Have you checked out tanker rates lately? You absolutely save money by having more domestic supply in this environment.

(Crude isn't exactly "cheap" either)

To derail the conversation. It's a common tactic the right-wing uses. You tell why to get the conversation about correcting the LIE instead of about the fact that right wingers are murdering millions of children and the conservatives are letting them do it.

The goal is to throw a lie out and wait for it people in the center and the left to waste all their energy correcting it. We fucking love correcting this information because we are nerds and the happiest time in our life was when we were in school and we were rewarded with praise for being right all the time.

They are exploiting that mental vulnerability that we on the left and the center have.

20 seconds on Google and yeah you can find it the number is in a millions and it's going to push around 20 million if Trump or JD Vance wins in 2028.

I don't understand why you would tell such an obvious lie. Do you think we're stupid?

That I would have to explain to anyone why it's a bad idea to integrate pretend money with no government backing and virtually no regulation that is primarily used for money laundering directly into our financial system...

I wish I could get the libertarian types to understand you can't not have government.

People are going to organize. They're going to form groups. Those groups are going to need a mechanism for making decisions. People are not going to be able to spend all day monitoring and processing the daily goings on of that process. And those groups are going to get larger and more complex because there are a lot of people with a lot of different goals and beliefs.

Government is an inevitability. It's like when we discovered the atomic bomb. We are stuck with it barring a fundamental shift in human physiology.

So if you don't form a government somebody else will and you just won't be part of it. And they will use it against you just like with nuclear weapons.

So you can't just say you're going to deregulate all the financial markets and make everything free. You're going to have to have a complex series of regulations because you're going to have to have rules and those rules are going to have to be spelled out in advance and then you're going to need government to enforce them. You have to protect people from themselves because otherwise when they go down they're going to take you with them.

And libertarians want to pretended that's just not a thing and that they could be an island any of themselves...

I wouldn't care except well we've already established that people doing dumb shit bring everybody else around them down that includes me

I just tried this for fun with Gemini (hardly the best model, but I wasn't about to spend the money having an agentic framework of high-end models go over it ;) ). It advised:

1) Working with the Iranians at the upcoming UN meeting to try to strike a deal where the US stops its blockage of Iranian oil in exchange for Iran allowing free traffic through Hormuz, without nuclear programme preconditions.

2) Adding pressure on Putin to accept the Ukrainian offer of a mutual energy industry targeting ceasefire

3) Focus freed up US naval forces on protecting convoys through the Bab-el-Mandeb

4) Launching an emergency Jones Act waiver

5) Order the EPA Administrator to issue temporary waivers easing seasonal Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) gasoline restrictions and granting flexibility on Tier 3 sulfur credit banking.

6) Convene the CEOs of the top domestic refiners into a taskforce run by the Department of Energy to coordinate autumn maintenance schedules to avoid multiple regional coker and hydrocracker units taking turnaround downtime simultaneously.

7) Formally announce that the administration will not conduct large-scale, unrefined crude releases from the SPR. Signal to the industry that physical crude in domestic storage is adequate, shifting regulatory focus to downstream bottlenecks.

8) Reprogram allocated DOE infrastructure funds ($1.4 billion) to expedite cavern repairs at Bryan Mound and Bayou Choctaw.

9) Deploy the Northeast Home Heating Oil Reserve (NEHHOR) strictly on an exchange/loan basis (where refiners borrow diesel barrels now and repay them with interest in refined barrels next spring) to protect national balance sheets while easing spot tightness

10) Issue an Executive Order under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to expedite pipeline compressor stations and pipeline permits connecting the Permian Basin to Gulf Coast refining hubs

11) Direct the Surface Transportation Board to prioritize crude and chemical feedstock movements on Class I railroads.

12) Use USDA Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) authorities to establish emergency fuel cost-offset credits for agricultural producers and commercial freight carriers until crack spreads retreat below $30/barrel.

13) Announce this unified security-and-energy plan publicly to provide appropriate signals to the market.

The US economy as a whole would lose more from banning exports than it would gain. If one is concerned about "ordinary people", it makes more sense to continue allowing exports, add a windfall tax on oil companies or add export duties, and then rebate the revenue from that across the US population, than to ban exports.

Had the oil industry not been so naive and spent this whole year betting on TACO and/or Iranian surrender, the US could be making even more money right now on this crisis. New shale production from an existing lease can be added in just 3-6 months, yet shale expansion rates didn't increase over baseline from spring through the summer. Refining capacity is harder to add that quickly, but probably could have been boosted several percent, which would still be a quite meaningful added value. It gets harder to improve capacity now because most types of capacity addition involve downtime and absolutely nobody wants to be shut down now while crack spreads are this high.

I'd love to see the US congress pass a bill renaming Trump ;)

And the only thing that matters to Trump now is the stock market. You have a shitload of old people who are completely disconnected from the regular economy that anyone that works for a living depends on. Those old people are the ones who put Trump back in the White House and or why gas is $5 a gallon and inflation is out of control and we're about to get another massive round of interest rate hike fueled layoffs.

