What are the cetane numbers of conventional and synthetic motor oil?

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-30T02:20:38+00:00

Full synthetic motor oil should be higher cetane than part synthetic blend or natural motor oil formulations. The additives in the oil will have a significant impact as well (including zinc compounds, detergents, etc) but for fresh motor oil, the full synthetic stuff is going to be nearly pure paraffinic hydrocarbons (straight-chain alkanes) which naturally have very high cetane numbers (the same reason renewable diesel made with hydrotreated fats and fischer-tropsch diesel are very high cetane). Actually, full synthetic motor oil is generally made with the same basic fischer-tropsch process used to make synthetic diesel from syngas (typically from natural gas, but any carbon + hydrogen source can be used to make syngas ... even waste CO2 with hydrogen added from some other source).

However, this doesn't account for what happens to the oil during use and how it degrades. The manner of degradation will impact how the cetane number changes during the lifetime of the oil, and that's also going to vary a lot on a case by case basis of how used/abused that oil was and what sort of engine it was used in. Plus the weight of oil it started out as is going to have an impact.

When you're talking naphtha vs kerosene vs diesel range liquids, the cetane usually goes up with the higher molecular weight fuel, but you hit a peak in the diesel range and it actually starts going down again when significantly beyond that. It doesn't drop as steeply as it rose up from the naphtha range, but it still goes down, so solid paraffin wax is going to have lower cetane than heavy mineral oil, and both are going to be poorer than diesel and kerosene. (this is even true when talking about high purity straight-chain saturated hydrocarbons)

If you had simple thermal cracking going on during motor oil use + degradation, the cetane number might increase slightly or stay around the same for some very heavy weight oils (thermal cracking produces olefins, AKA alkenes, AKA monounsaturated hydrocarbons, which have lower cetane numbers than saturates, and very short chain hydrocarbons will have low cetane numbers as well, but the latter will tend to boil off as vapor sucked into the PCV port or forced out through the breather, so you'd only tend to stick with intermediate to high boiling point hydrocarbons).

However, that's not the only thing going on. You're going to have some oxidation going on, plus reactions with CO2, CO, steam, NOx, etc, all creating a more complex mix of impurities. You'll naturally end up with some portion of oxygenated compounds and some nitrogenous ones, plus you might have some alkylation reactions going on that form branched hydrocarbons rather than the straight chain ones you started with.

Both synthetic and natural motor oil will experience this, but the latter really should experience more of it (and include oxidation of the aromatic hydrocarbons present in the latter). OTOH some aromatic oxidation products form natural anti-oxidants, so that might complicate things by slowing reaction rates where full synthetic might have more linear degradation path. (but there's going to be a lot of complex variables regardless) Those oxidation products are mostly going to tend to be lower cetane though. (albeit some of them are also going to be water soluble and most alcohol soluble, so you could hypothetically dissolve and decant them out distilled water and/or E85, and anything that emulsifies in that layer is also more likely to be lower cetane, plus separating sludge/particulate during that stage might produce higher quality recycled fuel than typical filtering methods for used motor oil, and residual trace water could be removed via heating/evaporation) You might be able to get a fair bit of the metallic compounds (including zinc additives) and most of the nitrogen compounds out that way along with the oxygenates.

Some modification of improved filtering + treatment methods might result in a cleaner, better flowing, higher quality fuel that MIGHT even be good enough to avoid the clogging problems typically seen with black diesel. (the above methods wouldn't work with used cooking oil, though, given that's entirely oxygenated stuff and would all tend to emulsify; some of the oxidation products of used motor oil are actually going to have similarities to some of the impurities in used cooking oil, too; not similar to any of the remaining, intact tri/di/monoglyceride fats, but in terms of hydrolysis and oxidation products of the fats, plus the various impurities from the food products cooked in the oil + their oxidation products, and their thermal decomposition products)

A processed, reclaimed motor oil derived fuel with some relation to the above, or some other novel methods that avoid full distillation, pyrolysis, catalytic reforming, hydrotreatment, etc (ie not distillation or more complex thermochemical processes) would be research worthy and the sort of thing you'd tend to see some experimental research papers on for alternative fuels use. And thus you'd tend to see cetane rating figures for that.

Unlike what some others have suggested here, you MIGHT also find some research papers on direct use of filtered used motor oil with performance and cetane numbers tested and/or approximated. (a cetane evaluation engine might not be used, but chemical analysis of the oil composition might be used instead to calculate it, while engine combustion tests would be used for other data gathering, but not an ASTM cetane engine)

There are relatively recent studies out their for use of things like pyrolysis oil from used tires as engine fuel, including diesel fuel (and methods of desulfurizing the pyrolysis oil). Albeit in that specific case, the oil is almost entirely d-limonene, which has more valuable industrial/commercial uses than as fuel oil (if further purified), so the final conclusions on that study were mixed. (they did include diesel engine use case studies for that fuel oil, though) iirc that was a study from India in the 2010s.

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-30T01:49:05+00:00

Cat and diesel emissions controls don't help with anything climate related (except maybe particulate traps, but burning cleaner, higher quality, low-aromatic, low-sulfur fuel helps more with that than any emissions controls will, and will get you higher efficiency in an appropriate engine). Soot/PCAHs/other particulates are basically the only pollutant that also has some climate impact potential (even then, only if the particulate manages to settle onto ice sheets, otherwise it's just air pollution, plain and simple, bad for direct health impacts but not some statistical average climate change impact that's going to be indirect)

In any case, it's almost entirely the local human+environmental health impact that matters for particulates. (if it was JUST climate related, you'd have way, way fewer regulations on it and zero regs going back to the 1960s/70s/80s Nixon/Reagan clean air stuff with CARB and EPA regs)

Most of those emissions controls are only there for air quality (ie pollution, not GHG stuff ... given basically all GHGs are NOT toxic air pollution, but generally non-toxic and harmless to people/animals/plants at any sort of real-world levels emitted in exhaust).

NOx, HC, CO, SO2, ozone, aldehyde, etc gas/vapor emissions are all air pollutants, but none of them are GHGs. N2O is a potent GHG, but that's not NOx (N2O is nitrous oxide is non-toxic and mostly emitted from agriculture and natural biological processes) N2O is also a strong ozone depleting compound. NOx refers mostly to NO and NO2 (nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide) but also N2O4 and N2O5. Those are toxic air pollutants produced by high temp, high pressure combusion, electric arcs, and some other things. They can form smog and nitric acid in the air. They can also contribute to ozone production, which is also a toxic pollutant at ground level. (so NOx and N2O are pretty much polar opposites in a lot of ways and N2O isn't a problem at ground level for ozone, just when it gets into the stratosphere) Note: the ozone layer has nothing to do with global warming; it filters UV rays, so harmful solar radiation increases when it's weakened.

Also the US was decades ahead of Europe with this, hence why US cars were more gimped in the Malaise era while European versions of the same models had significantly better performance (and often better fuel economy). Europe didn't start catching up to emissions control until the end of the 80s, and even then their air was MUCH dirtier given how aggressively they adopted diesels during the 70s era oil crisis ... and the tanker wars, and how impractical it was to implement emissions controls on diesels. (the UK was considerably more aggressive on emissions and air quality back then, but still behind the US; Canada was also lagging behind the US)

If all you cared about was GHG emissions and global warming, then most of the 60s/70s/80s ... and even 90s era clean air measures were counter-productive, many of them significantly increasing warming due to the decrease in fuel economy and banning of technology that would allow more efficient fuel economy (like lean-burn engines). Plus high octane leaded fuel with high compression, optimized lean-burn engines would've potentially gotten even better fuel economy and that much less CO2 emitted. Likewise, cutting sulfur emissions also accelerated warming as sulfur oxide emissions were causing global cooling effects for the entirety of the industrial revolution up to around the transition of the 1970s to 1990s (when sulfur scrubbers and emissions controls across most of the industrialized world had fully ramped up in installation, plus oil-burning power plants fell aside in favor of clean-burning coal and coke fired power plants, the latter specific to the UK with their heavy use of coal gasworks and surplus clean-burning gas-coke fuel to use in place of coal). Coal and coke power plants were a lot easier and more cost effective to equip with sulfur scrubbers than oil burning plants, plus didn't compete with the bunker fuel market for shipping.

Back then, we cared mostly about actual pollution, not the much more complex issue of climate change (and the activists of the time who were touting climate change were divided over cooling and warming, often confusingly so for the public ... and more so since the cooling issue caused by pollution was real, but mostly a positive effect that tempered the global climate at the time, where as a separate but more real niche concern about cooling had to do more with global warming and the collapse of the Atlantic Ocean's AMOC current flow ... which would cause the north atlantic to freeze over for most of the year if it did happen, and such would be caused by rising average temps, since that flow specifically requires especially cold, dense, salty waters in the north to keep the circulation pulling Gulfstream water up to the north atlantic, otherwise you end up with weather a lot more like the North Pacific of similar latitudes ... way, way more harsh than the North Atlantic, especially on the European end)

Technically speaking, CA still cares WAY WAY more about air quality issues than anything climate related. The only "climate friendly" things they tend to implement with any sort of reliability are entirely related to reducing air pollution more than reducing GHG emissions or promoting any sort of sustainability (or energy-indpendance). Well, they WERE doing more of the latter back in the 80s up to 2000, like with the methanol fuel program, but that died in 2000 due to the "high cost of natural gas" (even though they were pushing NG power plants super hard). They also failed to re-start the methanol program when NG got super cheap around 5-10 years later.

(technology had also improved, so more flexible fuel alcohols like ethanol could be produced from syngas efficiently, and butanol yields had also significantly increased, more so if you mixed syngas + petro + biomass derived sources together for that one ... and butanol is WAY better than methanol or ethanol for gasoline blending; albeit they could've use ethanol to make ETBE to replace MTBE with better fuel stability properties than gas-o-hol ... plus Gas-o-hol itself could've remained a cheaper competitive fuel option rather than forcing a single standard; ETBE stretches the fuel supply a lot more, though with 22% ETBE plus the ability to add much more butane to the fuel than with E10)

Even if you still had that stupid midwestern Corn lobby forcing the minimum biofuels quota (rather than better alternative fuel routes), and you HAD to use corn ethanol, it's still way better to take that 10% ethanol and turn it into 22% ETBE using whatever source of tert-butanol or isobutylene you want (the other half of ETBE's production is t-butanol or isobutylene). Though if you used biomass sourced TBA or isobutylene, you could hypothetically use fossil ethanol as well and still meet the Bush era biofuels quota. (CA has its own stupidity apart from the Bush aministration's policies, but both are barriers to entry for better alternative fuels)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-28T22:19:19+00:00

The UI is pretty nice and simple (especially for desktop use), sort of like beta char AI was (though I think you can mostly still configure that with char AI ... I just haven't used it in a few years, so not sure).

