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Comment Re:Hormuz has frozen 20% of the oil and gas (Score 1) 152

1. Fertilizer is made from methane, so that's also stuck there. This is a HUGE problem for countries like India.
2. Poor countries are already switching to 4 day work weeks to save fuel.
3. Iran is letting ships whose balances are settled in Yuan leave. That means the power of the petro-dollar is under serious threat.
4. Countries that can no longer get Iranian oil are now buying non-Iranian oil, which drives the price of ALL oil up. There's speculation that it will hit $200/barrel. That's more than 3x what it was over the last few years. That will affect the price of literally everything. All transportation costs go up, so costs for all goods go up.

At some point, the price will get high enough that some countries won't be able to buy it at all, they'll give up. At that point, some interesting things might happen, since the demand drop-off vs. the price drop off will cause a wobble in the price. People will start looking elsewhere for energy.

Solar and small-battery vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters) might start taking off even more. You might not be able to buy petrol for your car, but your e-bike charges quickly and can still tow a few hundred pounds worth of stuff. Maybe BEVs adoption will become even MORE popular, since it's one less way you have to directly pay for petrol.

But this war is all con. 100%. Like, Trump didn't even fill up the oil reserves before going to war. China's been buying oil for MONTHS at low rates now, so they're actually the least impacted here, despite the fact that they get a lot of oil from Iran. That means they have zero impetus (not that they had much previously) to do anything about this. This is purely punishment for the USA. Those are expensive weapons being wasted on Iranian targets (in some cases, planes that are actually just paint on the ground). It might be possible for the USA to open up the strait again, but the second they leave, Iran can just close it off again. This might be the most forever of the forever wars, or it might just be an outright defeat for the USA.

This whole thing is such a mess on so many different axes. I didn't even get into how Israel is driving a lot of this, and it's all because Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He's firing in all directions, and he's relying on the USA to protect him.

Comment Re:Having billionaires telling me to work from hom (Score 1) 152

It wasn't just to maintain value for their corporate properties, it's because they love seeing people in the office, doing their bidding. They'd be able to save so much on capital expenditure if everyone worked from home, but they keep people in the office because they looooooove to see who they're oppressing.

Comment Re:The sky is falling....? (Score 2) 152

Yeah, there was just fuel rationing and it FUNDAMENTALLY changed the car industry for decades? Big cars went out of style and Japanese econoboxes became a thing because people wanted to spend less on gas?

I get it, you were a KID in the 70s, so you didn't really understand what was going on and what the challenges were. But you could go and read about them now if you want--you're probably north of 50, I think you're ready to learn the truth.

Comment Re:*facepalm* (Score 1) 177

This was always going to end this way. Sorry Ofcom but 4chan is 100% in the right here. Your authority extends only to requesting it be blocked in your country. Nothing more.

This isn't a multinational company and it is not in any way subject to any laws other than US law.

The US should think and act the same way: activities, companies and individuals outside the borders of the US are not subject to US laws. America is not the world's police force, as much as it likes to think it is. Mind your own business, and the rest of the world should do the same.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

Comment Re:UK folks went to 4chan, 4chan did not go to UK (Score 2) 177

they are no longer in the UK and UK laws no longer apply.

You're blissfully unaware of how laws work.

There are certain crimes that can be prosecuted and punished in the UK even if they were committed in Thailand or Antarctica. It is sufficient that they can get to you somehow, for example via an Interpol arrest request or an extradition order or by freezing your assets, etc.

Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

Comment Admitting the obvious (Score 5, Insightful) 184

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

Comment Anonymity (Score 1) 54

Lying to yourself is the biggest danger for trying to stay Anonymous. With enough patterns to recognize, the idea that one can hide is a delusional take.

The only way to win, is to run EVERYTHING you post through an AI that changes the tone and words used in all your online activity. But even then that may itself be a lie.

Comment Re:Charging extra for security? (Score 1) 147

TouchID is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. I have a Mac Mini and I have no way to get TouchID on this thing and it doesn't make it a bad computer with no security.

The extra storage is the REAL thing you want for MacOS. 256GB is almost unworkable, IMO. It's what I have on this Mac Mini and I've had to fight pretty hard to keep my disk space free, even with a bunch of external drives hanging off of it.

Comment Re:An affordable Macbook? (Score 3, Interesting) 147

For a laptop, the chip is fine. The A18Pro is faster than the M1 Mac Mini that I'm typing this on, and the M1s are all still getting along just fine--I'd like a newer machine because I compile code now and then and it's punishing on this thing, but for day-to-day use, it's still going strong. The REAL limiting factor on these machines is storage. 256GB is *barely* enough. macOS is bad about allowing you to offload certain things to external drives without jumping through some hoops, and once the space starts to run out, the OS flips out pretty hard. So storage management is kind of always an ongoing thing.

But if you're mostly using it for a bit of schoolwork, web browsing, some spreadsheets, and you rely on the cloud for all your photos and music, it's probably fine.

Seriously, this is a very good deal. I do agree that they should have physically marked the USB 2.0 port SOMEHOW, but other than that, this was a decent set of compromises to make to drop the price.

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