64 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum”

    1. As of 2019 the global percent of certain products that are imported for local consumption includes
      43% for soybean, 41% for edible oils, and 25% for wheat [all record highs].

      Also consider that biofuels contribute very little net energy/acre, compared to say solar, and are produced on land that is very valuable for food crops or wildlife habitat/watershed.

      For example in Iowa the amount of net transport energy that can be produced by solar vs corn ethanol is over 140 times as great/acre. And if that solar is shifted to marginal grazing lands of the western Great Plains rather than the prime farmland of the Midwest, then not only does that prime farmland get freed up for purposes other than corn ethanol, but the solar output is even higher/acre.

      Its a political decision to have a massive biofuel industry, now that PV energy is much cheaper and abundant and that electric vehicles are readily available.
      A jobs program for corn farmers.
      And that makes it very difficult to change, despite economic and ecologic facts.

      They could probably make more money selling electricity from 1% of their land, than they earn from corn ethanol- if they had a standard market for the electricity like they do for corn.

      1. It’s also a market program for the farm machinery industry, and the ethanol industry, and MOST ESPECIALLY for farm country politicians.

        And of those politicians……… most of them are of course supposedly free marketers, and Republicans.

        1. True.
          Nonetheless I suspect that many corn farmers will gradually add solar production to their land. A bit here and there, kind of like how wind has been slowly added in the midwest and plains.
          Many farmers growing corn for ethanol/distillers grain will continue to do so for a long time,
          with diversion of a small fraction of their land to solar- doubling or tripling the energy output… and financial performance from their land.

          1. Yeah, by agriculture standards solar barely needs any land, so it will creep into the sector as prices continue to fall.

          2. Hi Hickory,
            You’re dead on as usual……. there will be one hell of a lot of farm land measured as actual acres, but only a very minor portion of all of the farmland in the mid west, that will be home to solar farms.

            The technology will continue to grow and mature, and while I don’t see it happening in the wide open spaces anytime soon, crops and solar panels are a match made in heaven, under the right circumstances……… these circumstances being any place good farm land is in short supply, energy ( especially other than imported energy) is short, and labor is in excess.

            There are numerous well proven ways to make awesome yields if you are willing to put the man hours into the job….. and what’s one of the biggest single problems in half or more of the world today? Unemployment or underemployment of course.

            It’s a damned sight better to subsidize food and energy production and have people working at it, compared to having them on relief and producing nothing useful. No brainer.

            I won’t be surprised, assuming I live to be really old, to hear about mid western corn farmers growing some veggies, using mass production techniques,between their solar panels . The technology to do this profitably will be profitable within ten to twenty years.

            It won’t really be hard at all……. it mostly just involves redesigning the equipment to work in somewhat confined spaces.

            The renewable energy naysayers, the fossil fuel trolls, have lost the war against renewables, and now the very best they can hope for is to continue to fight a rear guard action slowing down the transition.

            Most people just don’t get it yet……. but they will, just as my grand parents came to realize that they would be the last generation of our family to own a working horse or mule. They grew up using wagons, and plowing by hand. They died owning tractors and trucks. I’m the last man, except for a couple other old guys, in my family to have ever plowed a furrow with a mule…… and the last time I did that was when I was a kid, just to learn how. By then we were doing virtually everything with tractors, but we kept that last horse and mule a couple of decades for old times sake.

            Look at Texas. The reddest politicians in the country are Texans, and they’re the worst when it comes to badmouthing renewables……… and all the while Texans are building wind and solar farms out the ying yang, lol.

            But while I can get giddy at the prospect of living to see my country running mostly on renewable energy…… I’m totally cognizant of the fact that unless we stay pedal to the metal on the transition, we may well crash and burn before we can finish the job.

            And it might already be too late…… a lot of very capable people believe this to be the case.

            But I don’t hear them saying it’s too late……. if we were to go at the job on the basis of going to a wartime economic plan, in order to MAKE it happen fast enough.

