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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Oil is just in a precarious position with supply and demand.

    High prices will accelerate demand destruction, as people and businesses move to cheaper energy sources, like solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear, plus spur the continued development of grid scale storage and demand management technologies. Sustained high prices could cause lifestyle and consumption habits to change, too: fewer gas guzzlers, fewer supercommuters, improved shipping efficiency, etc.

    Low prices would put strain on the finances of producers, whether for profit corporations in the West or state owned (or closely affiliated) producers in places like Saudi Arabia or Russia, and would weaken those countries’ influence on geopolitical issues.

    There’s a reason they want a strong cartel, which is what OPEC tries to be, but that cartel has been weakened considerably by non-OPEC Plus nations becoming huge producers. OPEC cut supply to try to hurt Biden, but it ended up being a handout to American, Canadian, and Norwegian companies, by propping up prices while losing market share. Meanwhile, sanctions on Russia (and Iran and Venezuela) add a bunch of friction (and some cost) to their exports, so that they need higher prices to break even.

    For the first time in modern history, societies have access to non-fossil-fuel energy sources in competitive volume and price, to where an oil oligopoly can’t push around consumers. Trump can’t put that back in the bottle.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldPeak
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    13 days ago

    We can agree to disagree. I don’t miss the days of paying for long distance phone calls, all the waiting around in trying to link up with friends at a designated place, looking up addresses in a physical book of map grids, manually maintaining a calendar in a planner, driving across town and waiting in line for tickets to a show. The internet made things better.

    The other stuff back then wasn’t always better, either. Smoking eveywhere, unreliable cars, air pollution, crime, etc., really cut into quality of life.









  • That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.

    No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.

    The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.



  • I’ve been against electronic voting in the USA for years. Many states, especially the so called battleground states, rely on these for the most of the results.

    Direct Recording Electronic voting machines are less common now, and DRE machines without voter verifiable paper receipts are even less common. Here is a state by state list. Louisiana is the only state with statewide DRE without paper verification. The other states that permit precincts to use DRE without paper are Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma (only for those in need of assistive technology), Tennessee, and Texas. So that’s one state that uses totally electronic voting statewide, 5 states that permit it in some instances, and 44 (plus DC) that prohibit electronic voting without a paper trail. And none of the states with DRE and no paper trail are swing states (although many have swing districts).

    I think it was a bigger problem before, but is getting phased out.


  • booly@sh.itjust.workstomemes@lemmy.world95 what?
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    27 days ago

    In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

    Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

    Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.




  • The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

    It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

    And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.


  • These fuckers act like they’ve never heard of Lina Khan. Let’s see if Republicans try to replace her with someone with a stronger track record. Or, if they’re so serious about tech competition maybe they’ll get on board with net neutrality.

    And look, I actually like Gail Slater (the Trump nominee that kicked off this thread). She’s got some bona fides, and I welcome Republicans taking antitrust more seriously, and rolling back the damage done by Robert Bork and his adherents (including and probably most significantly Ronald Reagan).

    But to pretend that Democrats are less serious about antitrust than Republicans ignores the huge moves that the Biden administration have made in this area, including outside of big tech.


  • Cultural appropriation is a broad enough term to functionally be meaningless, but I’ve found it helpful to think through 4 distinct interests at play, that I think are legitimate:

    Proper attribution/credit. We don’t like plagiarism or unattributed copying in most art. Remixes, homages, reinterpretations, and even satire/parody are acceptable but we expect proper treatment of the original author and the original work. Some accusations of cultural appropriation take on this flavor, where there’s a perceived unfairness in how the originator of an idea is ignored and some copier is given credit. For a real world example of this, think of the times the fans of a particular musical artist get annoyed when a cover of one of that artist’s song becomes bigger than the original.

    Proper labeling/consumer disclosure/trademark. Some people don’t like taking an established name and applying it outside of that original context. European nations can be pretty aggressive at preserving the names of certain wines (champagne versus sparkling wine) or cheeses (parmigiano reggiano versus parmesan) or other products. American producers are less aggressive about those types of geographic protected labels but have a much more aggressive system of trademarks generally: Coca Cola, Nike, Starbucks. In a sense, there’s literal ownership of a name and the owner should be entitled to decide what does or doesn’t get the label.

    Cheapening of something special or disrespect for something sacred. For certain types of ceremonial clothing, wearing that clothing outside of the context of that ceremony seems disrespectful. Military types sometimes get offended by stolen valor when people wear ranks/ribbons/uniforms they haven’t personally earned, and want to gatekeep who gets to wear those things. In Wedding Crashers there’s a scene where Will Ferrell puts on a fake purple heart to try to get laid, and it’s widely understood by the audience to be a scummy move. Or, one could imagine the backlash if someone were to host some kind of drinking contest styled after some Christian communion rituals, complete with a host wearing stuff that looks like clergy attire.

    Mockery of a group. Blackface, fake accents, and things of that nature are often in bad taste when used to mock people. It’s hard to pull this off without a lot of people catching strays, so it’s best to just avoid these practices. With costumes in general, there are things to look out for, especially if you’re going out and getting smashed.