The one part of the economy those old farts care about is the stock market because that's where they're retirement savings are and that's how they stay ahead of inflation. So if the stock market crashes those old people will finally turn on Trump. Because suddenly their savings get wiped out and inflation hits them like a brick.

So even though it's very unpopular Trump is pushing AI because everything now for him depends on the stock market and appeasing those old people until he has enough voter suppression in place that he can throw them under the bus too.

He would only ask it for things that result in an improved situation for him, personally. There is nothing at all for him to gain by seeing lower gas prices. He hasn't bought gas himself in many years - and will never have a reason to buy gas again for the rest of his life - so the price is completely irrelevant to him. If the price fell and the MAGA party lost part of congress he would still blame it on other people. If the price stays the same and the MAGA party loses part of congress he'll blame that on other people as well.

The Epstein class has a plan where they will live in the temperate zones that are left over after runaway climate change devastates everything else.

Where they might run into a problem is we may actually have enough usable nuclear weapons to render the entire planet completely uninhabitable even with the best bunkers in the world. And that assumes nobody cut corners on their bunkers. If you don't have a spot in your bunker for every single person who built it corners are going to be cut...

And of course we are in the process of handing the nuclear launch codes to absolute religious lunatics. JD Vance in order to get the votes he needs to take a shot at the White House has been courting the Armageddon evangelicals who want to destroy everything to bring back Jesus...

But assuming things don't get out of hand for the Epstein class they're going to be just fine as our civilization collapses and they will have automated killbots to keep us at Bay. Periodically they will conduct a mass cull of the little people to make sure that we don't develop enough technology that we could do something about their killbots. Basically they'll bomb us back into the Stone age every 100 or so years.

That's at least the plan guys like Elon Musk and Peter thiel have laid out for themselves. Honestly I think they have a good shot making it happen. I've been trying to get the left wing folks I know convinced that they need to do something about county level voter suppression but all they want to hear about is AOC for president and how much Chuck Schumer sucks.

According https://militaryspend.org/iran... there are between 9,044 and 18,371 civilian casualties in Iran due to US air strikes. So yes, preventing collateral damage of civilians is not a priority at Pete Hegseth's "Department of War".

My violence premise is based on the fact that Trump has ordered military strikes on seven different countries during his second term so far. https://factually.co/fact-chec...

Personal shoppers etc are a thing; but what is different here is the scale.

If Amazon's experience is so bad, that is what that is maybe the market will move to walmart.com; not really the point.

The point is that letting the AI Boys become an intermediary between every enterprise and most people will NOT be a good thing. I am not saying Amazon isnt a bad actor or isnt hypocritical here on a broader context. I am saying that shop keeps of all stripes should be at least free to post a "No Robots Allowed Sign" and have it respected.

Because I don't think we will much care for the outcomes when we have a world where Coca Cola and slip Meta half a a couple hundred million to make sure the next model generally chooses their products when someone asks the AI to ensure the fridge has colas in it. The consequences for the market where there are six or so middle men everywhere won't remain 'free' long.

How much of that was buzz the movie got from all the Free press.

The reason most movies lose money is that the advertising budget is as much or more than the cost of making the movie even with all the Hollywood math involved. And the advertising budget is real it's harder to do Hollywood math when you're reporting on that stuff since the studio is paying another company instead of companies that kind of sort of owns...

I'm happy to see the movie released but it didn't need much of an advertising budget because of the controversy. And it would be hard to replicate that.

Every authoritarian regime needs some form of multi-generational conflict to justify their power over the people. Trumpism is a form of anti-democratic, authoritarian-oligarchy that exists only within the context of an eternal conflict. The conflicts only exist to distract the people from Trump and his oligarch's corruption, abuse of power, and outright theft from the American people.

Because it didn't achieve any of their goals.

I believe that the actual fundamental goal of the attacks on Iran was to trigger a second to 9/11 that Trump could ride into midterm election wins and maybe even a third term. Trump saw what a terrorist attack on us soil did for Bush Junior's numbers and I'm sure he wants that.

The problem is I ran has pretty good control over their non-state actors so they didn't take the bait. So we are basically stuck in a war that's causing hyperinflation.

This is also why Trump is suddenly so pro AI it's the only thing holding up the stock market around all the stupid shit Trump keeps doing. He desperately needs the stock market to stay high because the baby boomers and older Gen x that put him in the White House really only give a shit about the stock market because that's where all their savings are because that's how they stay ahead of inflation. As long as the Dow keeps going up those voters will keep backing Trump because their money stays ahead of inflation no matter how much Trump fucks up everything..

This is kind of the problem we have now. There are tens of millions of older voters who are completely disconnected from the broader economy because they are retired and they have a bunch of savings. Eventually the stock market will come crashing down and they are investments won't keep Pace with inflation anymore and they're going to be good and proper fucked but the goal of the American right wing is to shut down elections through voter suppression by then so it won't matter what they think anymore.

Again all of this is incompetence. None of these people are achieving their goals the way a psychopath like Dick Cheney did or somebody like Karl Rove. They are killing a lot of innocent people, Elon Musk is the greatest mass murderer of the 21st century for example having killed 8 million children and he's on track to knock out another 9 million at least. But again that's incompetence.