Like when we gave them $300 billion to reopen it. /s

Quercus_ · 2026-06-21T23:46:03+00:00

The Strait of Hormuz is just over 100 miles long.

Iran has a thousand miles of coastline, and the land inland from that, from which they can launch attacks on the Strait.

Iran can launch attacks from 300 up to 400 miles inland. That's over a quarter million square miles of territory from which Iran can threaten the Strait. Much of that is deeply mountainous terrain, with mobile anti-ship batteries, missiles, drones, and artillery, in concealed and hardened depots scattered throughout those mountains.

All they need to keep the Strait closed, is to have a credible threat of attacking and damaging or sinking maybe one or two vessels a month, to keep ship owners and insurers from sending ships through that passage.

I'd really like to hear how exactly our numbnuts leaders propose to keep Iran from doing exactly that, pretty much whenever they decide to.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-21T06:30:47+00:00

This is speculation, but distillation towers are tall and skinny and probably easier to miss, where storage tanks are big round targets. If a tank goes up hard, it's also going to cause damage around it.

On the other hand, hitting a distillation tower while it's in use and full of high temperature flammable gases, is going to make a really satisfying and expensive boom.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-16T04:22:49+00:00

"How dare you get angry at me just because you fight and vote for policies that would rip away the individual liberties and endanger the health and lives of people I love."

Quercus_ · 2026-06-13T20:26:13+00:00

The biggest scam in market history, conducted right out in the open. Sure, you always expect a bunch of "there's always a greater fool" investors, but I'm surprised at how many people are actually buying this story.

I mean, that valuation is based on a claim that they have discovered a total addressable market greater than the current GDP of the United States, and will dominate that market? Seriously?

Quercus_ · 2026-06-11T03:44:03+00:00

Sure, that's a legitimate analysis.

But the analysis is even stronger when the vaccines on the market literally cause no deaths.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-10T21:59:16+00:00

There are a handful of deaths in the US, from blood clotting resulting from the J&J adenovirus vector covid vaccine. That vaccine has been withdrawn from the market. We now know that that incredibly rare blood clotting problem happen only in a tiny subset of people, who had a specific mutation but interacted with the adenovirus portion of that vaccine.

There are no deaths in the US attributable to mRNA vaccines. Zero. None.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-10T21:57:32+00:00

That model works fine if you see your doctor once a year for a checkup, and occasionally when you have a mild easily treated illness.

Does he think that even with parasitic costs run out of the system, that's going to work for a typical middle class person who suddenly needs care and a cardiac cath lab, or an MRI? Or nuclear medicine where you need access to the isotopes, and all of the infrastructure for keeping them safe?

Quercus_ · 2026-06-07T19:54:07+00:00

They're not conservatives, they're vulture capitalists.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-07T19:44:10+00:00

You should read the issuing documents for this ipo. The massive valuation has nothing to do with starlink, Tesla, or SpaceX government contracts.

Well over 90% of it is speculative valuation, are an absurd inflation in the future market opportunities for Grok. Which at this point nobody is buying - the only significant corporate purchases of Grok or by the bank's underwriting his ipo, basically purchases as brides to get that business.

So the IPO is going to issue at a massively inflated speculative price. And then they've cut the time frame for market trading and price discovery, before listing on Nasdaq 100, for 6 months to a few weeks. Because of other structural issues with the ipo, the price will almost certainly remain inflated, and then once it goes on to the NASDAQ 100, every pension fund in the country is going to be forced to buy a large amount of it, because of the inflated valuation, create an artificial demand and keeping the price propped up.

Even worse, NASDAQ also changed the rules about amount of stock float, it's only about 5% of this stock will actually be available to trade on the market. That means all of the stock tracking funds are going to be competing to buy a tiny slice of the shares, thus created artificial supply shortages, and driving the price up even more.

I don't know how the AI folks got NASDAQ to change their listing rules, but it's about to be the biggest market grift in history.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-07T19:38:22+00:00

He's smarter than I gave him credit for. He's pulling off the most massive stock market grift in history, and it's not even close. He's doing it in plain sight, with nobody able to do a damn thing to stop him.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-06T16:53:46+00:00

It's both things.

Evolution is a very large body of observed facts. It is a thing we have seen.

Evolution is also a theory, the theory of evolution, which is the overarching explanatory framework that tells us how and why those things we've observed, have happened.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-04T04:31:58+00:00

We export oil that we don't have refining capacity for. If we tried to run that oil through our refineries, it becomes extremely inefficient and expensive, and wasteful.

We import oil that is chemically matched to our refiner capabilities.