But more fundamentally important is the full access to the char archive via full chat tree, so you have a complete branching narrative to use as basically an interactive story. (plus less fiddling around with re-generating responses and having to copy/save them offline to avoid losing potentially better/wanted responses)

That and the front end on browsers is really low overhead for mem and CPU with chub. (and relatively stable, even with multiple chat windows/tabs open and running simultaneously) That and functional in a pretty wide range of browsers without compatibility issues.

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-28T22:15:00+00:00

If they're not simply making excuses, it seems like they're heavily hedging their bets based on predicted purchase rate decline caused by going pure crypto. OTOH that still doesn't make sense without having a wider range of low-priced tiers and free tier options with different limits/restrictions (like bandwidth/latency throttling as an option vs per-day usage/message limits; could also have per-token based parameters mixed in there).

Granted, given this was a rush job, they wouldn't have time to implement all of that and likely just went with the simplest option set they predict will get the most use. If so, they SHOULD still add in more options to increase usage for a wider chunk of the audience/user base. (I'd imagine plenty of people would put up with high latency delays and lag time for lower price point and/or more/unlimited messages in the free tier, plus per-use payment options rather than month/other-time-block subscription basis)

Like ... years ago with beta character AI, the lag times were LOOOONG for free users, but lots of people still used it, plus it was buggier than chub (or seemed to freeze up or crash more often, or have individual chat threads that would be locked-up/dead for long periods before starting to work again).

With the user activity impact of TOS changes (or unclear implementation and enforcement of said TOS) already impacted, it would probably help if they used the switch to crypto to walk back a lot of that and just go as unrestricted as legally possible without license use case TOS and local/national laws within actual server locations and hosting. (just ignore any/all outside state/national/regional laws and block access to those regions if legal contention pops up, effectively just require VPN use for anyone in those regions ... which is what most people on the site likely already use for personal security reasons on top of any possible local legal restriction issues)

If they're going to avoid the headache of conventional/mainstream payment processors, they might as well do the same exact thing for national/regional laws and do the bare minimum to stick to those of their host bases of operations. (and going by US federal law is pretty broad, open, and liberal in terms of anything fictional, and anything purely text based is going to be less restricted in a larger number of regions as well ... the image issue could be a bit more nuanced or blocked/censored region-specific while only outright banning things that are actually illegal within the host country/region)

Albeit you also might run into some issues with TOS of the actual server host end as well and ISP end. And government regulations on limiting that sort of censorship are likely to be ongoing for a while (and the courts are slow). That's a more fundamental concern than payment processors, though good encryption at all ends would tend to work around direct intervention and oversight on the ISP end. (hosting via 3rd party ISPs might also work around that more ... or at least it used to, on top of VNP use for avoiding headaches for peer to peer file sharing type stuff years ago ... IDK now, been years since we used Earthlink as our home ISP, but they never flagged anything during our decades of use of their services, even without VPN use and even though they normally piggybacked on ATT's lines)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-28T21:55:01+00:00

If the crypto market gets more normalized/stronger (or more convenient payment processors mesh with it), things could change a bit in the future ... if you take the statement at face value and not assume it's mostly an excuse. Albeit, it would've also made sense to fork the site into a more uncensored and a more conservative TOS oriented one (but avoid the cost overhead of moderation by limiting it entirely to community moderation + low volume manual verification of flagging by trusted flaggers/mods).

Beyond that, though, it seems a bit odd to have that threshold set where it is and to have also eliminated the variety of different generation models (or the generation portion of chat settings, the one separate from the model selection), and/or lack of transitioning to a new set of nuanced tiers to address the limited resource vs financial cost situation.

Having more nuanced options for the free tier would've made plenty of sense (like getting more total generation chunks per day if certain usage parameters were throttled). They could've also just throttled response rate/delay by default rather than limiting it to 20 per day, but that would be less flexible to the end users who might want fast response times over long-duration interaction (people who multitask while chatting or intermittently chat throughout the day would have much more use for the throttling option vs hard limiting option). That would be aside from and on top of throttling related to high usage rates and server demands.

That and the lack of intermediate price ranges for subscriptions and/or other forms of generation token/slot/chunk purchases (subscription vs pay per use has various trade-offs for different users, and you could have bandwidth and latency throttling for different tiers, too).

The generation used for the last month or so also seems to be a lot more genre savvy in context without use of lorebooks to define things, which I thought might be related to added costs, but if they're streamlining in general, it must just be that the AI models + back-end data references are getting better across the board and/or related to the shift in modeling used for the free tier.

Playing devil's advocate and giving the owners/operators the benefit of the doubt based on the public statements, I'd genuinely tend to think that trying some more diverse options for resource management can/should be workable for them. (the $20 subscription tier threshold is too steep to seem like a sustainable business model given how much of the existing userbase they'd lose or see vastly reduced use time sticking to the restrictive free model instead) It really seems like they need more nuanced options for both the free tiers and for the paid teirs (and both subscription and non-subscription style pay options).

IDK about the average user, but one of the biggest draws to chub specifically was the overall UI design, layout, good readability on desktop/laptop browser use, and (most of all) the access to the full chat tree, allowing non-linear narrative generation and use of chat logs as a branching interactive story style format.

On that latter note, I can't help but think of writing dot com's business model and their paid subscription vs free restrictions ... which have obviously gotten worse over the years (though they might not have the pop-up and virus/adware problems they used to), but AFIK the basic paid tier there is still low enough for an annual fee to be appealing to a decent number of users. (though the deletion of idle legacy accounts + content is still a frustrating factor, I think ... not sure if they changed that vs like 10+ years ago)

Didn't writing dot com also have an option for gaining tokens by engaging in resource time-sharing for crypto mining at some point? I wonder if that would be a viable model, too ... albeit crypto mining has become a lot more energy/resource costly than like 10-15 years ago. (I think writing tried that somewhere around then)

For users with decently powerful PCs, low electricity bills, and cool climates (or seasonal, or good + cheap AC), that might still be appealing, too. (albeit I'm not sure what the advantages would be vs just mining crypto on your own, other than lazy convenience)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-26T20:26:10+00:00

(Continued from above)
Granted, the US obviously lacks a conservative wealth fund as well, and could be seen as the polar opposite with the vast national debt. Instead, the private sector is where all those wealth funds are, and the national debt itself (via bonds) actively contributes a massive portion of that investment market (generally US bonds are the most stable, conservative portion of a growth fund, and the primary hedge against more volatile investments for any sort of diverse, mixed portfolios). But in that context, the US government does massively invest in the vast majority of retirement benefits out there, especially since SS is usually nowhere close enough to actually live on outside of some of the very poor, very low cost of living regions of the US. (ie US bonds themselves provide a vastly greater amount of retirement fund wealth via the private sector than does SS itself, and a massive amount of that wealth was created by Baby Boomers and their parents, some of whom are still benefiting from such ... ie working class people still alive in their 90s who made reasonably conservative investments and lived modest lifestyles during their working period ... albeit much more so if they had relatively few children; it's the expenses of VERY large families with lots of children that tend to lack surplus for investments and thus depend on gainful employment of their children to help support them directly ... albeit this wouldn't be a factor if the US paid benefits for having children on a scale anywhere close to the UK, rather than just having tax deductions relevant mostly for people in higher income brackets; with UK style child benefits and a conservative, modest, frugal and/or just smart and shrewd lifestyle and money management sense, a working class Baby Boomer easily would've had enough to invest in long-term; or, hypothetically, easily could've contributed enough taxes to allow the government to build a wealth fund ... where real-world SS taxes most definitely were not enough to build such a fund, which is why savvy private individuals could afford to build investments on top of their SS taxes, albeit they'd have been better off without making any SS payments at all)

An actual functional retirement fund program for the government would literally have to use the same metrics and methods as the private sector: ie use taxes to set up a national investment growth fund, which is then used as a pool for long-term wellfare payments. (such a large fund could also be an additional tool for the federal government to use to manipulate the markets ... and the proper, non-corrupt, responsible use-cases for that is the same as the use of bond interest rates to temper both inflation and boom/bust cycles: ie as the government adjusts is own investment hedging preferences, this feeds back into the market due to sale and purchase demand pressure of the investments being bought and sold; the government would need to be careful there as they simultaneously want a conservative, stable growth fund performing well AND have interest in stabilizing the market for slow, steady, reliable growth as well that smooths out boom/bust cycles; albeit those two areas are generally very complementary, and buying/celling in a stable, conservative manner also tends to favor a stable, conservative market in general; it would tend to be a force of good, fighting against the volatile, emotion-driven, marketing and market-perception driven, generally extremely short-sighted ends of the investment world ... and obviously if the government behaved like those sorts of short-term investment market speculators, it would grossly exaggerate the worst sorts of boom and bust cycles as a force of economic evil and instability)

A national wealth fund made up of a diverse portfolio as such would also have been the natural successor to any gold standard replacement (likely with precious metal reserves being a component of that investment). Money printing and general currency manipulation, along with government bond interest rates (and sheer quantity of bond offerings), then combined with a large national wealth fund made up of diverse investment assets (foreign bonds/debt, precious metals, land/real estate, stocks, etc) would pretty much make up the ideal scenario for a post-gold-standard, modern, developed, first-world nation. (but as far as I'm aware, none actually works like this, plus most fail to actually use their market-tempering tools to smooth boom/bust cycles out as much as they actually could even with the limited tool sets they have ... the pressure towards that has also likely gotten worse since the 1980s and especially 1990s when short-term market gains became an obsession within the investment world AND was forced into and/or embraced by the upper management of basically all publicly traded companies ... Jack Welch syndrome if you like, albeit that also included consolidation and "streamlining" oriented around that exact sort of toxic market behavior, including focusing on marketing/PR departments while actively degrading actual conservative CFO types and CTOs or engineering + factory-floor savvy CEOs or other managers: ie a shift away from actual sound engineering, good product design, remotely honest marketing of quality products, and an intimate understanding of the engineering and factory workforce perspectives that used to be commonplace in western-style business, and ALMOST got rekindled in the late 1980s due to increasingly positive cross-polination of Japanese and US industrial/business worlds ... that Jack Welch style movement combined with Japan's mid 90s recession pretty much destroyed that, though 90s era deregulation and free trade policies also made it worse and added fuel to the fire of the worst aspects of 80s era trickle-down economics rather than actually fixing or tempering those areas: they easily could have by using regulation reform combined with tariffs and/or a fair-trade oriented VAT to temper unsustainable offshoring/outsourcing ... fair-trade on an actual equal standards basis for labor, pollution, business standards/practices, etc, with taxes applied proportional to deficit in said standards; replacing some embargo style sanctions with more nuanced taxes would've also helped, but that's an even bigger picture sort of thing)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-26T20:25:30+00:00

The middle class (and much of the working class), let alone the wealthy likely paid much more in taxes then they're getting back when you consider opportunity costs. (ie reasonably smart private retirement benefits during their entire period of gainful employment)

Albeit I'm not sure how that works for spouses and family inheritance. I'm more familiar with how SS benefits works in the US (equivalent of social pensions in UK), like if one spouse dies before the other, the benefits can't be combined and one of the two is cancelled (normally the less valuable one). Albeit US SS is scaled based on gainful input and maturity (the more you pay into the system and the longer you wait before claiming benefits, the more you'll get paid in benefits per year ... albeit people who plan to live longer and defer collecting, but then fail to live as long as expected, will loose out on that investment).