            We may be past the tipping point that means the world wide climate goes haywire.
            But even so, it’s my personal belief, speaking as a pro farmer, that it’s entirely possible that we Yankees will be able to grow more than enough food for ourselves and some for some of our allies as well.

            Doing it might mean giving up most of the beef industry, and some of the pork, and eating a hell of a lot of chicken, and more beans and veggies….. and it might mean food will be a serious expense again, for most of us, as it was in times gone by.

            But the calculus involved in growing food in greenhouses evolves as times change.
            If the climate is haywire, it may be and probably will be practical to build greenhouses out the ying yang….. because while doing it may be expensive as hell….. not doing it may well be even MORE costly.

            A skillful operator can use ten percent of the water, a quarter of the fertilizer, and only a very minor portion of the pesticides needed out in the fields. Transportation costs and losses in shipping can go down ninety percent.

            And if large portions of the economy cease to function….. well, we are will be looking at supporting such workers on welfare…… or paying them subsidized wages to grow food. No brainer.

            The fertilizer can be suitably processed sludge from the local sewage treatment plant. We can get used to it, and we will, if we have to.

            The containers used to deliver locally grown food to local stores can go back to the kind we used when I was a kid, and halfway thru my working life. We harvested our own trees, and made our own apple crates, and they were used five or six times over each year, with some of them lasting forty years or longer.

            Now we’re using cardboard boxes of course……. most of which wind up in the trash after one use.

            Doing all this will likely mean driving small or even electric micro cars, and spending half or more of the income we used to spend on flashy cars on refurbishing our homes and other structures to be twice or even three times as energy efficient as they are now

            I’m not an engineer, but I am a world class jack ass of all trades, and you can take this to the bank. Putting another fifty bucks into the construction of a new refrigerator or range or water heater, at the factory will make it last two or three times as long in most cases.

            There should be a law that just about any durable sold comes with a CD or other media that has ALL the spec’s and all the trouble shooting procedures, and all the parts numbers……. and that the manufacturer has to buy back any appliance sold that can’t be repaired for at least twenty years if it costs more than say a couple of hundred bucks in today’s money.

            So help me, I can make most of the commonly needed repairs on a commercial truck in half the time, or even less than half the time, sometimes in one tenth of the time, that the same repair takes on a typical automobile these days…….. BECAUSE commercial truck buyers have always made damned sure to buy trucks that are easy and fast to repair…… so that’s pretty much THE way, and the only way, they are built by ANY manufacturer.

            The starter motor that fits a 2023 commercial truck with a given make of engine will generally fit that same make of engine going back as far as thirty or forty years, and a garage working on a fleet of the same make needs keep only four or five separate starter motors in stock……. as compared to a couple of hundred variations between new model cars.

            There’s no GOOD reason why a new car sold today with a new design engine can’t be built so that the NEXT generation engine, or electric motor, can’t be bolted right in place….

            If you ask any industrial mechanic, he will tell you that the electric motors he installed forty years ago can be replaced with brand new ones that bolt right in place….. and that wiring them up is a standardized job. So installing a new motor is as easy after fifty years as it was after five years….. but the new one uses a third less electricity.

            We can get away from being a throw away society….. and maybe we will, someday, when there’s no other choice, except a down hill spiral to collapse.

            My old house is mostly furnished with locally hand made furniture, from trees harvested locally, and none of it has ever been in a box, or moved over twenty miles. The only non local parts are brass screws, hinges, and glass. Plus some cushions.

            Barring fire, this furniture will last hundreds of years. None of it will EVER go to a dump…… I’ve been offered enough for it to buy all new stuff five or six times over.

            And piss on economists and bankers who keep telling us we must have an ever expanding job market.

            What we CAN do, if we do the right thing, is provide the necessities for everybody…… and everybody can work FEWER hours.