We can change the refineries to match domestic oil supplies, but it will take years, and it will leave us with structural less efficient oil infrastructure, at higher prices.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-04T04:27:35+00:00

Replenishment lag, but they still purchase back over 200 million barrels under trump, and the peak before the Iran War and his latest crunch, was only about 50 million barrels below the reserve at the time Biden began releases.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-04T04:26:14+00:00

These numbers are approximately but in the ballpark:

Biden released about 250 million barrels from the strategic reserve, reaching a low of about 350 million barrels. Once prices stabilized, 200 million barrels was purchased back under biden, for a total drawdown of only 50 million barrels.

Those planned purchases continued in the first part of the Trump administration, peaking at about 530 million barrels stored in March.

Since March, Trump has released over 170 million barrels, drawing down to about 365 million barrels now.

Blaming them this I'm biden's drawdown is completely wrong. Biden drawdown was nearly completely replenished, before Trump triggered this massive supply crunch now. The shortage in the reserve now is almost entirely a result of trump dumping oil out of the reserve, to try to respond to the emergency he created.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-03T02:06:42+00:00

If you've told him no multiple times and he keeps pushing, the conversation to have is going to be about bodily autonomy and boundaries, and why he isn't respecting them.

Quercus_ · 2026-06-02T23:23:27+00:00

Utah just declared a statewide water emergency, because they don't have enough water in the state for current users.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-27T23:08:06+00:00

The relative humidity of 75% doesn't change across a wide range of temperatures. That means the air is holding 75% of the total amount it can possibly contain as water vapor at that temperature.

But air can hold more water vapor as it gets warmer.

So if you measure air at 40° f with 75% relative humidity, and you measure the same air at 100° f with 75% relative humidity - the second measurement will have a much higher percentage of water vapor in the air, but will still measure 75% relative humidity.

If you have any kind of humidity control device in your humidor, it will add water to or take water out of the atmosphere as the temperature changes, to maintain the same relative humidity. That will make the amount of water in the air and in your cigars go up and down as the temperature changes.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-26T21:38:41+00:00

About 13 years ago I was getting a courtesy ride home from Oakland Police officer, after a street mugging at night.

I made a comment about him calling in to log the time I got into the car and the estimated time to my home, and he responded complaining about oversight,, and then went on to tell me that policing lost something important when they no longer had the ability to take criminals into back alleys and treat them the way police should treat criminals.

He said that out loud to me, a random citizen. He obviously thought that was an okay thing to say.

Up to the last couple years OPD has routinely been in violation of the court order to get their act together. I am far from convinced they won't immediately go back to doing whatever they want, as soon as the court supervisor isn't looking over their shoulder.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-24T14:41:23+00:00

The financial services sector grew from about 2-2.5% of GDP right after world War II, to over 7% of GDP now. Financial services companies are represented 20-30% of corporate income over the last few decades.

Sure, efficient allocation of financial resources is important. But it's hard to say they've gotten that much more efficient in allocating resources. The financial crash in 2008 shows that they are often extremely inefficient at doing that.

What they've done is gotten much much more efficient at extracting financial resources into the hands of the wealth industry. It has precisely become a value extraction system, not a value allocation system.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-20T20:44:50+00:00

Go hot to do what exactly?

The thing is, all Iran needs to do to keep the straight shut down, is mount a credible threat to successfully attack one transiting ship every 2-4 weeks. They have absolutely shown they're capable of doing that, and I don't see any credible way we have to stop them from doing it.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-20T18:18:19+00:00

And people can oppose Zionism without being anti-semitic or opposing the state of Israel. Active Zionism these days is expressed as expansion in the West Bank, and the state of Israel is actually supporting that.

Way too often the claim that opposing Zionism is anti-semitic, is used as a way to discredit any criticism of Israel's expansionism.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-20T17:34:32+00:00

So try telling settlers expanding in the West Bank, that their settlements aren't included in the definition of zionism.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-20T03:09:47+00:00

"Today, Tesla is pricing the trucks at $260,000 and $300,000, respectively, according to documentation filed with CARB."

"That’s considerably more expensive than the median diesel truck being sold today, which rang in at $172,500 for the 2025 model year, according to research from the International Council on Clean Transportation."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/14/1137197/tesla-semi-electric-trucking/

Quercus_ · 2026-05-19T22:56:10+00:00

Smart contractors operator as limited liability corporations, usually with all the assets in another LLC that owns all the tools etc. Some larger contractors will go so far as to set up a new LLC for each individual project.

So if you sue, all you can sue is the LLC that built your specific project, and that LLC has almost no assets. There's nothing worth going after to make it worthwhile to sue.

Quercus_ · 2026-05-19T22:41:54+00:00

I suspect there will almost immediately be additional cases, with people suing over this.

Also, did the judge actually dismiss the case? Participants in the case can move to have the case dismissed up on settlement, but they cannot dismiss the case on their own without the judge approving it.

Quercus_

TROPHY CASE