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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Obama is not a pedophile

    He sent his kids to work at Miramax fully aware of Harvey Weinstein’s history. He spent more labor and resources conducting a Cold War across Latin America and the Middle East than cracking down on the crooks, the white nationalists, and the pedophiles at home.

    Ffs, his chief economic advisor - Larry Summers - absolutely was a pedophile. As were his political allies in the tech sector, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

    If he wasn’t personally schtupping kids, he was enabling and enriching those that did.

    Trump, himself, was engaged in open and notorious human trafficking through Eastern Europe during Obama’s tenure. This whole thing could have been nipped in the bud if his FBI director James Comey cared half as much about Krasnov as Hillary’s emails.


  • And some manchildren have none of that.

    Obama very wisely and maturely appointed Mueller’s protege James Comey to head the FBI. Comey very diligently and methodically played Ds and Rs against one another to secure his position as a radical centrist. And between the two of them, the conditions were laid for a Manchild to take control of the executive branch.

    I just don’t get the need for hagiography. All these guys sucked. Some of them were just smoother about it than others.









  • I mean, you say that. But we have a quarterly all-hands office meeting at my company. Every meeting kicks off with “This is how many accidents we had this quarter. We are aiming for ZERO accidents. Zero Is Achievable.” And in the quarters we’ve had zero accidents, the upper management makes a big deal out of it.

    There have been a number of campaigns to eliminate certain viruses from the human population - smallpox being the most famous. And there was quite a bit of glory doled out to celebrate the regional elimination of these contagions.

    It’s possible to make prevention a celebrated endeavor. But you do have to prioritize it. And you can’t run away and blow it off when you fail. I think the real “no glory” issue is in bungled preventative campaigns. Far easier to insist vaccinations don’t work than to acknowledge our pre-Trump efforts at vaccinating the population have been half-assed and profit-motivated.



  • There’s issues of base load, of compactness, of reliability, and of yield. That’s why new Chinese coal plants (and Indian and African/Latin American plants) keep getting built.

    But there’s a bottleneck in material supply across the pie of energy options. China gets much of its coal from Australia, a country that’s increasingly hostile to the CCP government. As a result, domestic coal production in China has picked up notably.

    It’s still a grim picture of the future, precisely because these emerging market states state puts mid-term economic growth ahead of long-term ecological preservation. The current western governments are, similarly, prioritizing annualized rates of growth/consumption over real ecological limits.

    But for Oil/Gas production, this war is definitely reshaping what countries consider viable or sustainable even in these short-term time horizons.




  • Coal power drops in China and India for first time in 52 years after clean-energy records

    Coal is too expensive and inefficient. Solar/Wind with battery backup is becoming the new hotness, as rechargeable lithium and sodium battery prices/kwh plunge below coal mining costs.

    A big appeal of natural gas was its dirt cheap extraction and transportation cost. You pressurize a well and it pumps itself. Gas is lightweight and easy to pump along pipes, so transportation is low-cost and very easy. And the machinery to convert the gas into electricity is cheap and prolific.

    Coal doesn’t work that way. Huge manual labor for extraction and transport. And using coal to generate electricity requires enormous capital investment that is heavily centralized. If you don’t already have a coal plant, you’re unlikely to build any new ones. Even in the US, a country flush with coal, the federal government is needing to force plants to stay open and operating at a loss in order to keep demand up.