Electoral College bias, they’re referring to the difference between the margins in the popular vote and in the “tipping point” state — that is, the decisive state that carried the victorious candidate across the 270-electoral vote threshold needed to win the presidency.

Over much of the last 70 years, the tipping point states have closely tracked to the popular vote.

In 2012, for example, Barack Obama won the popular vote by almost 4 percentage points, and he carried his tipping point state, Colorado, by more than 5 points.

But that changed in the Trump era, when the Electoral College bias grew to the highest level since 1948 — in the Republican Party’s direction.

Part of the explanation was Trump’s particularly strong performance among white working-class voters in the Midwest and Rust Belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Another explanation was Democrats’ overperformance in states like California and New York, which aren’t key to deciding presidential contests in our current political landscape.

“Biden won by roughly 7 million votes [in 2020],” said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, the GOP half of the bipartisan team that conducts the NBC News poll. “He won California by 5 million votes; he won New York by 2 million votes.”

“This means in 48 other states and D.C., the vote was essentially tied,” McInturff added.

Also, Democratic improvement in Texas — going from 41% of the vote in 2012 to 46% in 2020 — further underscores how, in the Trump era, three of the most populous states have swung in the Democrats’ direction relative to the nation.

And with Biden and Trump set to be on the presidential ballot again in 2024, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to see both overperformances — Trump’s with white working-class voters, Biden’s with voters in places like California and New York — repeat themselves.

The case for the GOP losing its Electoral College edge

A year ago, however, political number crunchers Nate Cohn of The New York Times and J. Miles Coleman and Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics surmised that 2024 could be different from 2016 and 2020.

With national polls showing Trump faring better with Black and Latino voters, and with Democrats performing better in the 2022 midterms in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania than in California and New York (relative to past results), they argued that the pro-GOP Electoral College bias could be shrinking.

“If in fact Trump is improving with young and diverse voters — a debatable proposition, I think, but this is what the polls show now — it may simply give him better margins in states he’s already likely to win or lose, like California, Florida and New York,” Kondik told NBC News.

“So I do think it’s possible that the pro-GOP bias in the Electoral College could be smaller in 2024 than 2020,” he added.

Indeed, recent high-quality California polls show Biden ahead of Trump in the state by about 20 points in a head-to-head matchup, down from Biden’s nearly 30-point winning margin in California in 2020.

As Cohn put it in his New York Times article last year: “At the very least, tied national polls today don’t mean Mr. Trump leads in the states likeliest to decide the presidency.”

Where the battleground polling stands right now

Currently, Biden and Trump are locked in a competitive contest nationally, according to head-to-head polls, but Trump has held a small, yet consistent, advantage in several of the top battleground states, although those results are usually within the margin of error.

And polling averages do hint at a pro-Trump Electoral College bias in some battlegrounds, but not others. Now, a big caveat: Using polling averages to measure exactly where a presidential contest currently stands can be problematic, because of the polls’ different methodologies, their different margins of error and their different reputations. But they can be useful to take a broad view at how the national polls might be different from battleground surveys.

According to the RealClearPolitics average, Biden and Trump are essentially tied in the national polls.

They’re also essentially tied in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, suggesting little to no pro-GOP bias in those states — a shift from the final results in the last few elections, when those states tilted several points to the right of the national vote.

But Trump is ahead in other battleground states, including in Michigan, which some analysts believe could be the tipping point state in 2024.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

5 minutes ago, Mainecat said:

Not a dime to the campaign.

Link?

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

Evan Halper

Fri, April 5, 2024 at 10:22 AM CDT·13 min read

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants.

“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.

The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid - the network of transmission lines and power stations that move electricity around the country. Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy, particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times for hookups.

The situation is sparking battles across the nation over who will pay for new power supplies, with regulators worrying that residential ratepayers could be stuck with the bill for costly upgrades. It also threatens to stifle the transition to cleaner energy, as utility executives lobby to delay the retirement of fossil fuel plants and bring more online. The power crunch imperils their ability to supply the energy that will be needed to charge the millions of electric cars and household appliances required to meet state and federal climate goals.