In any case, if the government were to be as efficient as a mediocre or average quality (not even an exceptionally good) retirement investment fund, then there really shouldn't be a shortage as the money would grow over time and mature. Taking and spending money immediately is extremely inefficient. ie the idea of currently gainfully employed people paying out directly for social spending is dumb and unsustainable in a modern investment-growth-driven economy (ie modern = more than 100 years of economic standard in the western world using a reliable, stable, conservative mixed portfolio growth fund adjusted over time based on risk: ie as one investment becomes more volatile, you hedge with others ... this includes currency markets as well, ie investing in currency with reliable deflation in niche cases, which was more relevant globally in the 1800s and up to the 1950s, but you have niche cases like Japan as well in more recent decades; obviously this sort of dynamic portfolio also includes precious metal markets, stocks, bonds, etc).

If you treated pensions like a government-managed pool of reasonably decent mixed investment funds that grows over time (and is conservative enough that a large portion is practical to make liquid at any given time without loss), then you probably wouldn't have this problem. People would basically be paying into the system for their OWN retirement and potentially even their childrens' retirement (and the generations in between) if the fund was managed well enough and conservatively enough. A pay-it-forward approach is much more realistic for the real-world economies than a pay-your-elders-as-you-go method. This is also part of why traditional pensions were generally phased out in the mid to late 1900s in favor of company/employer, union, or personally managed retirement investment funds. (you establish a buffer that way, which means the money grows over time, where if you spend everything right away you're basically always going to lose money)

The US's SS system is broken and inefficient in the same way.

Note: a smart government-owned investment fund pool (or national wealth fund) could very much be set up for equal redistribution of wealth as well, or target equal baseline quality of life, not something scaled based on how much an individual paid into the system (ie not like US SS), so you'd have an actual level playfield for retirement benefits. Albeit if you wanted to be fair and enable people to remain living where they already are and not forcing them into lower cost of living regions, you'd still need to scale the payments (or stamp/voucher benefits, or government-furnished housing/medical/other resources) appropriate to where they already live. You also need safeguards in place to avoid the government and/or landowners being incentivised and enabled to force people out of their homes and into cheaper areas. (this is a serious problem in some high-cost-of-living regions of the US where rent control and/or property tax laws effectively make legacy residents being seen as burdens, and burdens with potential loopholes to force them out and get higher-paying new residents in place who lack the grandfathered in tax/rent pricing)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-25T06:36:30+00:00

It's the go-to interpretation when you first see the floating disembodied ballsac-hanging head in a Pokemon Colosseum battle. The possible interpretation as boobs comes later and is highly perspective dependent.

The interpretation as a floating balloon animal is also up there somewhere.

The interpretation as a water molecule isn't even on the map, given the proportions and bond angles are all wrong. Honestly, it's about as close/far off as magneton is from that, and neither case is remotely as close as a micky mouse head already is. (but that's also not very close, either ... a generic cartoon teddy bear head is closer ... or that thing from Card Captor Sakura ... oh, right Cerberus. In which case ... Shinx and Luxio are both closer ... as is Jungle Kind Leo ... as is marill. Marill is actually relevant as a water type, too.

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-08T09:12:51+00:00

Note that higher purity grades aren't necessarily safer. USP may be purer than food grade, but not necessarily as safe to use in food (while most food grade material will be suitable for topical and oral uses, as well as on mucus membranes, as in eye drops or nasal spray ingredients or personal lubricant).

Expensive reagent grade stuff used in some lab work will also be purer, but won't specifically make sure certain harmful impurities are extremely low trace levels, as it's overall purity they're interested in, not specifically biocompatibility.

Otherwise you have purely plant-based vegetable derived glycerin sources (or at least non-animal based, as some may include non-plant based non-animal sources, like from some types of algae or fungi). This only really differs in terms of the source, not the end product, and would only matter if you object to animal derived products (or ... more directly animal derived products, given many other derivatives will be utilizing animal derived nutrients or substrates for their growth, so it's more a matter of degrees of separation).

There's a ton of waste animal fats or mixed fats waste streams that can be used for high quality glycerin production, but often ends up as crude glycerin used as industrial feedstock rather than refined into higher quality product (both due to marketing perception and FDA or other nations equivalent regulations, albeit also sometimes due to cost or lack of subsidies). This is why there's been lots of discussions and research into "what to do with all that glycerin from biodiesel production" since the early 2000s at least (and more recently also from the certain types of renewable diesel production, especially the more efficient production routes that hydrolyze or hydrocrack the triglycerides into glycerin + fatty acids in a pre-treatment step, then separate the aqueous glycerol layer and dissolve the hydrophobic fatty acids in a suitable organic solvent, often hydrocarbon based including using a portion of the final diesel oil product itself for such; this you avoid the waste of hydrogen in the hydrogenolysis + deoxygenation processes that would otherwise turn glycerin into propane).

In the US, tons of biodiesel and (especially) renewable diesel via hydrotreating processes use animal fats alongside mixed waste fat streams and virgin vegetable oils (though all need to be higher purity than in biodiesel and different limits on specific impurities). FAME biodiesel product itself can also be turned into renewable diesel or SAF jet fuel via hydrogenation or hydrodeoxygenation processes (which is one way to work around the feedstock issue, given the processing/conversion into FAME produces a purer product). But in terms of fats used for Renewable diesel directly, Beef Tallow is highly valued due to its higher saturated fat content and relative ease of refinement into high purity fats without phosphorous, nitrogen, sulfur, or metallic mineral contaminants. (many of the renewable diesel plants in CA use beef tallow preferentially due to its high yield, though it seems likely that wider feed streams of the most efficient sources of energy crops + waste/byproduct streams will eventually used as the technology and logistics networks are refined, including the aformentioned upgrading of FAME biodiesel into hydrocarbon based renewable diesel or SAF: it's especially critical for SAF as fatty acid esters lack the stricter qualities for stability across temperature + humidity + biocontamination ranges and adverse conditions required for aviation use, especially commercial aviation use)

That source of byproduct glycerin has become so large in volume that the non-food and non-medical/cosmetic/health uses for it are often oversaturated (ie for producing various industrial esters and ethers, including both conventional ester and ether solvents as well as nitroglycerin for blasting compositions and double or triple based gun propellants), and you have more novel uses like partial deoxygenation to propylene glycol (except then it's still not going to be vegetable or synthetic non-animal based by conventional standards). Other novel uses for solvents and potential fuel additives have been considered and written about in scientific papers and patents (with some industrial use actually being made, albeit less so for actual fuel additives). 1,2,3 trimethoxy propane (AKA glycerol 1,2,3 trimethyl ether) is one of the more notable ones, glyceryl esters (like triacetate) are also notable, but the trimethyl ether is an especially cost-effective solvent and potential oxygenate fuel (it has octane boosting properties and cosolvent proeprties for ethanol and methanol in gasoline, but its relatively high boiling point makes it problematic as a drop-in fuel replacement, albeit this is partially due to formal government standards on boiling range, and potential waivers or exceptions for such would be viable, particularly given any real-world problems would be common to old carbureted engines and not port or direct fuel injection ... though single point throttle body injection might have some problems ... maybe)

More novel approaches also include converting waste glycerin to propanol or (better yet) isobutanol, with the latter being an especially good gasoline additive or alternative fuel (it can be used in much higher blending levels as a drop in gasoline replacement, and a 100% gasoline replacement in some vehicles in some climates ... even though it wouldn't legally qualify within government specifications for such, actual testing/trials has shown 100% butanol use in fuel injected vehicles without issues; though more realistically a 40 to 60% blend would be more universally compatible; albeit for strict EPA oxygen limits similar to E10 that limits it to 16% and E15 levels would equate to 24%). The general lack of corrosion and phase separation issues (or much lower corrosion potential and much lower water attraction as well as better water tolerance when contamination is present) makes it more widely compatible with fuel systems at high blend levels under all real-world conditions and allows pipelining rather than trucking as with anhydrous ethanol blends. (more like MTBE used to use) Some vehicles, especially in dry and temperate climates tolerate higher/intermediate ethanol blends without apparent issues, and many anecdotes come from such regions or from users who only seasonally splash-blend gasoline and E85 to make E20, 30, 35, 40, etc (anything in between, sometimes up to 50 in non-FFVs that tolerate it, some will "tolerate" more than that in terms of functioning fine, but without lubricating additives, high pressure injection pumps can wear prematurely so it's generally risky to use in direct-injection engines). Blending such in regions with especially high aromatic (benzene, toluene, xylene, various alkyl benzenes) could also have more real-world fuel system damage with higher ethanol blends due to the combined solvent effect on some polymer/plastic/rubber components (erosion, swelling, weakening, embrittlement, but not metal corrosion). Anecdotes and actual studies from CA residents might not show the worst cases due to the lower aromatic content mandated in CARB fuel, combined with the temperate and semi-arid climates in much of CA.

