Overzeetop

Russia is one of the largest exporter of gasoline.

At the risk of linking an un-cited web page, they look to be a distant 12th in gasoline.
https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=gasoline&graph=exports&display=rank
The source is supposedly https://www.eia.gov/ but I can’t find the original data there in any usable format.

Russia comes in a distant second for general refined petroleum (not just gasoline) according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/refined-petroleum-products-exports/country-comparison/

Don’t even need that. Meta crosses multiple platforms now - Instagram, FB, WhatsApp, etc. All you need is for someone you know to have you in their contacts list, and the hit the “allow access” a single time. All of that data is then scraped, cataloged, and cross referenced with everyone else. Name, address, phone numbers, birthday, work address - anything your contact felt it convenient to add about you in their phone. From there it’s just a matter of time until data mining of second and third level contact - or outright data leaks - fill in the rest of your profile and demographic information.

More of a boil situation. Nothing’s getting golden brown and delicious in this scenario.

Get rid of bitcoin and you solve the energy problem.

I think it doesn’t go far enough. Straight up, no one should be permitted to create or transmit the likeness of anyone [prior to, say, 20 years following their death] without their explicit, written permission. Make the fine $1,000,000 or 10% of the offender’s net worth, whichever is greater; same penalty and corporate revocation for any corporation involved. Everyone involved from the prompt writer to the work-for-hire people should be liable for the full penalty. I can’t think of a valid, non-entertainment (parody/humor), reason for non-consensual impersonation - and using it for humor or parody is a slippery slope to propaganda weaponization. There is no baby in this tub of bathwater.

Based on videos from one of the major lava-themed entertainment venues who has been posting updates for two months, the “barriers” for Grindavik were barely started, with work only beginning some time after January 4th or 5th. The primary focus of the public work was in building the barriers to protect the regional power plant to the east of the fissures (and hot springs resort area just east and north the power plant). IIRC, those barriers took a month to construct.

The subsurface dam/inclusion runs pretty much directly under Grindavik, so if an active eruption opens along the southern edge of the magma inclusion there will be no way to prevent damage to those houses adjacent.

Disc: I’m neither a seismologist nor a volcanologist, but I’ve seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, and I was in Grindavik in October.

Solid fuel for rockets burns relatively slowly at 1 atm and in solid form, much like a flare, though still faster than I would expect you’d want for a hot pot unless these were a hybrid (so no oxidizer in the pellets, just a solid fuel source like modified PVC, with a separate oxidizer like nitrous oxide). The water was replacing the jet fuel, which - assuming it was similar to Jet A - is basically kerosene. Though I’d be worried what modifiers or stabilizers were used for a green flame if I were cooking over it. I’ve made green flames with boric acid and methanol for Halloween decorations (outdoor, of course), but who knows what is causing it in their fuel.

maybe get a few of those potatoes up front

It’s good to see such unbridled optimism in these dark times.

Shut up and take my money!

It took me searching the blacks to notice. Where I play there’s usually enough glare I wouldn’t get good blacks if you swapped the LC layer for vantablack.

Itemized invoice:

Fan $ 7
Design & overhead to incorporate fan into design $ 13
Value of increased performance, as judged by the accounting department $480

My only reason to believe that is not what is happening is that China, and the Chinese, are too smart to using coal as a peaking or emergency source of power. The only thing worse than coal for peaking is nuclear. Oil, Gas, and hydro are all much better for short-to-mid term peaking and batteries - something they’re very good at and have vast resources for - are perfect for short term emergency/failover loads. I believe (without documentation) that they are building extra capacity for the possibility of another expansion - the incubation of so many “third world” economies and partnerships across Asia and Africa to spur demand for their domestic production. If they don’t use it, it was a jobs program; if they find they need it, they will accept short term cash and economic power for a worsening of the world environment. In a way, the largest communist country on earth is also the largest capitalist power. Ironic.

his past year, China couldn’t run their hydro at peak capacity because of a drought.

Well, yes. The simple facts we have are that fossil fuel use is up. What happens next year will be speculation, but what we know is that they are using more coal this year, and they are hedging their future bets by building out their coal generation capacity. So if climate change means a further drop in hydro output, or more cloud cover where they install solar, or they need to make more power than they’re installing because the world wants more steel (I’m in the building industry and steel supply is still a bit tight) - they can start belching out a massive amount of CO2.