The nation’s 2,700 data centers sapped more than 4 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2022, according to the International Energy Agency. Its projections show that by 2026, they will consume 6 percent. Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

Data center operators are clamoring to hook up to regional electricity grids at the same time the Biden administration’s industrial policy is luring companies to build factories in the United States at a pace not seen in decades. That includes manufacturers of “clean tech,” such as solar panels and electric car batteries, which are being enticed by lucrative federal incentives. Companies announced plans to build or expand more than 155 factories in this country during the first half of the Biden administration, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a research and development organization. Not since the early 1990s has factory-building accounted for such a large share of U.S. construction spending, according to the group.

Utility projections for the amount of power they will need over the next five years have nearly doubled and are expected to grow, according to a review of regulatory filings by the research firm Grid Strategies.

- - -

Chasing power

In the past, companies tried to site their data centers in areas with major internet infrastructure, a large pool of tech talent, and attractive government incentives. But these locations are getting tapped out.

Communities that had little connection to the computing industry now find themselves in the middle of a land rush, with data center developers flooding their markets with requests for grid hookups. Officials in Columbus, Ohio; Altoona, Iowa; and Fort Wayne, Ind. are being aggressively courted by data center developers. But power supply in some of these second-choice markets is already running low, pushing developers ever farther out, in some cases into cornfields, according to JLL, a commercial real estate firm that serves the tech industry.

Grid Strategies warns in its report that “there are real risks some regions may miss out on economic development opportunities because the grid can’t keep up.”

“Across the board, we are seeing power companies say, ‘We don’t know if we can handle this; we have to audit our system; we’ve never dealt with this kind of influx before,’” said Andy Cvengros, managing director of data center markets at JLL. “Everyone is now chasing power. They are willing to look everywhere for it.”

“We saw a quadrupling of land values in some parts of Columbus, and a tripling in areas of Chicago,” he said. “It’s not about the land. It is about access to power.” Some developers, he said, have had to sell the property they bought at inflated prices at a loss, after utilities became overwhelmed by the rush for grid hookups.

- - -

Rethinking incentives

It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances that previously ran on fossil fuels. A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.

Planners are increasingly concerned that the grid won’t be green enough or powerful enough to meet these demands.

Already, soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina.

In Georgia, the state’s major power company, Georgia Power, stunned regulators when it revealed recently how wildly off its projections were, pointing to data centers as the main culprit.

The demand has Georgia officials rethinking the state’s policy of offering incentives to lure computing operations, which generate few jobs but can boost community budgets through the hefty property taxes they pay. The top leaders of Georgia’s House and Senate, both Republicans, are championing a pause in data center incentives.

Georgia regulators, meanwhile, are exploring how to protect ratepayers while ensuring there is enough power to meet the needs of the state’s most-prized new tenants: clean-technology companies. Factories supplying the electric vehicle and green-energy markets have been rushing to locate in Georgia in large part on promises of cheap, reliable electricity.

When the data center industry began looking for new hubs, “Atlanta was like, ‘Bring it on,’” said Pat Lynch, who leads the Data Center Solutions team at real estate giant CBRE. “Now Georgia Power is warning of limitations. ... Utility shortages in the face of these data center demands are happening in almost every market.”

A similar dynamic is playing out in a very different region: the Pacific Northwest. In Oregon, Portland General Electric recently doubled its forecast for new electricity demand over the next five years, citing data centers and “rapid industrial growth” as the drivers.

That power crunch threw a wrench into the plans of Michael Halaburda and Arman Khalili, longtime data center developers whose latest project involves converting a mothballed tile factory in the Portland area. The two were under the impression only a couple of months ago that they would have no problem getting the electricity they needed to run the place. Then the power company alerted them that it would need to do a “line and load study” to assess whether it could supply the facility with 60 megawatts of electricity - roughly the amount needed to power 45,000 homes.

- - -

Going off the grid

The Portland project Halaburda and Khalili are developing will now be powered in large part by off-the-grid, high-tech fuel cells that convert natural gas into low-emissions electricity. The technology will be supplemented by whatever power can be secured from the grid. The partners decided that on their next project, in South Texas, they’re not going to take their chances with the grid at all. Instead, they will drill thousands of feet into the ground to draw geothermal energy.

Halaburda sees the growth as good for the country and the economy. “But no one took into consideration where this is all going,” he said. “In the next couple of years, unless there is a real focus on expanding the grid and making it more robust, we are going to see opportunities fall by the wayside because we can’t get power to where it is needed.”