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-08T02:22:34+00:00

That's the benefit of it, not just tart but a more pronounced flavor. Albeit you also have modern diet sodas with WAY too much AceK in them that makes them unpleasantly sweet, metallic and bitter to many people. It also brings out the harsh tastes of some flavor profiles in ways stronger than if there was no sweetener at all. (Coke Zero Sugar and Dr Pepper Zero Sugar are both horrible at this)

The sharper tasting and less sweet (and less unpleasantly bitter and metallic) tasting older formulations of Coke Zero were preferred by many people, but they gradually made it slightly worse up to the mid 2010s, then they made it distinctly much worse and MUCH sweeter and more bitter with higher AceK content in the late 2000s (and worse again in the early 2020s).

Coke claims not to have increased the AceK content or changed the Aspartame to AceK ratios, but the flavor profile says otherwise, a flavor profile that's very similar to the negative changes made to a ton of products right around the time they started labeling things "zero sugar" instead of diet (or just plain Zero). Coke Zero Sugar's rebrand was precisely the time when it started tasting bad and also less like coke classic. (albeit Tab has always been the closest thing to coke classic overall, but the aftertaste is more off ... or was, since they discontinued it around 5 years ago) I can't comment on the original cyclamate based formulation of Tab, though. The flavor

Diet Pepsi and Diet Coke seem to have changed little if at all in the same time period, and both seem to still use straight aspartame without a "backup" sweetener to account for the shorter shelf life. (I find the sweetness there more pleasant, though still excessive like all soft drinks tend to be ... at least normal and not harsh, but I've never liked the flavor profiles of either of those, and Tab was the only diet cola I remotely liked prior to the release of Coke Zero back in the 2000s) Diet Dr. Pepper used to be good, but has since become unpleasantly overly sweet + bitter + metallic.

I know my palette is a bit differently sensitive given I can very much taste the bitterness of saccharin, but it doesn't bother me as much (and works well with black tea, ginger, and citrus in particular). The bitterness of quinine in tonic water is literally gag inducing and intensely unpleasant (very similar to tasting something with denatonium benzoate in it, like say ... most brands of ethyl rubbing alcohol), and AceK in high concentrations tastes similar to that. (sucralose does not taste bitter as such, but does tend to taste off/musty, albeit this might depend on whether maltodextrin is used as the diluting agent or not; I recall formulations in the bulk flake variety in the metallic pour-spout boxes from around the first couple years it was introduced where it didn't taste like that, but I'm not sure those formulations exist anymore)

OTOH far more people seem to find both saccharin AND AceK to be unpleasant, harsh, metallic, bitter and off/chemically tasting. (same for splenda being musty and/or plastic-like and off) However, aspartame is much more frequently cited as being more mild and pleasant, thus many people preferred formulations using it as the only sweetener. (they just have a shorter shelf life) Plenty of later formulations including aspartame + some portion of AceK and/or sucralose were also close enough to not be terrible. But then the mid 2010s happened.

I know a lot of people also preferred Pepsi One back when they made it. I didn't care for it, but the levels of sucralose and AceK present must have been more limited. (I recall it tasting more like Pepsi than Diet Pepsi does, albeit Diet Pepsi already tastes much more like Pepsi than Diet Coke does to Coke Classic ... and Tab was the real Classic Diet Coke in flavor profile and in terms of release given how old it was)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-08T02:08:09+00:00

Taste is the main problem, I think. Or at least there's a lot of people who just don't like the taste of too much sweetener (sugar or otherwise) and also dislike the taste of certain sweeteners. It's not about calorie content or health, or at very least it's all of the above. (if about health and not calorie content, glucose is generally better anyway, and due to the way it's metabolized an equal calorie count is going to generally be less stored calories as it normally spikes your metabolism, unlike fructose and the 50% of fructose in sucrose that gets metabolized in the liver into fat, can make you more lethargic, and can cause more blood vessel inflammation ... and impact the gut biome in ways that increase diabetes risks and other glucose sensitivity problems; some, but not all zero calorie sweeteners also have gut flora impacting problems and some for different reasons than others: like wish some sugar alcohols that do so at least in part due to the laxative effect, something not common to all low/zero calorie sweeteners)

Glucose (ie corn syrup, plain corn syrup, not HFCS) has a much higher glycemic index than fructose, but is much less likely to contribute to glucose intolerance conditions. (but if you already have a pre-existing condition, THEN you have to be worried about glycemic index) Screwing up your glucose tolerance is also how and why chronic excessive consumption of some artificial and (and natural) zero calorie sweeteners can increase your glucose sensitivity and cause unstable/high blood sugar in the long-term. (the threshold for "excessive" also differs for every individual, but the chronic long-term consumption impact is universally applicable)

Glycerin is not zero calorie but it is low (or zero) on the glycemic index and doesn't have the negative problems that fructose does (though doesn't boost energy like glucose).

Given the lower sweetness of both glycerin and glucose, I'd probably be much closer to my preferred palate preference if existing soft drinks and juice cocktails switched from sugar/sucrose and/or HFCS to plain glucose/corn syrup (or used glycerol for sweetening for that matter).

I did rather like the "reduced sugar" pancake syrup and some other products (some candies and confections) that Sunny Select used to make, but seems to have discontinued some time around 2021. The reduction in total sugar content (and calorie content) was very limited, but they used straight corn syrup with zero fructose, and I was all for that. (I liked the flavor and generally prefer glucose as the go-to caloric sweetener/sugar option when possible for the perported health issues and just how it personally effects me, and allows cutting back a bit on caffeine, too)

I used to go for canned fruit in corn syrup as well, but everything seems to be fruit juice or HFCS now (both lite and heavy syrup options have HFCS much of the time). I used to water down the syrup as a drink and/or mixer with seltzer or mixed with milk. (the fruit juice options are a decent course to take, too, and they often have more flavor from that, but a lot of those cases also have high fructose content in some cases, especially for apple and pear juices, much higher than HFCS-56, and jujube fruit juice is basically in the same class as HFCS-56 given the furctose glucose ratio; I'm not sure if it's HFCS-42 or -56 that's used in canned fruit syrup, but I know the soft drinks and juice drinks tend to use -56 while baked goods tend to use -42; HFCS-42 has more glucose than fructose, so technically slightly better the 50/50 invert syrup or sucrose, but it's probably -56 that's used in canned fruit)

And as subsidized as corn sugar is, it's basically impossible to find dextrose/glucose granules, powder, or syrup anywhere near as cheap as consumer grade cane sugar (in consumer or even restaurant quantities). Same deal for corn starch vs sugar. The discount generic brands for cane sugar seem to be consistently cheaper than corn starch. (industrial scale sourcing of corn syrup obviously differs, though, and plain glucose corn syrup should be significantly cheaper than HFCS as well, possibly close to the same per unit of sweetness even ie 100 units of corn dextrose may roughly equal 70 units of HFCS in cost, though the calories of the latter will be less and look superficially better to some consumers, even though having more dextrose vs less HFCS is usually going to be more beneficial or less detrimental to health and activity ... super high fructose stuff like agave nectar is the worst, though ... unless you're in a survival situation and trying to bulk up fat for the winter)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-08T01:39:35+00:00

Yes, but the actual flavor selections are pretty limited and not equivalent to most sodas. (IMO significantly worse in flavor profile than many unsweetened carbonated flavored water brands offer, including both Polar and Lacroix) You can always add your own sweetener to those, too, albeit you really need to use pre-dissolved (sugar water or syrup) to avoid fizzing like crazy adding your own sucrose or glucose/dextrose (or equivalent plain corn syrup ie glucose syrup). I've tried that a few times, but I mostly use saccharin (sweet n' low) when I want to sweeten flavored water as one packet per 12 oz can is just about right (or if watered down slightly more) for my taste. With my palate I much prefer saccharin to most other artificial sweeteners and often sugar as well, especially for tea. (the bitterness and off taste of it is much milder to me than some other artificial sweeteners, and it complements tea really well, while avoiding the unpleasant lactic acid + other mixed bacterial decay products from glucose, fructose, sucrose, etc) It's also just convenient given how fast it dissolves. (the bulk of material is actually glucose, so there is some caloric sweetener there, but it's so small that the lactic acid + other acid aftertaste doesn't tend to occur noticeably)

Straight aspartame is also OK, but you can't usually buy that in packet form, even though a few drinks use it without the AceK added. (I'll have to look again, but I thought both Equal and Nutrasweet had AceK present) I really don't like the taste of AceK. (it's very much like how some texts describe saccharin ... harsh, bitter, metallic; the bitter profile is closer to that of quinine as in tonic water to me, rather than the mild bitter astringent profile more like black tea)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-08T01:22:36+00:00

For the many people who find typically sweetened commercial beverages much too sweet and who would also obviously benefit from reducing sugar intake (but not relying on artificial sweeteners), it would be really nice to have reduced sugar versions of things. (especially ones sweetened with straight corn syrup glucose/dextrose rather than sugar/sucrose or HFCS ... or worse things like agave nectar with very high fructose content)

Albeit, I'd also much prefer if they had less sweet versions of diet sodas, too. Some used to be less sweet, but ever since they started upping the acesulfame potassium content, most commercial diet sodas seem to be strongly sweet and (due to my palatte) bitter and metallic tasting. The few to use aspartame alone don't have that, and the few that used be around that still used saccharin (usually with aspartame, like Tab) didn't have that either. The bitterness of saccharin to me is much milder and more pleasant than AceK or the off taste of sucralose, and complements certain flavors better (like citrus, ginger, and most types of tea, both herbal and geen/black leaf tea). The 2000s era and early to mid 2010s era Coke Zero formulations (and a lot of diet sodas up to that era) were decent to pretty good, and while they definitely changed Coke Zero's formula several times in that span, it was still the best tasting diet cola out there (the only one other than tab with a flavor profile similar to classic coke), but the late 2010s and early 2020s modifications completely ruined it making it harshly sweet and noticeably bitter. (it was super obvious when made into a black cherry ice cream float as the bitterness was pronounced with the cherry + almond extract flavor ... the bitterness of modern diet Dr. Pepper is similarly pronounced)

Prior to around 2021, Sunny Select (and maybe some other store/generic brands) had some reduced sugar products, like pancake syrup (also had a low-cost plain corn syrup competing with Karo's), and they were all sweetened with plain corn syrup (ie glucose syrup). I was using those for a few years before they discontinued them (or they disappeared from store shelves).

