Thevenin
It’s more about the how and why.
How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.
Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.
Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.
Beyond All Reason is my favorite RTS at the moment. I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation (despite its flaws), and BAR provides the same sense of exponential growth, escalation, and strategic pivots.
One of my favorite things about the game is that it’s not ridiculously APM-intensive. The controls have a learning curve, but they enable you to “fire and forget” most of your tasks.
If you want to get a sense for the game before diving in, Brightworks does some good casting for both competitive and community-level games. https://www.youtube.com/@BrightWorksTV
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.
In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.
Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.
a bit melancholic sometimes
Viewer be advised: If you’ve ever lost someone you took for granted, or hurried through what should have been a formative time in your life instead of slowing down and appreciating it while you had it, then this show knows how to punch you in the tender bits, and it will not stop.
I cried during every one of the first four episodes.
10/10
Playing hardball.
The graphic there looks like an Embassy Suites hotel without the roof.
I’d strongly suggest a retractable canopy for the peristyle (Atrium? Courtyard?), because you basically have an enormous chimney – on windy days, the draft pressure caused by a flue that size would threaten to break peoples’ windows or suction their doors shut.
She doesn’t have the bona fides for the presidency, but I’d love to see Katie Porter show up to a presidential debate carrying that whiteboard.
Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.
States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.
You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.
(You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)
But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.
It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.
The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.
