Not only that, but SP500 pays dividends practically every year, whereas gold costs money to store securely. $15M in SP500 would have netting something around $300k last year in dividends alone.
Not only that, but SP500 pays dividends practically every year, whereas gold costs money to store securely. $15M in SP500 would have netting something around $300k last year in dividends alone.
Meh that’s easy. Thin, glasslike, uniform exterior aesthetic.
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.
A Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox
I mean, that’s a weird-ass AI prompt. But if fascism wins and you voted third party, yes - it’s partly* your fault unless you’re too stupid to understand how first past the post voting works.
*conditionals against massive fascist party majority states notwithstanding.
maybe get a few of those potatoes up front
It’s good to see such unbridled optimism in these dark times.
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.
The way I read it was a ceasefire in return for some of the hostages. Nobody floats their final offer with the first contact.
Well, lucky for him he didn’t even entertain the ceasefire to see if he could have gotten them all back.
Wait until I tell you that the US is indebted to Japan for that same amount ($1.1T) and to China for nearly that amount ($0.9T). Sure it’s a bigger portion of the available funds in the developing world, but on the scale of superpowers, it’s not so much.
Marketing: We need to defend this - what’s something people are really excited about?
Engineer: Stainless steel; you can’t make a good stainless without nickel
Salesman: Oooh - I know! How about nickels? Everybody loves nickels and their worth 5 cents each!
Engineer:
Marketing:
Intern: You know, they use nickel in battery packs for electric cars
Marketing: Oh, right - everybody likes electric cars. Green and vroom-vroom, I love it!
Engineer: You know that electric cars don’t go vroom-vroom, right?
Marketing: I’m going with electric cars, it’s a feel-good use people will get behind.
Indeed. A relatively lightly administered area which was predominantly (3/4) Muslim. Then Britain took it over following WW1 and said “The Zionists supported us during the war so we’re going to carve out a Jewish homeland in this space where they say they used to live a couple millenia ago and we’re going to pretty much ignore that there’s someone already living there.”
Now you have people displaced who felt their homeland was taken and people transplanted who believe their homeland is due them and the most extreme factions have guns and bombs to argue about it. There is no solution where Israel remains and stays at peace with it’s neighbors, some of whom were displaced to make space or Israel.
It saddens me that this is the case. My great grand-parents were Jewish and fled the pogroms in western Russia to come to the US. Zionists are a stain on our religion.
Terrorists and Religious zealots (a Venn diagram which is nearly a perfect, single circle) will never recognize basic humanity, because power and control are more important than any human life. To expect peace in a land claimed as sacred by multiple groups is simply guaranteeing unending violence.
I don’t know how deep that area is, but damage to a pipe and the comm cable cut makes me wonder if it was some numbnut dragging an anchor - plain incompetence rather than an act of sabotage. Not that it wasn’t sabotage, just that it seems sloppy for someone looking to disrupt gas supplies.
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/