Companies are increasingly turning to such off-the-grid experiments as their frustration with the logjam in the nation’s traditional electricity network mounts. Microsoft and Google are among the firms hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site, with Microsoft even putting AI to work trying to streamline the burdensome process of getting plants approved. Microsoft has also inked a deal to buy power from a company trying to develop zero-emissions fusion power. But going off the grid brings its own big regulatory and land acquisition challenges. The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States. Fusion power does not yet exist.

The big tech companies are also exploring ways AI can help make the grid operate more efficiently. And they are developing platforms that during times of peak power demand “can shift compute tasks and their associated energy consumption to the times and places where carbon-free energy is available on the grid,” according to Google. But meeting both their zero-emissions pledges and their AI innovation ambitions is becoming increasingly complicated as the energy needs of their data centers grow.

“These problems are not going to go away,” said Michael Ortiz, CEO of Layer 9 Data Centers, a U.S. company that is looking to avoid the logjam here by building in Mexico. “Data centers are going to have to become more efficient, and we need to be using more clean sources of efficient energy, like nuclear.”

Officials at Equinix, one of the world’s largest data center companies, said they have been experimenting with fuel cells as backup power, but they remain hopeful they can keep the power grid as their main source of electricity for new projects.

The logjam is already pushing officials overseeing the clean-energy transition at some of the nation’s largest airports to look beyond the grid. The amount of energy they will need to charge fleets of electric rental vehicles and ground maintenance trucks alone is immense. An analysis shows electricity demand doubling by 2030 at both the Denver and Minneapolis airports. By 2040, they will need more than triple the electricity they are using now, according to the study, commissioned by car rental giant Enterprise, Xcel Energy and Jacobs, a consulting firm.

“Utilities are not going to be able to move quickly enough to provide all this capacity,” said Christine Weydig, vice president of transportation at AlphaStruxure, which designs and operates clean-energy projects. “The infrastructure is not there. Different solutions will be needed.” Airports, she said, are looking into dramatically expanding the use of clean-power “microgrids” they can build on-site.

The Biden administration has made easing the grid bottleneck a priority, but it is a politically fraught process, and federal powers are limited. Building the transmission lines and transfer stations needed involves huge land acquisitions, exhaustive environmental reviews and negotiations to determine who should pay what costs.

The process runs through state regulatory agencies, and fights between states over who gets stuck with the bill and where power lines should go routinely sink and delay proposed projects. The amount of new transmission line installed in the United States has dropped sharply since 2013, when 4,000 miles were added. Now, the nation struggles to bring online even 1,000 new miles a year. The slowdown has real consequences not just for companies but for the climate. A group of scientists led by Princeton University professor Jesse Jenkins warned in a report that by 2030 the United States risks losing out on 80 percent of the potential emission reductions from President Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, if the pace of transmission construction does not pick up dramatically now.

While the proliferation of data centers puts more pressure on states to approve new transmission lines, it also complicates the task. Officials in Maryland, for example, are protesting a plan for $5.2 billion in infrastructure that would transmit power to huge data centers in Loudoun County, Va. The Maryland Office of People’s Counsel, a government agency that advocates for ratepayers, called grid operator PJM’s plan “fundamentally unfair,” arguing it could leave Maryland utility customers paying for power transmission to data centers that Virginia aggressively courted and is leveraging for a windfall in tax revenue.

Tensions over who gets power from the grid and how it gets to them are only going to intensify as the supply becomes scarcer.

In Texas, a dramatic increase in data centers for crypto mining is touching off a debate over whether they are a costly drain on an overtaxed grid. An analysis by the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the energy needed by crypto operations aiming to link to the grid would equal a quarter of the electricity used in the state at peak demand. Unlike data centers operated by big tech companies such as Google and Meta, crypto miners generally don’t build renewable-energy projects with the aim of supplying enough zero-emissions energy to the grid to cover their operations.

The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie analysis, is that crypto’s drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth, such as factories that produce zero-emissions green hydrogen fuel or industrial charging depots that enable electrification of truck and bus fleets.

But after decades in which power was readily available, regulators and utility executives across the country generally are not empowered to prioritize which projects get connected. It is first come, first served. And the line is growing longer. To answer the call, some states have passed laws to protect crypto mining’s access to huge amounts of power.