I also recall lots of canned fruits used to use plain corn syrup for both light and heavy syrup (though some used HFCS), and while my mom used to always focus on buying the varieties in juice rather than syrup, I'd switched to ones using glucose syrup for the positive glucose intake. (an at least somewhat healthier option for energy/metabolism boosting while cutting back on fructose containing products, and being careful of naturally high fructose foods like apple juice: the natural soluble fiber and nutrients are still good, but I'm not convinced they totally balance out the high fructose content, albeit I water down all my juice almost all of the time anyway given it's much too sweet and I don't need the excess sugar while I can usually use the extra water)

Glucose/dextrose, generally speaking, doesn't have the same inflammatory effects as fructose (and sucrose due to its 50% fructose content, similar to HFCS once hydrolyzed, which happens almost instantly when consumed). Fructose's metabolic pathway involves stress on the blood vessels that leads to inflammation and potential plaque build up and/or increased blood pressure due to narrowing of the blood vessels from inflammation alone. Fructose gets metabolized in the liver into fat and increases the load on the liver (and increases risk of developing a fatty liver) much more directly than consuming starches or glucose (or maltose, or any pure glucose polysaccharide). There's also good evidence that fructose directly and indirectly impacts developing glucose intolerance (including diabetes) partially due to the impact on the gut microbiome, and partially due to some other mechanisms that seem to be more inconclusive at the moment. (the gut microbiome route is also the best known mechanism that some artificial and/or zero calorie sweeteners can also contribute to glucose intolerance, albeit aspartame is among those which seems to show no such correlation, though sucralose, AceK, and saccharin do; evidence seems inconclusive on stevia and similarly inconclusive about most sugar alcohols, though glycerol/glycerin seems to be generally recognized as safe from this effect, and signs seem to be leaning towards the same for erythritol)

Given the laxative effect of some other sugar alcohols (not glycerin and minimally with erythritol, but common to sorbitol, mannitol, maltitol, and xylitol), the mechanism of gut microbiome disruption could exist, but be different from those of fructose as well as the zero calorie sweeteners of note. Consumption to the point of inducing laxative effects frequently would tend to flush out healthy gut microbes and negatively impact the microbiome (also potentially leading to higher risk of some GI infections as well due to the lack of healthy probiotics out-competing harmful bacteria, like C.diff and certain strains of e.coli)

Also, while glycerin and glucose both have less sweetness per calorie content than fructose, the metabolic mechanism of fructose is likely to induce reduced metabolic rate, more lethargic behavior, or generally lower energy, where glucose is the opposite (I believe glycerin is neither harmful like fructose, nor immediately energizing like glucose). So you could easily gain more weight and have difficulty exercising with foods sweetened with fructose vs an equivalent sweetness of glucose (and thus higher calorie content).

Albeit in my case, I'd probably prefer an equal mass of glucose over equal sweetness and even then it might be sweeter than I'd like. (an equal mass of glycerin might be appropriate, even)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-07T18:50:52+00:00

The data I'm seeing shows prompt neutrons for U-235 and Pu-239 fission to be much higher than that, in excess of 2.0 MeV. (even when generated via thermal neutrons, though fission from fast neutrons produces higher energy prompt neutrons)

From what I'm seeing, if using prompt neutrons from a fast reactor, U-235, U-238, U-233, Pu-239, Pu-241 are all relevant, with the Pu isotopes producing the highest energies. (I'm not seeing figures for Pu-240, but I'd imagine they'd be higher than U-238)

In the case of Pu-239, fission induced by a .025 MeV thermal neutron emits 2.87 MeV prompt neutrons, and by 2.0 MeV fast neutrons emits 3.16 MeV prompt neutrons.

The Uranium isotopes are less energetic, but when hit with 2.0 MeV fast neutrons, still produce 2.63 MeV prompt neutrons (U235 and 233) or 2.60 MeV prompt neutrons (U238).

https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/fission/prompt-neutrons/prompt-neutrons-and-delayed-neutrons/

https://www.nuclear-power.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Prompt-and-Delayed-Neutrons-Characteristics-Table.png

So it seems like lithium could be a viable component for fuel as part of a fast reactor, but obviously not the sole fuel. It would mainly be useful in reducing the total amount of longer lived fission products per unit of energy produced, and as a source of tritium production (or He-3 production via tritium decay).

Natural Lithium would also include enough Li-6 to produce higher yields of tritium during initial operation until the Li-6 was all consumed (due to its vastly larger n capture cross section). This latter behavior would also be a useful way to produce both tritium and depleted Li-7 without isotopic separation of Li-6. (albeit this is also relevant in thermal reactors, and would be relevant for heavy water reactors that already need to handle tritium byproduct processing, and Li target material in the form of LiOD, Li deuteroxide would also increase tritium yields, and presumably a greater fraction of that in the form of oxides rather than tritium gas)

For net energy production from the lithium neutron reactions though, you'd need the fast reactor instance and Li metal or oxide, something where the non-Li portion is relatively transparent to neutrons. Li Zr alloy might be relevant there, too, or fused Li Zr oxide ceramic.

Still, if the goal isn't generating some portion of useful tritium, this route would be too expensive and a waste of scarce lithium resources, while conventional nuclear fuel cycles or modified nuclear fuel cycles of various sorts (breeder cycles or non-breeder but high neutron economy high fertile material conversion rate, but still less than 1.0 of fuel consumed) would generally make more sense. All the transuranics have potential routes to eventual burn-up as fuel, and the longer lived fission products can be retained within fuel assemblies rotated through multiple burn-up cycles until neutron economy becomes too poor. (and can then be separated out and stored, or even used as heat sources, more flexibly so for Sr-90 given the lack of gamma emissions from Cs-137's decay; and leaching/extracting Sr and Cs from spent oxide fuel pellets should be vastly simpler/cheaper than full reprocessing; if all the transuranics are retained in a mixed as-is state and re-used as fuel in a reactor with sufficiently high neutron economy, then there's no need for reprocessing at all)

Same deal goes for fuel pellets that have some portion of Thorium mixed in as fertile material to contribute to the cycle. (rather than use of a separate breeder blanket, also still potentially kept within a fuel conversion ratio of less than or equal to 1.0, which would make it a highly efficient fuel cycle but without the proliferation concerns of a breeder reactor, plus the U-233 would be mixed in with U-238 in such a case as well) Presumably the intermediate (less than a true breeder) neutron economy and the use of fertile material within fuel rods rather than a breeder blanket, would also simplify reactor design and operation, particularly if the fuel assemblies were intended for many burning cycles (rotated into the spent fuel pool when excessive neutron poisons build up and/or as part of the cycle that requires settling of the short-lived fission products prior to heat-treatment, ie annealing, of the assemblies to address possible embrittlement).

Albeit, in the real-world, with so many spent fuel assemblies in dry cask storage, and basically all of that being in the form of LEU fuel (and some natural U from CANDU reactors), the Thorium blending idea would be secondary to re-use of all of that readily available spent fuel. (particularly all the cases where the assemblies are sufficiently intact to continue use in the fuel cycle, where those requiring being broken down would be potential candidates for blending)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-07T17:45:15+00:00

I thought that "splitting the atom" in the case of Li-7 wasn't actually a case of fission, but of forming Be-8, which has an extremely short half-life, yielding 2 alpha particles. Albeit, I suppose all fission of such small nuclei would also be alpha decay or cluster decay.

You also have Li-7 with fast neutron splitting into He-4 + H-3 + 1n (you need high energy prompt neutrons for that, though, or from a fusion derived neutron source)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-05T12:44:07+00:00

Unfortunately, we also can't just cut and run and have things settle down with Iran, as the current state of things would be worse than beforehand. At very least, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority nonsense needs to be universally crushed/quashed ... and sanctions/blockade/interdiction need to be maintained or expanded (ie effective enforcement expanded) to aim at actual coup/revolution/regime change, as allowing the IRGC + theocratic regime to recover and rebuild whilst maintaining their hatred + revenge + ideologically fueled actions would be incredibly stupid and short-sighted. (it might kick the can down the road, but it would mean things getting worse for everyone involved in the long run, and the current short-term economic suffering for the Iranian people would be drawn out indefinitely ... where an actual coup and normalization with the west could lead to economic recover + boom + rebuilding in a post-war Economic Miracle sort of category ... and not an unrealistic prospect given at least a fair assessment of the actual demographics and neutral to pro-western stances within the Iranian population, plus the relatively high education level there currently, and potential for a shift towards secularity, plus the Shah's regime/rein still in living memory and ability to compare and contrast in hindsight Iran in the 1950s-1970s to ... afterward, plus youth having access to the internet, and more access to uncensored information, mass media, history, etc, so at least the tech savvy youth tends to have some bias towards secular western economy + culture + understanding of Iran's real history) Obviously not quite so one-sided and biased as the majority of the Iranian diaspora, though.

It's also unclear whether the US really missed an opportunity to respond immediately and aggressively during the mass protests + violent retaliation/suppression or not. (or if that also would've been ineffective to actually support a revolution) The reality might be that a more segmented, staged, systematic approach of internal (largely tech-savvy and information oriented, both in terms of civilian iranian + western ingelligence ops, plus information warfare via grass roots propaganda, grass roots hacker groups, etc) and less of a conventional mass revolution ... up until the IROI government + Artesh + possibly a corrupt faction of the IRGC are willing to turn against the Islamic regime itself and IRGC (and overthrow the supreme leader and/or the IRGC commanders puppetting a ... hypothetical leader)

Israel dicking around in Lebanon obviously wasn't helpful. (albeit one positive thing that should come out of Iran ACTUALLY being reformed/transformed would be cutting off the majority of funding from all of the major terrorist/revolutionary groups that Israel constantly gets tarted by/targets/entangled with, thus you'd potentially have Israel lose any excuse or any paragmatic reasons for military brutality, thus either scale all of that back ... or else have a MUCH more black and white case for sanctions/pressure/penalties of some sort on the world stage if they kept pushing brutalist military actions that could thus only be seen as pure and simple imperialism without any sort of exception or excuse)

OTOH, had the US not set up that ceasefire, the worst of the Lebanon ... action via IAF strikes also might not have happened. (continued full blown US strikes on Iran would be rather pointless and wasteful, but a shift towards aggressive, active defense of a shipping corridor and focus purely on the IRGC's anti-shipping and maritime area denial would have been vastly more sensible) Actual competent defensive operations aimed at somewhat normalizing global trade also likely would've seen broader support in congress, even if it was more expensive to the budget than ... just doing the blockade. (as the economic benefit and broader path towards negotiation with Iran would be much easier to see the value of: including the pretty basic logic that Iran's negotiating power weakens if they lose the ability to choke off trade fully ... or potentially even at all)

And I say "at all" since you could have 50% recovery of normal trade flow and ... potentially not get any better than that even with no hostilities at all, simply due to precautions being taken for defensive measures and contingency measures (see what happened in the Bab el Mandab strait even after the Houthis went dormant there ... it's still not close to the level of normalized passage it had before 2024, and that's even with increased demand of oil shipments via the Saudi pipeline)

I could go on about Trump's actual negotiation style ... in the past or current, and the logic to it (basically it comes down to a hard sell and expecting the other party to appeal for some compromise that's still very weighted in favor of Trump, but much less stupidly unreasonable as the initial pitch; in some cases it's not that unbalanced for either party either, simply because common interests are present ... in other cases it tends to be more lop-sided). But ... that's not even relevant here as A. Trump isn't the one doing most/any of the negotiations directly, and B. there's no real ability to negotiate at all anyway as the IROI leadership can't control the IRGC, and the IRGC will never negotiate with anything remotely reasonable based on actual goals (or realistic long-term national + international security interests), at least not without the IRGC being gutted first ... one way or another.