Only time will tell - and I hope you turn out to be the one who is right :-)

China has increased their coal generation in terms of absolute GW, and increase the coal usage per GW this year. I’m not sure where your data is from. Here’s mine:

“China’s CO2 emissions have seen explosive growth over recent decades, pausing only for brief periods due to cyclical shocks.” and “…CO2 is rebounding in 2023 from zero-Covid lows (see: Why emissions grew in Q3 of 2023)…”

both from a link in the original posted article, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2024-after-record-growth-in-clean-energy/

“Domestic coal output tonnage has continued to grow in 2023, following the steep increase in 2022 resulting from government efforts to boost output. However, coal quality has declined, resulting in a much smaller increase in energy supply from domestic coal. Poor quality of coal supplied has also pushed users to shift to imported coal for blending, the result being a record surge in imports.”

https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-trends-june-snapshot

The analysis points to a reduction in 2024, but that is speculation. What is clear is that 2023 is higher. And if the Chinese economy should pick back up and steel and concrete production come back up to recent historic levels, the CO2 is definitely going go continue to go up for a while. They’re bringing renewables online, yes, but if we look at what is actually happening the CO2 is currently increasing. Both of us would be speculating beyond that.

That says nothing about reducing total energy output, though. They’re only talking about paying back installation costs for additional capacity. Adding 50% more capacity and then running everything at 80%, for example, still means burning more coal and making more power. And, often, running a plant at below optimal will decrease it’s efficiency, leading to a higher CO2 load for every kWh. It’s an incentive for growth and surplus capacity, not an incentive to lower carbon emissions.

I presume “decline” is used in the percentage sense and not the absolute sense. If the total power amount of carbon-based fuel generation plants is increasing, and the fuel is coal ©, then the carbon emissions must go up in an absolute sense. But the rapid deployment of non-carbon fuel power sources are increasing faster than the the carbon based, so percentage will go down. Am I reading this wrong?

Also, in a linked article: "And, as Myllyvirta highlights, numbers in the communique stating that coal consumption rose 4.3% in 2022 and total energy use rising 2.9% “appear to contradict weak or falling industrial output”

So consumption of coal - the most carbon-producing fuel - rose in 2022, and according to this article their energy consumption jumped again after Covid restrictions were lifted this year. Renewable installation is rising faster than carbon installation (280GW installed this year vs 136GW of coal “under construction”). The data given in these articles seems intentionally inconsistent, from annual installation (only given for renewable) to total capacity (only given for future Coal). One has to wonder if The Guardian is running their articles through some kind of Donald Trump AI filter to ensure that no verifiable content gets printed.

You sully the good name of Internet Pirates, sir or madam. I’ll have you know that online pirates have a code of conduct and there is no value in promulgating an anti-ai or anti-anti-ai stance within the community which merely wishes information to be free (as in beer) and readily accessible in all forms and all places.

You are correct that the pirates will always win, but they(we) have no beef with ai as a content generation source. ;-)

And we know how strict these big companies are about voluntary compliance to the GDPR. ;-) I’m glad at least someone is putting in rules against this fuckery but, sadly, once that data is sold to the first outside vendor (Cambridge Analytica, Palantir, etc.) it’s out there and lives on the internet forever, even if the big boys are brought to heel by the EU.

If you’ve ever had a contact allow a service to read their contacts, you are in their database. That then gets cross-referenced with the (relatively few) online store providers the first time you use that address - or the obfuscated emailname.store@* version that was meant to serialize or identify spammers but which the simplest script can undo. Now your shipping/billing address, phone, and partial purchase history can be linked with every social media company that weird chick who did upside down keg hits with you that one night decided to allow contact access. Or your aunt Gertrude.

And it’s not even that complicated. Are you in the contacts list of anyone who has ever used the internet? Google, yahoo, or microsoft definitely know who you are in their internal databases and can create a web of contacts and likely contacts just from a couple of emails. Heck, I remember when there were “contact synchronization” websites where you could transfer your contacts between gmail addresses, or to/from other mail services. It was free, so I can just about guarantee they’re selling all of your info, which has been checked and corroborated by however many of your contacts decided to use their services.

That “not having” Facebook or [insert nearly any other major information-based corporation] means that those companies don’t have your information and profile already completed in their database.