“Lawmakers need to think about this,” Hertz-Shargel said of allocating an increasingly limited supply of power. “There is a risk that strategic industries they want in their states are going to have a challenging time setting up in those places.

Just1 list of Joe Biden's lies, there are many more.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/08/heres-the-full-list-of-every-lie-joe-biden-has-told-as-president-part-three/

18 minutes ago, ckf said:

DJI

Ok, thank you.

3 minutes ago, ckf said:

  My screen is built into the controller.

Nice. What kind/brand is that one?

1 minute ago, ckf said:

My drone uses it's own connection between the drone and my controller.

As does mine. The phone is only needed to view what the Drone sees and to take pictures and Videos, you can also steer it with the phone if you want to.

3 minutes ago, Jerry 976 said:

But were you able to control the drone or did it have a mind of its own??

Well being that I never had a Drone before, I'd say I could control it about 85% BUT it somehow got out too far and while trying to turn it around to come back it hit some branches about 200 feet away, my fault as it's hard to see that far out, I probably steered it wrong left/right.

7 minutes ago, Jerry 976 said:

You might not have the drone paired correctly if you crashed it several times maybe @ckf can help you with the drone? I do not see that setting on my A42 Android, WiFi on an off blue tooth on and off???

Yeah, that's all I see on my phone, I do recall seeing WLAN on my A12 when I had it.

I was flying it without the phone using the controller just to see how it worked, crashed it in indoor and outdoor modes, hit my stove and TV, outside it hit trees.

1 hour ago, steve from amherst said:

Yesterday's snow. 

Dropped a tree onto the wires ,snapped the utility pole.  No power ,no cable. Internet, phone.  

Yesterday was the day that my customers had to call by to get a discount.  

Betting there are 60 messages. 

Can get em on my cell but can't use quick books without internet 

It's why we have a Generator. Our Power used to go off at least twice a month, they buried lots of the wires along many roads now and had tree service guys with telescopic boom saw blade trucks that reach up over 100 feet to cut branches and cut trees down, now our power only goes off maybe 6-10 times a year.

At 7:25 minutes in the video.

Here it is:

Just now, Stephen Hawking said:

There is no specific WLAN setting.

Steve's answer is correct.

Weird because the video for setting up the Drone shows WLAN on the phone screen..I'll try to post the You Tube video.

12 minutes ago, Deephaven said:

Just pull down twice from the home screen and click on Internet or whatever it is called on a Samsung.

Ok, tried that, never shows Internet, what else might it be called?

23 minutes ago, Steve753 said:

 

 

I tried that now, never see WLAN which is what the Drone instructions says it has to use. I already crashed the Drone 6 times, LOL

WLAN on my Samsung A14 cell phone?

I can't locate it after trying for almost an hour last night.. Trying to set up a small Drone.

1 hour ago, Jerry 976 said:

Got  link you can copy and paste? Might help us figure out what widely outlets are??

Oh and go whole house if you can

I posted the question on Amazon, folks responded and said it simply means the outlets are spaced further apart than normal.

12 minutes ago, ViperGTS/Z1 said:

Not sure what "widely outlets" are... But I'm dealing with that next week when I get a split system heating/cooling installed.  We do lose power around here quite frequently and when power resumes, it sometimes can result in surges.

They are offering me two options.... A surge protector which will protect the split system that they install or I can opt for a whole house surge suppression.  I may go for this, because I have some expensive appliances as well as several pinball machines that are very sensitive to voltage spikes.    

  Is that what you're looking to do?.... Or are you just looking to protect the computer or something with a plug in device?   I have a ton of those plug-in ones but I don't know how effective they are.

I was just looking for a better option for the many items/devices I have plugged in at several places here, there is 400+ wires behind my TV/sound system, 3 surge protectors there right now.. and about 40+wires  for both computer desks..

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/27090638/worlds-longest-legs-maci-currin/

Geez he's only a poor Billionaire today:

1 day ago 4/3/24  · Donald Trump. $5.7B  Real Time Net Worth as of 4/3/24. #530 in the world today.

Just now, Mainecat said:

Trump becomes more irrelevant every day.

IMMINENT

Many say:

"widely outlets" what does that mean?

59 minutes ago, ckf said:

How? toslow's article doesn't dispute the crowd numbers. All it say is that hundreds wait outside for hours before the doors opened. It doesn't say thousands.

Talking about MC's daily idiocies not just this article.