The Trump administration—and conservatives in general—are treating oil that can only be extracted from fracking like it’s old fashioned oil wells. They’re not the same. The output from a traditional oil well is easy to predict: They have a specific amount of estimated oil and over (a long) time you need to add more well heads to keep the same level of output but in general it’s well-established science. You can extract from them for decades and decades.

Fracking can extract a lot of oil from a tiny area all at once over the course of just a few years. In theory you could extract oil from the same fracking well for 40 years but in reality it’s just ten years. No fracking (for oil) has lasted longer than that as far as I’m aware. You can still extract natural gas from the same site though (I don’t know the specifics on that).

NOTE: What makes fracking wells only last ten years isn’t that you can’t get any more oil out of them. It’s because it takes too much energy to get more oil out of them. Forget how much it costs: There’s an amount no one will pay to extract a barrel of oil from the ground and that is “more than one barrel’s worth of energy”.

Whereas wind and solar power will last forever, fracking is a boom that will only last another 20 years or so. By screwing over solar and wind power Republicans/Trump/conservatives are screwing our future. It takes a long ass time to replace fleets of vehicles and the time to do that is like ten years ago. We need to ramp it up too if we don’t want to get caught in another energy crisis around 2035 (that’s approximately when the output from traditional oil wells drops to the point where fracking can’t make up with demand anymore).

Microsoft is trying to make Xbox into Windows: Where 3rd parties make the hardware and then license the platform from Microsoft. It’s a vastly more profitable model. Especially if they get all those end users signed up for a subscription service.

The problem is that the world thinks of “Xbox” as a console (and a specific kind of controller). To pull this off Microsoft is going to have to re-brand Xbox entirely by making people think of it more like a game-specific app store that runs on Windows and special handheld hardware. It won’t be easy.

There’s a bigger problem with this plan though: No real coordination with the Windows OS team. Windows on handhelds sucks. The past twenty fucking years of Windows development has been almost entirely focused on improving enterprise features with very little attention paid to end users or gaming.

Growth in Windows gaming has come despite Microsoft’s investments. Not because of them. In fact, I’d argue that if it weren’t for Steam, Windows—as a gaming platform—would be a fraction of what it is today.

Don’t get me wrong, though! I love this new Xbox roadmap! Windows gaming has been holding back Linux desktop adoption for far too long. The latest benchmarks that show games on SteamOS vastly outperforming the new Xbox-branded handhelds pretty clearly demonstrates all that bashing of Windows by Linux nerds was deeply accurate.

It turns out that Linux on the desktop really is superior! 🤣

Wait: Are we sure they’re actually people?

Trust me when I say that if you do this with that many girls in the bed… Urine trouble!

Get a tortoise and feed the berries to it 👍

(That’s what we do at our house)

The AI said that trying to reason with you is a waste of precious tokens.

“The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion.

So was your right to vote. Shall we let the executive branch take that away on a whim as well?

Over a billion dollars to fight… (checks notes) the concept of people not being 100% aligned masculine/straight/male or feminine/straight/female.

WTF‽ What made them think that the 0.5%-2% of the population (depending on who you ask) that land at the edges of the sex spectrum are worth that level of hate?

More Americans are witnessing people being hauled off as they shop, exercise at the gym, dine out and otherwise go about their daily lives

There was another time in history when this happened. It’s pretty famous. Maybe the news media could make that reference? Nah, that would be too prescient and “too biased.” In the same way the news media didn’t report the same things realistically for the same reason during that other time in history when this happened.

Biden just followed through with what was negotiated with the Taliban by the former Trump administration. If the US doesn’t follow through we lose credibility in all future negotiations with everyone.

What you’re complaining about is the fact that Trump et all made an agreement to pull out the troops within a certain (completely unreasonable) timeline. They had no idea WTF they were doing and obviously didn’t do due diligence or any sort of logistics planning for such a withdrawal before making the agreement.

If you think that sounds like bullshit let me ask you this: Does Trump ever do due diligence on anything? During his first administration nearly all his executive orders got thrown out because they were deemed arbitrary and capricious and during his second administration it looks like we’re getting the same exact situation.

They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to govern. If they didn’t have several powerful right wing media empires backing up every stupid decision they make Trump would never have been re-elected and he’d have long since been impeached in this administration.

Correction: Education is not OK.

AI is just giving poor kids the same opportunities rich kids have had for decades. Opportunities for cheating the system that was made specifically not to give students the best education possible but instead to bring them up to speed on the bare minimum required to become factory workers.

Except we don’t have very many factories any more. And we don’t have jobs for all these graduates that pay a living wage.

The banks are going to have to get involved soon. They’re going to have to figure out a way to load up working-age people with long term debt without college being involved.

Socialism to the rescue!

Retiring would be a step down for that guy.

Just hoof it down to your nearest library and ask the librarian. They know how to horse around 🐴👍

If they’re bringing on “IT leadership” people then the only place where they’re going to be bossing people around is cubicles, conference rooms, and operations centers.

They may get people killed but it will be because they underestimated the damages caused by their hackers. In fact, I highly suspect that there will be a huge “collateral damage” incident from US/Israel hackers using an undisclosed vulnerability to break into something that “the bad guys” then use to break into some important systems all over the world.

Imagine a major industrial control vulnerability that gets turned into a worm by Iran that then causes massive explosions and chemical fires all over the world. Even in countries that have nothing to do with their current conflict.

The “front line” in that war is an operations center somewhere in the US where they control spy satellites and tell our allies, submarines, & other remote equipment what to do.

It’s super interesting, right? Are there any other armies around the world that have lowered their minimum health/boot camp requirements in order to recruit more people like drone pilots, software developers, and various other engineers?

Seems like a good idea to me. Ever since WW2 technology has been the most important factor in warfare. So much so that it now doesn’t matter if you have a single soldier ready to deploy if you have nuclear ICBMs (not that it’s a good thing we have those).

The difference today is that what you need are lots of people to “man” data/operations centers and just a few ready to deploy for actual combat. Also, a lot of people involved in manufacturing and with skills like CNC machining and 3D printing.

None of those skill sets are conducive to “being in shape”. Rather than focus on troops being “ready for anything” it makes more sense to have them housed right next to the systems they work with so they can roll out of the bunk and into the operations center like a fireman rather than out of a barracks and on to a troop transport.

Future news story: Trump wanted to use nuclear bomb on Iran but couldn’t figure out how to read the codes in the nuclear football.

“No matter how many times I asked no one brought me a football. They just kept handing me a briefcase!”

Something tells me that the MAGA base won’t be too happy about this. They want the deportations to happen in their communities.

“Sorry Texas: Because you’re full of MAGA people we’re cutting your ICE resources.”

To me, this is like saying, “4chan has turned into a cesspool!” Yeah: It was like that from the start. YOU were the ones that assumed it was ever safe!

You’re posting stuff on the public Internet to a website for adults where literally anyone can sign up and comment FFS.

If you want good moderation you need community moderation from people in that community. Not some giant/evil megacorp!

There’s all sorts of tools and platforms that do this properly, easily, and for free. If you don’t like Meta’s websites move off of them already!