General Electric is working on a ginormous new wind turbine. The largest offshore turbine currently produces 9.5 MW. The Haliade-X will be 12 MW, enough to power 16,000 European homes. Maintenance costs on offshore turbines are mostly independent of size, so building them as big as possible makes economic sense. These turbines will be 853 feet tall. The 351 foot blades are longer than a football field.

GE is spending $400 million developing the Haliade-X, which will be able to perform in low wind conditions, boosting total output. Offshore wind is actually easier to install because transporting the parts can be done by ship. And also, there are far fewer NIMBys 🙂

What explains the move to bigger turbines? Efficiency. The longer a turbine’s blades — the Haliade X’s will be 351 feet — the more wind energy they capture. Larger rotors make a turbine less sensitive to variations in wind speed, which can reduce a turbine’s efficiency. And with offshore wind farms expensive to build and maintain, it makes sense to use bigger turbines rather than more turbines.

“The number of hours at sea for planned maintenance is largely independent of the size of the turbine, resulting in a lower cost to maintain the offshore wind farm with larger turbines,” Vincent Schellings, a product development manager at GE Renewable Energy in the Netherlands, told NBC News.

The new Gutenberg editor will be the default soon in WordPress. The Classic Editor will be available as a plugin. However Gutenberg is way better, more powerful and intuitive. I’ve been using it for months. It does mean change. Some things may break. That’s the price of doing a massive updates, not just incremental changes. There is some gnashing of teeth now.

A few examples of why Gutenberg is better:

Everything is a block. Images, paragraphs, quotes, video embeds. Blocks are easily editable and moved. Plugins like Atomic Block and Caxton are already adding functionality to the default blocks.

Upload images directly into posts.

Cut and paste from Word, Google Docs, and many more formats directly into a WordPress post and Gutenberg handles the conversion, turning everything into blocks.

Woo Commerce, which is owned by WordPress, is now using WordPress components.

Once the Gutenberg editor is officially released, WordPress will then put Gutenberg functionality into the core code for themes and plugins. This means some themes and plugins, especially older ones that haven’t been updated in a while, may have issues or even break.

Prepare now for Gutenberg. Contact me if you want to know more.

Let me get this right. Secretary of State Pompeo flies to Saudi Arabia for a fifteen minute meeting with MBS, smiles at the photo op, State officially thanks MBS for his commitment into investigating a murder he probably ordered, then Pompeo leaves. Gosh.

However, members of Congress including Republicans are genuinely appalled at Khashoggi’s murder and by Trump’s attempt to pretend the Saudis aren’t culpable. Lindsay Graham described Bone Saw as “a wrecking ball. He had [Khashoggi] murdered…the MBS figure is toxic. He can never be a world leader…This guy’s got to go. Saudi Arabia if you’re listening, MBS has tainted your country.”

Daily Beast reporter Betsy Woodruff said on Twitter “A lobbyist for Qatar tells me he’s advised them to do nothing in response to Saudi’s Khashoggi disaster.

“When your opponent is exploding, stay away from them and stay out of the splatter”

This is nowhere near over, and the venality and corruption of Trump is there for all the world to see.

Astonishingly, not only did “rogue killers”, fifteen of them, somehow manage sneak into the Saudi consulate in Turkey undetected, torture and murder Khashoggi, chop him into pieces, then skulk off into the night without being caught, we are now treated to a cleaning squad arriving at the embassy just hours before an alleged investigation is supposed to happen.

Yes, better freshen up the place, get all the blood and bone chips off the floors and walls, no sense in upsetting the investigators, or preserving evidence. I’m sure Crown Prince MBS (Mr. Bone Saw) is resolutely trying to determine how consulate security failed so abysmally.

Oh yes, MBS is also threatening prison for anyone in Saudi Arabia who criticizes him, issuing press releases that sound like bonkers North Korea propaganda railing against the US, and banging his rattle on the high chair because many financial biggies have cancelled going to his upcoming financial conference. Maybe we should have a sad for him?

Meanwhile, Trump is acting totally not complicit by siding with the Saudis against solid evidence to the contrary. Also, neither Trump or Saudi Arabia is saying anything about what happened to Khashoggi. Why do you suppose that is?

What did Trump and Kushner know and when did they know it?

There’s little doubt that Crown Prince thug Salman of Saudi Arabia ordered the torture and murder of Khashoggi. Invoke the Magnitsky Act, freeze assets of all the Saudis involved, ban them from international travel. Make them pariahs. Multiple nations have versions of the Magnitsky Act. It has teeth and claws. Russia hates it, which is all the more reason to support it.

US senators want to force Trump to invoke Magnitsky and they also want to ban future arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Naturally Trump doesn’t want either to happen. It should be obvious why.

Senators in both parties are gearing up to force a vote on scrapping U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia amid mounting frustration over the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Riyadh government.

“I don’t think that a military sale could pass the Senate today. I don’t think that it could pass the House,” Murphy told reporters.