            One way of looking at this , to get my point across, is that a clerk in a store doesn’t have to work two jobs in order to live…… but rather he has to do this BECAUSE so many OTHER people are paid way the hell TOO MUCH for what they do.

            My local mail carrier makes two or three times as much, including federal bennies, as a parts driver working the same hours delivering car parts. There’s no REAL difference in the skill level or difficulty between these two jobs. A mail carrier, in a just society, would be paid a little less, and a delivery driver a little more.

            My dentist charges ten to twenty times the average hourly pay rate earned by most of the people I know who work in local industries.

            There’s no moral or ethical justification for such a huge discrepancy. It’s basically legalized robbery.

            And now that I’m pretty much free of family obligations, with my time being my own now, with Daddy gone on recently, I’m planning on getting over to the nearest community college and learning all about having and operating my own web site.

            And I’m going to run it so as to help fix some of our problems.

            I’ll hopefully move the needle a tiny little bit here and there, and maybe once in a while I’ll come up with a story or example of something that will go viral. Maybe once in a while some youngster will read my stuff and go into politics.

            Sometimes the difference between winning and losing on election day is a dozen votes or less…… and if the right new candidate for the local board of supervisors wins, down the road he or she can go to the state house, and maybe even to the governor’s office , or to Washington.

            There are ways to get the environmental and social justice message across even to trump type conservatives, and I’ve been studying these ways for the past decade.

            This is probably my longest rant ever, lol.

            I’m blaming it on having four or five shots of One oh One Wild Turkey with old friends…….. who were planning on staying the evening but had to go due to a family issue.

            Never fear, one of them is a teetotaler, and doing the driving.

            1. Thanks for all that…your perspective is always appreciated!
              Its hard for me to understand how current youngsters in this modern world are going to accumulate even a small portion of the skill-set and common sense about the non-digital world (the place we used to call the ‘real’ world)
              as you you have in your lifetime.
              And hats off to you on the long job of caring for you father.

          3. There is one big reason why farmers and other landowners across the country haven’t gone hog-wild with solar deployment now that the costs of the produced energy is low.
            That reason is the lack of a smooth offtake system for the energy excess they generate, both on a grid technical basis and on a financial basis.
            I don’t know if that dysfunction is solvable at large scale.
            Feasible solutions to handle the produced energy perhaps will be achievable on a local basis with community level ‘microgrid’ arrangements.
            A community level energy storage facility or coop can be supplied with energy input from numerous local sources, or the grid if necessary. An analogy is a sewage treatment plant- community level project fed from numerous sources….thinking aloud on this.

            1. I see that early efforts at implementing this kind of thing are well underway-
              https://spectrum.ieee.org/as-the-grid-decentralizes-electric-coops-look-for-more-local-control
              https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-co-op-group-forms-partnership-with-advanced-microgrid-solutions/434907/
              https://www.electric.coop/neighborhood-microgrid-gives-co-op-new-case-for-understanding-technology
              https://encorp.com/2022/07/21/innovative-rural-coop-in-colorado-shows-the-way-on-microgrids/

    2. Survivalist – I have recently come across these, which may be of interest. They are from 2016/17 and may have originally been behind paywalls.

      Global food security and food riots – an agent-based modelling approach
      https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/id/eprint/701976/1/For%20self-archiving.pdf
      Historic Food Production Shocks: Quantifying the Extremes
      https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/5/427
      Exploring the Dynamics of Responses to Food Production Shocks
      https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/9/6/960

    3. There were quite a few food riots and protests in 2022, as well as those triggerd by higher energy costs or some combination that inflate living costs. Unlike the food price crises there were more in europe.

      I found this report rather interesting, they have a database w. 12500 or so protests and riots last year. It is from an German think thank leaning left but the quantitative results looks robust https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/usa/19895.pdf

    2. Seems a little trigger happy to shoot down unidentified objects. Maybe it was an alien civilization coming to see if humanity could be approached peacefully. And we failed the test. xD

      1. I don’t think alien vessels would be that easy to shoot down. Given that they would have to traverse the universe to get here.