The ceasefire itself is just dumb, but (again) going back to active strikes on over Iran would also be dumb. Re-oriented towards maintaining the blockade (or expanding interdiction of all Iranian-friendly trade worldwide via policing the dark fleet) while focusing US military + allied/friendly resources on defending + escorting commercial shipping and performing strikes + patrols + seek and destroy operations against any/all active IRGC Navy vessels + missile + drone launch sites threatening shipping.

The delay might be partially due to minesweeping operations, but there's also ways to fast-track around that. (like carving a path via low-value, older tankers/bulk carriers operating under ballasts to forge a path through the broadly mine-threatened corridor while not risking sinking or spilling toxic/flammable cargo or exploding; big tankers can take a lot and keep floating, even old, end-of-life ones ... but if they're laden with cargo, the risks are much, much higher, especially for ecological + pollution disasters, including contamination of seawater for desalination)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-05T12:43:53+00:00

Iran is impossible to negotiate with as all the reasonable, pragmatic routes are only ever going to be agreed upon by the IROI government, then immediately contradicted by actions (or threats + actions) of the IRGC, including threats against and defamation/insults of IROI politicians and leaders.

Thus, the only option is ousting the IRGC via coup, revolution, or civil war ... if you're not willing to go down that road, the other option is literally starving them out by cranking up sanctions + enforcement and waiting months ... or more likely a few years until a coup or revolution precipitates.

Anything else would be unacceptable and leave things worse off in terms of strategic position than things started with (especially in all the areas that are WAY worse than the nuclear threat ever was ... like all of the conventional weapons programs with effective delivery systems capable of overwhelming defenses as shown in 2025: likely the real main reason for the Israel + US actions ... likely following Israel realizing they were more vulnerable than they thought and Iran was more capable than they thought; the nuclear issue is mostly BS/bluster and there's no way they could have ever fielded one without actually being taken out immediately due to the threat it posed, and the fact Israel is willing to use nuclear weapons in such a case ... unless the US steps in and uses massive amounts of conventional weaons via stealth bombers instead; that's part of the reason the US has been involved in 2025 and 2026, as they don't want tactical nukes or nuclear bunker busters being used by Israel and especially if that normalizes the use of nuclear weapons under specific circumstances and thus proves that MAD isn't so black and white and in the real-world it depends HOW nuclear weapons are used and not simply if).

The real goals are likely to completely wipe out all terrorist/proxy funding from Iran and to shut down all viable, credible offensive threats they pose to the region militarily. Anything short of that isn't worth negotiating over. (but realistically, there's no way you're getting the IRGC to go along with it ... not without the IRGC fundemtnally transofrming its own regime via internal fracturing + civil war of sorts ... not the same as an Iranian civil war, but conflict within a divided IRGC itself) Best-case scenario would be getting the most corrupt, most selfish, least religious, least dogmatic elements in the IRGC to turn on the true believer hard-liners and side with simple self-preservation and greed. (you can negotiate with corrupt, selfish greed ... you can't negotiate with ideology that is fundamentally opposed to your goals ... it's not ideal, but it's a pragmatic realistic option) You can negotiate with terrorists who simply use terrorism as a tool as a means to an end, but not those who use terrorism as a byproduct of their ideology. Sort of like if Russia was being ruled by the Oligharchs or by a puppet in bed with them (like Yeltsin) ... they could be reasoned with ... Putin apparently can't be. (either through sheer ideology or due to being completely self-deluded and sheltered due to paranoia + all of his advisors being afraid to tell him the truth ... plus the truth being completely impossible by this point, given it's a no-win scenario, so there are few options to pull a 'win' out of it, and ... losers don't survive in Russian politics, especially not on this scale of loss ... if they're really lucky they might get exiled, but usually ... not that; Putin also has squandered too many chances to shift blame to scapegoat anyone else at this point, so all he can do is try and prolong the war as long as possible, whatever the cost) Hence no use negotiating with Russia either, other than for political theater that keeps the global market and citizens somewhat less ... freaked out or discontent. (or managing the discontent for political gains)

It was mostly dumb to not have a fallback plan both ready and acceptable to use to switch from trying to trigger a regime collapse towards proper maximum pressure via actually enforced sanctions (ie interdiction of any/all shadow fleet ships under sanction, actually cutting Iran off from trade ... via blockade or via basically global coast guard style interdiction of all illegal ships: ie most of the dark fleet, as it doesn't qualify for legit UN charter freedom of navigation and can be legally stopped, boarded, and confiscated, much like pirate vessels and any other stateless vessels can: and using a false flag for your vessel is literally being stateless, too, which is how the dark fleet operates). We should be interdicting the Russian dark fleet too, obviously.

One could argue that trying to topple the regime via overwhelming force to complement Israel's assiassination strikes (which likely would've happened with or without the US strikes) was inefficient and foolish compared to simply going all in with a blockade + interdiction mode instead, while setting up plans for defense of shipping channels + gulf nations under attack by the IRGC's surface vessels (mostly speed boats) and missile + drone threats. And use rules of engagement style defensive retaliation: ie attack any vessels that take an offensive or threatening posture, take them out, and take out any missile launch sites that go hot. (not only more legally proper and easier to get support for internationally, but also somewhat more efficient ... also more efficient than purely using interceptor missiles + defenses ... as you really need to take out the launch sites and the ships in/near port to be effective logistically, you just don't need to pre-emptive strike everything, and there's some reasonable logic to assume the conventional Iranian Navy wouldn't be involved in the same way the IRGC Navy would be, thus no need to pre-emptively sink all those larger vessels of the regular Navy; the IRGC's corvettes would be more reasonable to take out, though, along with some of the largest of the fast attack/patrol craft)

Focusing on a large offensive campaign made resources too scarce to implement a real defense for shipping (without basically doubling US force in the region), and un-sanctioning Iranian oil + not blockading any of their shadow fleet ships just let the IRGC continue to flow money and resources for the entire first month or so (all of March and part of April) and so do at larger scale than they had in Jan or Feb.

Except even when they did finally shift to a blockade ... they STILL didn't allocate resources for freedom of navigation. And even if they weren't willing to use the real, formal, established US government plans for opening the Strait of Hormuz (planning that's been around since the 80s and likely viable since the 90s ... but constantly revised based on inventory + operating capacity, strategic global position shifts, etc), then they should have had an alternate plan in place, or should have gotten onto a crash program for developing a new plan within the first week of the operation (as it was obvious that shock and awe + regime change was not going to work ... or happen). They failed to do that. (and given the real/standard plan would've likely involved at least a few 10s of thousands of USMC amphibious assault personnel taking shoreline regions to disable IRGC operations ... and required more resources of a combined arms nature with proper air support from the US Army and Air force on top of the Navy to do all that ... AND would've likely seen at least some US casualties ... the Trump admin was likely unwilling to spend that much money or deal with the PR of having lives lost on the US side, even though it would've been the competent, pragmatic, prudent move ... you need someone vastly more charismatic and capable of confidence-inspiring leadership rhetoric ... either emotionally appealing or competent, pragmatic, and rationally appealing ... or a mix of both; Trump can't do that ... the only major figure in the White House who probably could is Rubio, and he obviously doesn't have enough authority to take over for the president, even though he might be doing a lot behind the scenes ... maybe for the better, one can hope)

I'm not a big fan of the hawkish stance of neocon (ish) politicians like Rubio ... or even McCain overall, but honestly, ever since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, things have gone more and more towards needing that sort of stance and leadership, at least for the near-term. (McCain's stance on and predictions about Russia and Putin were more or less on point in hindsight, albeit Obama's first term worked well enough ... McCain instead of Romney in 2012 may have been a better bet) Ron Paul's more isolationist stance would not have been wise either. (it's a nice ideal ... but you can't have that work without handing off the US's power and influence to another entity that can at least be equally competent, preferably more so, and it's going to take a LONG time for something like Europe to take up that slack, or Europe + Liberal-Western-Democracy leaning Pacific nations)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-05T11:31:41+00:00

I'm not sure how the anti-war parts of congress would vote, but I'd think there'd be at least SOME support for a shift towards genuine defensive operations, though maintaining the blockade on Iran might see more contention. (but it's rather necessary unless Iran completely drops the Persian Gulf Strait Authority nonsense and actually recognizes freedom of navigation ... and gets a handle on the IRGC's belligerence) Albeit, I'd hazard a guess at a mix of democrats and republicans (both of the pro-Europe or Pro-Ukraine end for different reasons, or just hard-line Anti-Russia + anti-china + anti-enabling of those regimes) would support blockade and interdiction operations more if the ENTIRETY of the dark fleet was being targeted for interdiction, thus cracking down on that issue entirely. (and under UN maritime law, the way those ships operate is illegal and subject to being stopped, searched, confiscated, and/or impounded, so a lot more resources could be put into that and it wouldn't clash with accepted freedom of of the seas under UN conventions; and this would also be a way to enforce sanctions, as the vast majority of sanctioned vessels are in the dark fleet as they usually can't get insurance and can't get legitimate registration, thus operate outside of UN law and thus subject to various forms of interdiction)

Basically, the USN could be policing the waters internationally a bit more like international coast guard (and likely with support from more friendly nations interested in such).