        According to the Pentagon guy/NORAD, they were very slow moving and the radars have trouble picking those up / differentiating between birds.

        It is very weird however.

      1. Personally I doubt that the Chinese got any really useful new information from this thing.
        But I don’t buy the American explanation that shooting it down over land would have been at all dangerous, in relation to national security questions. There are plenty of places ten square miles in extent crossing this country where there are almost no people at all, and the odds of any one of them being hit by debris would have been negligible.

        So I’m guessing the real goal was to simply spy on the spy, learning what it could do in terms of data collection and so forth.

        I also think this was a deliberate provocation. There’s a lot to be gained, by the Chinese, by simply putting us in the position of having to deal with one more major domestic hot political potato, which the opposition is of course using to belabor the Biden administration.

        Such things can pay off a million to one. Consider nine eleven in the simplest dollars and cents terms. Recruiting and training the terrorists probably cost only a few million at the most.

        It’s cost us millions every single day since in lost time and productivity right across the board.

    1. Methane from cow manure is a result of anaerobic breakdown, meaning manure lagoons/pits, meaning large, CAFO operations. This source of methane is nil if dairy cows are pastured instead of fed corn and silage in confinement operations. Methane digesters for cow manure have been around for decades. Here in the midwest, so much methane is used for keeping the microbes warm in winter, and other heating needs in a large dairy, gas to pipeline or to generate electricity is greatly reduced.

      With the unfolding water crunch out west, California will be hard pressed to maintain its status as #1 dairy producer state.

  5. Let’s go back to Musk, Tesla and Twitter a minute.

    My personal opinion, now, is that he originally made the decision to buy Twitter because this would give him an ENORMOUS amount of power, political power, and that this would be worth whatever it might cost him in money, short term.

    Tesla stock price and sales have come back like crazy. Twitter may or may not regain the former huge following…….. no real idea.
    The question is whether he will be able to keep Twitter up and running and helping him get what he wants, here in the USA……
    Can that be done with a stripped down engineering and management staff? Or can he rebuild it to the point it can be done, without hiring thousands of highly qualified people………. the sort he fired?

    1. All big tech companies are grossly overstaffed. A twitter employee was boasting on video that they don’t work for more than 2 hours per week. Take a look at the payroll of companies like Facebook, MSFT, Google, Amazon, etc. It has grown by 50%-100% in just 3 years. You cannot hire that many people and have them all doing productive work. Lucent Technologies (spinoff from the original AT&T) did the same thing during the 1990s and we know how that ended.

      1. Great downsizing strategy; are the remaining workers still in hardcore sicko mode? Musk couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper bag; too much Backpfeifengesicht.

        “Musk reportedly sacked one of Twitter’s engineers after they suggested his lower-than-normal engagement might be because people aren’t interested in him.”
        https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-engineers-shadowban-engagement-1850096392

        Musk paid $44 billion to be Catturd2’s tech support lol
        https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/catturd2-maga-twitter-shitposting-king-1234674671/amp/

        1. Yes, Musk is flawed. After all, he is human. However without him we wouldn’t have mass produced EVs, reusable rockets or low latency satellite based internet. He has single handedly forced the entire automobile industry to produce EVs. That in itself would be an absolutely astonishing accomplishment. How many automobile startups in the last 100 years have survived?

          2. I’ve compared him to Henry Ford.
            Clearly a certain kind of genius whose particularly type of nuttiness found a niche in a particular time. Taking a really long view of Ford we might ask if filling the world with automobiles was actually in the best interest of mankind. I think the answer is no. And that from a guy who has owned about 4o cars in his lifetime.

            While we can question whether the automobile age was bad for the human race and the planet, there is no question that Ford’s other roles, as a corporate leader or as a social phenomenon, he was simply dispicable:
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
            https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html
            and as a Nazi sympathizer Ford was a depraved human being. While agreeing that Musk has been key to igniting the EV market we have yet to know if that will end up showing that he was worth the trouble. I don’t think Ford was. The jury is still out on Musk.

            1. Henry Ford was clearly behind Ford’s success, but that is much less clear in Musk’s role at Tesla. He is more an investor than an innovator. The one product with his handwriting on it it the pickup truck, which hasn’t hit the market yet.

              He has also had some clear failures. One was bailing out his brother’s flailing solar company. Its big idea, solar roofing, doesn’t seem like a good product idea (to me anyway) and isn’t doing well. Also he nearly killed the company in the mistaken belief that he could get rid of all the assembly line workers using robots. The robot he claims they are building is embarrassing. Finally, he totally overpromised on self driving, though (I think) it will come “pretty soon”.

    2. Twitter is a boondoggle.

      It can’t be made profitable through superior engineering, and it can’t be a disruptive force in it’s industry, being that it is essentially an old fogey social-media wise.

      This was Musk’s version of drunk-ordering on the Shopping Channel.

      1. Twitter was losing money before Musk took over. Now that he has removed the deadwood, it might be profitable. We don’t know for sure because he has lost a few advertisers too.
        He could add more features (payment, etc to make it like WeChat) to generate revenue. We will have to wait and see. It is possible that Twitter will end up like Yahoo or Myspace and investors will lose most of their money.

        1. “Twitter was losing money before Musk took over” ~ Suyog

          Twitter annual revenue 2012 to 2022
          2012: 0.3 billion
          2013: 0.6 billion
          2014: 1.4 billion
          2015: 2.2 billion
          2016: 2.5 billion
          2017: 2.4 billion
          2018: 3 billion
          2019: 3.4 billion
          2020: 3.7 billion
          2021: 5 billion
          2022: 4.4 billion

          Twitter net Profits 2012 to 2021
          2012: -79 million
          2013: -645 million
          2014: -577 million
          2015: -521 million
          2016: -456 million
          2017: -108 million
          2018: 1206 million
          2019: 1466 million
          2020: -1136 million
          2021: -221 million

          https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

          Twitter burns money faster than it makes it. Musk has likely made it worse. What kind of idiot would buy Twitter for 44 billion?
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

          You ever meet a young dweeb whose first email address is some combination of their name and the number 420 and/or 69? That’s Musk, but he’s over 50, and he does it with stock prices. Does he have any friends?

          2. Social Media companies don’t have hard assets.

            They have intangible assets ( reputation, data, users , software ).

            IT Servers and laptops depreciate rapidly.

            Your reputation can change quickly as we’ve seen with previous social media companies

            You have to be a moron to buy Twitter for 44 billion.

            “Buy Low and Sell High” seems to go against Human Nature.

            Warren Buffet has been taking people to the cleaners on this for decades.

          3. It’s at least possible that he was willing to spend the forty four billion to get something otherwise unavailable by ANY other means, and that he concluded that owning Twitter would be worth it to him, regardless of how much it cost him in dollars……..

            Considering the potential payback in terms of political power.

            I don’t watch sports at all, and don’t know, but I seem to remember that Musk was seen socializing with Fox owner Murdoch at the big ballgame.

            My opinion of him as an individual is lower than a snake’s belly.

            But I nevertheless believe that we’re anywhere from five to ten years ahead of where we would be otherwise because he IS the one individual that must be given credit for getting the electric car industry into the mainstream in a big way.

            And doing that has so called knock on effects helping to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy in many other ways.

            Ramping up battery production for electric cars means batteries are now cheap enough, due to mass production, to be affordable for home and grid scale short term electrical storage.
            Etc

            1. “Considering the potential payback in terms of political power.”

              Today Musk tweeted a semi erotic picture of a blond force feeding a bottle of milk to a brunette.