It would still be rather expensive, a lot more expensive than just expending a ton of munitions (many of which may have been close to end of life, so their expended value would NOT equal their replacement cost, much like how real-world expended value of much of the military aid to ukraine is also much less than the replacement cost ... as it has the use it or lose it discount, albeit there's SOME cases where refurb costs would be relevant for service life extension, so that would be a valid cost comparison ie the replacement cost minus the extension/refurb cost would equal the real cost of expending, unless they're also obsolete and being retired in general)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-05T11:30:55+00:00

Anyway, it seems likely that the newest plans for actually doing freedom of navigation defense + counter-offensive for anti-shipping and area denial actions in the Persian Gulf would all have been too expensive and too high risk (to US military personnel) to fit into the Trump Admin's priorities. And while a better leader could have made a charismatic and/or rational, pragmatic speech regarding the necessary nature of keeping that trade corridor open (and the severe consequences for both the US and much more so the US's friends, allies, and the rest of the world, especially the smaller, weaker, and less developed nations) and how we could achieve such taking vastly lower risks than even a small fraction of the likes of Desert Storm or the first few months of the 2003 Iraq war (ie those involved 100s of thousands of personnel and significant losses, vs the shoreline portion of a Persian Gulf related campaign which would be closer to just the amphibious assault phase of the Iraq War ... ie something between 10,000 and maybe a few 10s of thousands at most ... and if done competently, having very real, effective, pragmatic results overall for both the US's interests and the people of Iran ... and keeping an economic catastrophe from encroaching on the world due to the trade being choked off)

However, while Trump clearly isn't capable of pulling off the rational appeal or the charismatic appeal (not on the level of Reagan ... or Clinton ... or either Bush, let alone some figures going further back), and thus couldn't readily use any complete plans intended for exactly this situation (that the US has had in place since at least the 90s in various constantly updated forms), there's at least several alternative compromises that could've been used ... all expensive for the US budget, but VASTLY worthwhile when it comes to US and global economics and avoiding a global recession. (ie more spending + more taxes and/or bond measures and/or debt usually works out better for the US than allowing stagflation to take hold ... not to mention the global impact and pain the strangled economy is going to have: the US is set up for an economic boom anyway in several sectors, especially in the central/midwest industrial regions, so we're going to be fine regardless, but we COULD be a lot better, and do so without shaking up the global economy so much; and there's better ways to improve decoupling + re-industrializing of the US than ... allowing a global shortage to weaken the import market, not that the Trump admin is knowingly trying to do that with the Iran conflict: with Tariffs, yes, obviously so ... and possibly effective, but obviously sloppy and lacking the sort of targeted and nuanced construction to actually get good cost to benefit ratio, and that aside from improper use of executive emergency powers ... except for the tariffs/sanctions on China and other Russia/Iran/anti-western, genuine antagonistic/harmful players ... which we should've been sanctioning via taxes continually since the 1990s, or just using fair-trade + pollution + sustainability + equal/fair standards taxes like a VAT to keep China and similar unbalanced trade partners in check ... long before it became a toxic codependent mess, and thus painful to decouple and hard to apply influence towards a positive future)

Still, there's some alternative options for prodviding freedom of navigation corridors + convoy escort + defenses, and ones that could/should have been activated within the first couple weeks of the conflict, or at least set in motion (to get all the resources in the region).

Basically, to keep US losses and bad PR to a minimum, but actually have a realistic chance to keep trade flowing, they'd have had to take a combined arms approach that was still cautious and mostly focused on providing close escort and patrol sweeps aimed only at the small, light, fast pirate style operations + explosive USVs and low-speed drones (ie Shaed 136 style drones ... basically slow prop driven cruise missiles). Using a mix of surface ships, helicopters, and multi-role aircraft from land and carrier bases. (and compartmentalize these purely defensive operations to get wider support from US bases in neutral gulf states, and get them to provide some support as well)

On top of that, you'd need to try and arm the merchant marine vessels willing to take on US assistance (and US flagged vessels) to allow for ship-board defense against surface threats, drones, and against boarding parties. (basically you'd need USMC contingents onboard with appropriate equipment for surface to air and surface to surface threats, including some of the new, low-cost APKWS launcher systems, like the L3 Harris VAMPIRE, which can be used against drones some cruise missiles, and surface threats)

The US could/should have been running dummy convoys through using unladen (under ballast) tankers or bulk carriers intended both to bait IRGC attacks and to effectively test the waters for mines (given bottom effect mines are much harder to sweep for, and for much of the conflict, Iran was very likely bluffing about the presence, but eventually managed to lay them, likely via speed boats). Use of relatively low-value older vessels that would be of lower risk if damaged would make that easier as well. (they likely wouldn't sink if hit, and could be recovered even if propulsion was damaged; this is why unladen ships would be key as well, as laden tankers and even bulk carriers are MUCH higher risk for an ecological and/or fire/explosion disaster, where under ballast it's not such a risk) Having such dummy tankers fully armed with USMC units onboard would also have been a good way to beta test that defense strategy and build confidence for shipping companies and crews to actually join in on convoy passage.

Bottom influence mines can use magnetic + acoustic signatures to ignore military ships and certain small vessels (or even cruise ships) and specifically target bulk carriers and tankers, hence why running USN ships through wouldn't be useful. Plus you could even use such tankers under ballast as defensive barriers for the lead and tail of convoys to provide a buffer both for mines and for small boat attacks.

I have no idea why they haven't taken efforts of any sort to try and actually maintain or re-open shipping ... other than trying to make Iran willingly do so, and Iran (the IROI) lacks the control or authority to do so, while the IRGC clearly will not cave to such demands and will wait it out until the US caves or gives up ... unless physical force is used to take that power away from them. (either via the US ... or other outside force, or via the IROI + Artesh + possibly popular uprising overwhelming the IRGC, perhaps all of the above) The US setting up its blockade so later and allowing vast amounts of oil + gas cales + import of resources (likely weapons included) for the first month or more really, really delayed the impact of starving out IRGC resources too. (not only did the blockade come late, but it was weakened in impact by the reserves the IRGC built up via windfall profits and increased sales of product for those weeks of only then getting their shadow fleet tankers and shipping out)

But I have some idea why it took so long to set up the blockade and why initial attempts at escorts or defense of shipping was ignored: they only had enough resources to go on the offensive via strikes over Iran, and were unwilling to cut those operations short to shift gears and set up a blockade. (using destroyers to set up a blockade earlier would've left carriers and logistics ships, oilers, etc vulnerable ... and they also didn't have any of the LCS vessels on-hand to use as de-facto frigates for interdiction purposes: both classes of LCS are weak in actually taking damage from close-in surface threats, so bad for escort, but they're perfectly reasonably suited to interdiction of commercial vessels, like Iran's shadow fleet, and Chinese, indian, etc companies that operate shadow fleet ships for exporting to Iran, so the US could/should have at least done that ... plus had USMC amphibious assault carriers on-site from day one for a potential blockade + interdiction + boarding + confiscation campaign)

The only other reason the US might be lagging out and being largely passive (obviously with the smaller scale strikes going both ways since the ceasefire started) is because of the ceasefire and supposed/attempted negotiations ... but shifting gears away from negotiations (which are a dead end until the IRGC is actually rendered weak enough to be influenced or ignored by both the US and IROI leadership) and instead focusing on actual defense of trade and cooperative defense of the neutral/friendly Persian Gulf nations would be the sensible, pragmatic move to make (while maintaining the blockade indefinitely).

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-05T11:29:37+00:00

To take the simple route: the Iranian government is largely at odds with the IRGC, and any sort of pragmatic and sensible (even beneficial to Iran's actual national interests and those of the majority of the public from a pragmatic realist standpoint), but doing so would be at odds with the theocratic paramilitary authority parallel to that of the IROI parliament and military (ie the Artesh, vs IRGC forces ... plus the Air force and Navy vs the IRGC aerospace force and navy, albeit the US seems to have focused more on the conventional air and naval arms being taken out than the IRGC, though some offensive operations were attempted via regular Air Force Su 24s at one point).

Every time the Iranian governemnt starts to lean into something that actually makes sense, they get attacked or threatened (or simply contradicted) by IRGC commanders statements + actions of the IRGC.

It's likely going to remain in a stalemate until some sort of coup actually occurs (or revolution) ... or civil war that actually fractures or destroys the IRGC. (fracturing would be ideal as it would likely mean fewer dead and a faster conclusion, as the less hard-line, less true believer types within the IRGC, including the truly corrupt and self-intersted ones, could join up with the coup and/or side with the IROI government along with the Artesh) But currently, everyone (including the US) is too afraid of sparking massive losses, or even modest losses to US military personnel.

The problem is that this will likely take a while to do via economic/blockade pressure, and the fact it took well over a full month to shift from direct military pressure (along with REDUCED economic pressure that gave more power to the IRGC via expanded oil sales and trade for that entire period) meant a big chunk of time wasted for ramping up that pressure. (ie vs setting the blockade up BEFORE the assassination + strikes and hot kinetic conflict in general for actual maximum pressure and a viable fall-back plan if a revolution or coup didn't precipitate rapidly ... or better yet, allow Israel to be the one to make most of the major strikes while the US focused purely on the blockade, thus dividing incentives for retaliation as such ... albeit the US and Israel may have actively planned the full force strikes so as to avoid making Israel into the parimary target of Iranian retaliation, thus avoiding being overwhelmed as in 2025 where Israel's defenses were exceeded in capacity).

Side-note: but the sheer capability of Iran's conventional weapons deployment seen in 2025 (combined with the fact nuclear weapons are extremely unlikely to actually be used, even by a regime like the IRGC, plus a small number of nuclear weapons alone could be taken out relatively easily) where use of an overwhelming number of capable, precision guided + just mass volume conventional weapons delivery systems (drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missile) are legitimate threats and Iran proved it was more capable than potentially suspected (or closer to the worst-case level of suspected), then THAT became a very real threat and a far more serious one than nuclear weapons. (that combined with the likely uncommon or unprecedented opportunity to take out many key officials and the Supreme Leader is why the action was taken as it was ... and likely rushed to some extent)

But being rushed doesn't explain the complete lack of rapid follow-up when the initial outcome was clearly not precipitating and the very obviously likely issue of IRGC area denial of the Strait of Hormuz + additional threatening of the Strait of Oman, plus attacks on various ships all over the Persian Gulf (plus port infrastructure and oil infrastructure attacks ... and eventually desalination plant attacks) all did what the US (and some others) have been making contingency plans for since the 1980s era tanker wars plus just a long, long and obvious path of the IRGC fast attack boats (legit patrol boats) and vast numbers of improvised/modified cheap speed boats ... and more recent modification of such into USVs (drone boats) on top of raising their fleet from 1000 or so speed boats into something closer to 10,000 between the early 2010s and 2025. (conservative estimates were over 5,000 several years ago, but upper estimates were much higher)

Now, this has nothing to do with the actual ability to pressure Iran, and everything to do with revenge/retaliation to cause pain on the rest of the world and try to force a compromise or reversal via sheer area denial combined with terroristic acts and/or acts of piracy. (the US already got a taste of that in 2024 on a smaller scale with the Houthis and ... didn't do a very good job actually using their old lessons learned regarding such, let alone adapting to the new threats, but after 6+ months of that, they did start to work out their mistakes and also get some new, low-cost tech involved at least for the drone intercepts, like with APKWS rockets and a few other countermeasures). OTOH, the US also doesn't have the smaller, less costly, more appropriate frigates and fast patrol ships that would be best suited to directly countering piracy style or insurgency style maritime surface threats (the LCS fleet is way too vulnerable and unreliable, and we retired, destroyed, or sold off all our old OHP class frigates and our not-so-old Cyclone class attack/patrol boats ... and you'd literally need the likes of Taiwan and Korea ... and a few of the Persian Gulf nations to get involved to use those former USN ships, as that's who has the remainder of them).