              He’s fuckin’ 12; likely has a Cluster B personality disorder; and is surrounded by sycophants. Smart people with money hire smart people who disagree with them. This will not end well.

            2. OFM , “Ramping up battery production for electric cars means batteries are now cheap enough, due to mass production, to be affordable for home and grid scale short term electrical storage.”
              I think there is something called ” The law of diminishing returns ” .

        2. If Musk has a better idea than “Targeted Advertising” he should have built a new company for under 1 billion and used that.

          Targeted adverstising is a risky business. EVERYONE hates it.

          Do you like talking to your wife about ERECTILE dysfunction and then seeing an ad for VIAGRA on your computer?

        3. Like all social media, technology isn’t the differentiator for Twitter. Twitter is like Studio 54. It was the cool place to be, because all the cool people went there. The physical premises themselves weren’t great, and weren’t the point. Remember Studio 54?

          To run a successful bar you need the right infrastructure, location, service and so on. But none of that really lets you stand out from the crowd. The same applies to social media.

    1. Hah. True, her and the orange Joker character, and the not Drag Queen.
      But its all ok as long as you vote for the party.

      1. Many of my Canadian friends feel that having a few extra parties on the federal ballot keeps the big two in line; less BS.

        1. In the US the rules are stacked so that no third party can gain even a toehold.
          Unfortunately, with these rules in places any vote for alternative party candidates is just a wasted vote…in essence a fashion statement- the vote in effect just going to the winner of that particular election.

          Here is a good article on this topic

          Let a Thousand Parties Bloom-
          The only way to prevent America’s two-party system from succumbing to extremism is to scrap it altogether….
          “The only way to break this destructive stalemate is to break the electoral and party system that sustains and reinforces it. The United States is divided into red and blue not because Americans want only two choices. In poll after poll, majorities want more than two political parties. Few Americans enjoy the high-stakes partisan combat. The United States is divided because in winner-take-all plurality elections, third parties can’t emerge. And even if Americans agree on wanting a third party, few are willing to gamble on an alternative for fear of wasting their vote. Nor can Americans agree on which third party they would want, either. The United States would need five or six parties to represent the true ideological diversity of the country.”

          https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/19/us-democracy-two-party-system-replace-multiparty-republican-democrat/

  8. Having a One Party State in the US puts us in an illiterate state.

    Pepsi and Pepsi Lite

  9. Putin’s opponent, a former FSB colonel who started the war in Donbas in 2014, gave a long interview (in Russian). He has support in the intelligence community. He took part in the entry of Crimea into the Russian Federation in 2014 (already retired, supported by the oligarch Molofeev). In an interview with Strelkov tells how he gathered a small detachment and left for the Donbass in the city of Slavyansk (Donetsk was quite large and did not have enough strength for the capture operation). After the armed forces of Ukraine surrounded Slavyansk. He received an offer from Russian officials and from Molofeev to leave his detachment and return in the Russian Federation to get high positions and the like, but he made a different decision …
    Now he criticizes the military leadership in a harsh form, constantly calling the Minister of War a “reindeer breeder”, hinting at the nationality of a Tuvan (the traditional occupation of Tuvans is reindeer herding). The Russian authorities are campaigning to discredit the colonel. Here is an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQc6RUf4u6E

  10. “The internet causes village idiots to form entire villages made up only of village idiots who have no idea they are village idiots.” ~ Vlad Vexler

    1. Postin’ away again in Dunning-Krugerville
      Searchin’ for conspirational gestalt
      Some people claim there’s algorithms to blame
      But I know, it’s the user’s damn fault

      1. I detect a hit song lol

        I went to a college library computer with a cleared browsing history, dialed up YouTube without logging in, typed “pancake recipes” in the search bar, and started clicking the recommendations in the side bar. In 9 clicks I had all the toxic political discourse on blast. You gotta have the algorithm chasing the heat if you want the clicks.
        There appears to be two things happening; online media/content agencies serving up heaping piles of false polarization BS; and people gleefully eating it with a shovel and thinking they’re virtuous and smart.
        The comment threads here at POB are the best contents of the interweb.

  12. Getting back to the guys who are focusing on Musk’s personal shortcomings.

    I agree that he’s a SERIOUSLY flawed individual. Totally.

    But there are PLENTY of seriously flawed individuals in the world, and in our country, who have enormous power of various sorts…. the power that comes with having enough money, the power that comes with being able to donate millions to various causes, or to particular politicians…… and the power that comes from controlling a mass media enterprise.

    Look at Murdoch, and Fox. Look at trump. I doubt Musk is even close to being as poisonous as trump….. but I don’t give a SHIT about his personal life or issues, except as knowing about these issues may enable me to gain greater insight into his future behavior.

    What I’m concerned about is the awesome potential power he will have, in terms of controlling public opinion in this country, if he succeeds in holding onto Twitter and rebuilding even half the original customer base. Even a fourth of that base could be critical in terms of winning or losing a lot of elections in various races.

    He could be the difference between the right wing and the left wing controlling our federal government one day.

    Sometimes it’s that close. It was that close the last time. Senate supposedly tied, with a couple of pretend Democrats, and Republican that goes RINO once in a while long enough to cooperate with Biden on some particular issue. House elections hanging by a thread, less than a percentage point, in a lot of cases, and only four or five seats difference between the parties.

    If anybody thinks Twitter is ALL ABOUT MONEY, in terms of Musk buying it, well……

    My personal opinion is that anybody that thinks this way is pretty much blind in terms of understanding the BIG PICTURE.

    If you’re thinking this way, you’re focused on the trees, and overlooking the forest, in my humble opinion.

    Of course I might be wrong.

    We’ll likely know within the next two years, given that Musk in my opinion is likely to emerge as a major power player in Republican and red state politics.

    Maybe he’s proven to himself, and the world in general, that he’s done ENOUGH in the business and technology world.

    Maybe now he’s hungry for another kind of success , and another kind of power.

  13. “If anybody thinks Twitter is ALL ABOUT MONEY, in terms of Musk buying it, well…… ”

    I think this was an EGO move.

    If it was purely for business than it is about as risky a move as I can think of.

    If Musk tries to steer everything towards one particular political party, that will open the door for a competitor to enter the market.

    The Democrats and Undecideds and Internationals from around the globe that use Twitter will go somewhere else.

    And IMO, I don’t want to advertise with a partisan. I want all potential customers from all demographics to buy my products.

    1. Musk’s purchase of Twitter could be just an Ego trip or an effort to make more money but it could very well be a case of “when the elephants fight the mice get trampled” or worse. Musk doesn’t care if he destroys democracy, the environment, or civilization as long as his ego is stroked. And he’s crazy.

      1. Imagine a psychologically-deteriorating forum moderator with a team of software engineers at his disposal.
        Practically speaking, I used to like Twitter for timely road reports; lots of very professionally minded truckers out there keeping it safe. I like other things too, like seeing what Art Berman has to say. But practically speaking I liked Twitter for updates on weather, roads, avalanche conditions, stuff like that.
        Since Musk took over it has had a lot of service interruptions. Many twitter accounts have stated they have trouble posting timely info due to outages.
        Musk really drove it into the ditch.

    1. Russians have not deployed anything to Norway, just out to sea – no mention of specific locations in the article.

  16. Attention astronomy buffs.

    EVIDENCE BLACK HOLES ARE THE SOURCE OF DARK ENERGY

    “The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein’s theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.”

    This work is published in two papers in the journals The Astrophysical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-02-scientists-evidence-black-holes-source.html

  17. This sums things up pretty well-
    ” A UN report in October said there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. Current national targets, if met, would mean a 2.4C rise in temperature.”
    “The climate crisis is causing sea levels to rise faster than for 3,000 years, bringing a “torrent of trouble” to almost a billion people, from London to Los Angeles and Bangkok to Buenos Aires, António Guterres said on Tuesday. Some nations could cease to exist, drowned under the waves, he said.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/14/rising-seas-threaten-mass-exodus-on-a-biblical-scale-un-chief-warns

  19. About money, politics, and power

    Open in app or online
    American capitalism returns to the Gilded Age
    American families rely on three coping mechanisms while robber barons like Musk abuse their power.
    Robert Reich
    Feb 17

    ▷ Listen

    American families have been relying on three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living despite stagnant real wages since the start of the 1980s.

    First, wives and mothers have gone into paid work. For many women, this has been a blessing. Yet according to a 2021 survey, more than half of married mothers would prefer to have one parent in the home full-time with children aged 5 or younger.

    Second, everyone has put in longer hours. On average, Americans now devote more hours to their jobs than workers in any other rich country.

    Third, Americans have gone deeply into debt. Americans held $599 billion in consumer debt in December 1985. By December 2022, it was $4.8 trillion.

    Through it all, the American economy has continued to grow — yet its fruits have been going to a smaller and smaller number at the top.

    Economies aren’t zero-sum games where the rich can do better only at the expense of everyone else, of course. But power is a zero-sum game. The more of it at the top, the less anywhere else. And great wealth easily morphs into great power.

    After a tweet that Elon Musk posted during Sunday’s Super Bowl game failed to achieve as much engagement as a tweet from President Joe Biden, Musk (who purchased Twitter last October for $44 billion) reportedly demanded that Twitter change its algorithm to artificially inflate Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000. (Many who do not follow Musk are also being served his tweets in their feed through the “For you” tab of the app’s homepage.) Last week, Musk fired a principal engineer at Twitter who told him that the reason his tweets had lost viewers is that interest in the erratic CEO is waning. Musk is also allowing the return of previously banned accounts like that of Donald Trump.

    Is it a problem that the richest person in the world buys one of the biggest megaphones in the world and then alters it so his words are seen by more people than those of the president of the United States, and unilaterally decides to allow back a former president who attempted a coup?

    American capitalism has returned to where it was at the turn of the 20th century, when most of the gains went to a handful of “robber barons” who wielded nearly unlimited power over the economy and politics.

    It is well to remind ourselves of the warning by the progressive Herbert Croly, who wrote in 1906 (in his great The Promise of American Life):

    Americans are just beginning to learn that the great freedom which the individual property-owner has enjoyed is having the inevitable result of all unrestrained exercise of freedom. It has tended to create a powerful but limited class whose chief object it is to hold and to increase the power which they have gained; and this unexpected result has presented the American democracy with the most difficult and radical of its problems. Is it to the interest of the American people as a democracy to permit the increase or the perpetuation of the power gained by this aristocracy of money?

    A candid consideration of the foregoing question will, I believe, result in a negative answer. A democracy has as much interest in regulating for its own benefit the distribution of economic power as it has the distribution of political power, and the consequences of ignoring this interest would be as fatal in one case as in the other. In both instances regulation in the democratic interest is as far as possible from meaning the annihilation of individual liberty; but in both instances individual liberty should be subjected to conditions which will continue to keep it efficient and generally serviceable. Individual economic power is not any more dangerous than individual political power—provided it is not held too absolutely and for too long a time. But in both cases the interest of the community as a whole should be dominant; and the interest of the whole community demands a considerable concentration of economic power and responsibility, but only for the ultimate purpose of its more efficient exercise and the better distribution of its fruits.

    What do you think? Is it time for a wealth tax, or even something more drastic?

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    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImvX3avAlM4

    I’ve put many times more hours than necessary to know without a shadow of a doubt that we’re killing ourselves, slowly, by the millions, due to eating half or more of the stuff sold in an ordinary supermarket or buy at a typical restaurant.

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