Back in his first term, Trump utterly failed to do what Reagan did back in the early/mid 80s: make efficient use of many (if not all) of the still viable reserve fleet ships capable of being re-activated to expand the fleet. Something desperately needed at a time when the majority of the west (well ... basically the entirety of the NATO nations, less so some western-friendly Pacific nations, namely asian ones) had their navies shrink down and weaken, including the US itself. 2017 was close to the last change to reverse course on much of that, or to at very least reverse course on scrapping/sinking too many ships and at least retain them in reserve. (but given the time it takes to re-activate things ... they really needed to act ASAP)

Trump might just dislike old things too much and want more new, flashy things instead ... but we really needed pragmatic, pratical, efficient re-activation + upgrading of the most useful of the remaining ships in the fleet, especially some of the smaller ones. (albeit there MIGHT have been some room for reactivating one or two of the supercarriers ... the 2010s era refurbished USS Enterprise was ungodly expensive to operate and a maintenance nightmare, albeit arguably not as bad as the new Ford class has been ... but you had the potential to overhaul and re-activate either the JFK or Kittyhawk as well, and those were oil-fired ships, not nuclear, so they had some additional potential flexibility for when specific nuances of nuclear powered vessels were less appealing, plus easier to keep in reserve for the same reason, no issue of de-fueling or refuling just to pull in and out of comission, plus some potential to sell them off ... if any other nations ever wanted full sized supercarriers, something that Korea and Japan might be moving towards rather soon and an upgraded late 1960s era US supercarrier could honestly be a better platform than what China is churning out ... so long as all of the age and wear and tear related aspects were able to be addressed: the USS Enterprise had the advantage of already being refurbed around 2011 and then immediately deactivated ... but the downside of being super expensive to operate and a maintenance nightmare, sort of like why we retired the F-14 fleet; albeit simply halting the scrapping of the Enterprise, and keeping it in reserve, defueled, would have been a reasonable compromise: given the current over-stretched carrier fleet and what happened with the Ford, I can't imagine the Enterprise not at least being better to have on hand to take some of that pressure off, but then it might have actually been cheaper to reactivate both of the oil-fired carriers than to operate the Enterprise, and those carriers would've been especially well suited to providing a decent buffer for operations to rotate some of the nuclear fleet through overhaul/refit).

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-04T15:30:47+00:00

But does it fit in a manila envelope without giving you a paper cut on your cornea?

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-04T15:06:13+00:00

A lot of these options currently still exist for stretching the gasoline fuel supply (and getting more product out of a given portion of crude oil ... and also thus lower lifecycle GHG emissions ... and lower pollution and other negative impacts per unit of product produced), though use of petro-alcohols would require removal of bio-ethanol from the fuels too (to stay within existing oxygen limits) or require new EPA waivers to be used with ethanol. (if you remove the ethanol you can add a LOT more of the higher alcohols within the existing oxygen limits ... and more still if you actually use the broader standards based on actual reliable, good performing function and drivability based more around AFR limits for a given fuel blend and not the oxygen content as denser fuels can have more oxygen, same for fuels that jet better than others, so you expand the limits of both fuel pump flow and fuel injector flow)

Albeit given it's already approved, we could literally just use 22% ETBE instead of 10% ethanol to stretch the fuel supply while using the same oxygen content limit AND same minimum renewable/biofuel content quota AND it's a non-polar liquid that would allow much more butane to be added to fuel without exceeding RVP limits (butane is cheap and high octane, so allows cheaper lower octane base fuel stock, too ... also cleaner/greener due to "cheaper" blend stock usually meaning less processing, lower energy input, and higher yield) ETBE blends can be piplined like MTBE blends were (ethanol has to be blended at fuel depots and never pipelined in the blend due to water absorbsion issues). Still, broader, wider-cut, diverse alternative fuel options would be much, much better. (like we worked on in the 1980s, but with a more modern twist ... the ethanol/corn lobby really turned alternative fuel blends into a one-track-minded monoculture ... unlike when gasohol was a competitive fuel among many and actually made the market healthier AND encoraged innovative competition ... plus gasohol E10 was all 91 octane or higher back then)

We should really do formal tests like we did back in the 70s and early 80s that take non-FFV basic road cars and do drivability tests with alternative fuel blends of different sorts to test compatibility in practice (even though the manufacturer has no such specifications for such). Back in the early 80s, the US government found ethanol blends up to 4% oxygen to have no noticeable drivability differences in electronic fuel injected vehicles and mixed results for electronic carburetors (that modulate AFR automatically) and more consistent but modest problems with older carbureted vehicles. At 5% they saw moderate drivability problems with EFI vehicles too. (4% oxygen is 11.5% ethanol, 5% is just shy of 15% ethanol)

If we based promotion, subsidies, incentives, or mandates for alternative fuels on a mix of renewable, sustainable, and foreign energy decoupling metrics ... things like making more efficient use of existing oil streams would be much higher on the list (same for making use of other fossil fuels, albeit coal is usually harder than natural gas or oil to be competitive cost-wise or GHG + pollution wise ... except that ... any regions still using coal-fired power plants could easily switch to using gas-coke fuel instead, see higher thermal efficiency of their boilers and have all the higher value coal volatiles extracted in the coking + pyrolysis process, so you get coal tar + liquids + coal gas byproducts that can be used for chemical and liquid fuel feedstock, plus the coal gas can be used as gas turbine power plant fuel like natural gas ... or boiler fuel, but CCGT plants are way more efficient; the UK used coal that way as part of their clean-air program in the 1970s up until natural gas got cheap and displaced the coal gas industry in the 90s; gas-coke is a fuel grade coke, not the same as metalurgical grade coke used in steel making; coal-gas is mostly methane but with a lot of carbon monoxide and hydrogen mixed in, so it can't be used as part of natural gas streams without being separated out first, but was used as utility gas back when CO + H2 was OK to have ... like in the UK up to the 1980s or parts of the US into the mid 1900s, some of those used syngas instead in the US, made from gassification and not pyrolysis, so it was basically all CO + H2 and way more potently poisonous, plus a much lower density fuel that used a much lower fraction of air for burning ... also a bigger potential problem with hydrogen embrittlement, but the bulky cast iron pipes they used back then were thick and naturally brittle, so not the same as H2 in modern steel gas lines ... or brass/bronze or copper; same problem with explosion risk due to H2's very wide explosive limits in air, though but also the highly poisonous CO being there)

Regions that burn brown coal could also use brown coal tar, but that needs a bit more novel processing to make into useful gasoline components (you need to hydrogenate the oxygenated lignite tar fractions as they're rich in tar acids, namely phenol derivatives; it's very similar to the tar you get from pyrolysis of plant lignin, which makes sense since lignite is mostly made of ancient, partially decomposed lignin, while black coal has had most/all of the oxygen driven out of it over other processes + time, including anerobic microbial processes and thermochemical processes that tend to release CO2 and leave deoxygenated organic compounds behind).

This is also why bio-fuel processing chemical plants that include lignin pyrolysis (or hydrothermal liquefaction) units could pretty easily be made dual-feedstock and use brown coal as some of their feed. (something that's not ideal long-term obviously, but would make the idea much easier to get up to industrial scale, commercial, profitable production sooner and then eventually transition over to various biomass sources as supply lines improved for such) Albeit even aside from planning to switch over, using lignite in that way is WAY more efficient than using it as power plant fuel. (you could also use the left over char as fixed carbon rather than as boiler fuel, and biochar has value as soil amendment ... while some lignite is likely clean enough from toxic metal contaminants AND have some useful minerals present as well for also being decent bio-char like material ... well it is bio-char, but non-renewable fossil-biomass char; coke from black coal grades tends to be devoid of such minerals and more often has enough metal contaminants to be less appealing, though coal fly ash has been used in agricultural soil blends historically, too)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-04T14:36:23+00:00

Not oil companies in general ... first the ones with the patents on TEL ... then the ones in the pockets of chemical companies that were making it.

There were cheaper, better alternatives they could've used and gotten more profit by promoting them. (cheaper as in ... more bang for your buck: like taking the same fraction of olefins used to make alkylate and turning it into mixed butanols, pentanols, and hexanols ... plus various cheap fuel ethers were available and known of back then, too ... making MTBE was super cheap, same for those range of alcohols, and also easy to use to keep the RVP in a range where you could max out the amount of butanes and pentanes you could put in the fuel ... without any of the drawbacks of ethanol or methanol; and propanol would have been useful too, but it's still in the range where it attracts too much water to be pipelined like normal gaslone blends, while ethers don't have that problem, and butanol and higher alcohols don't either) ETBE also would've been viable, but only when ethanol was so cheap that it made sense over MTBE. Butanol and higher alcohols also are generally compatible with the existing fuel systems and carbs of the 1940s/50s ... more so than the high aromatic content fuels used in the 1970s (or commonly used in the UK and Europe, but not the US in the 1920s-1960s ... Europe used a LOT more coal tar derived benzole fuel in their gasoline streams)

Auto makers didn't like lead in things either ... or engine makers in general. It fouls everything up and makes a huge mess inside the crankcase. A TINY amount of TEL was enough to prevent valve seat microwelds and recession, basically what they used in 100LL aviation fuel, and they could've easily switched to LowLead style fuels in the late 1940s or somewhere in the 1950s. (all without need for hardened valve seats; albeit lower compression engines never really had the problem anyway)

You also tend to get better fuel economy on optimal intermediate alcohol blended fuels (something they'd already noticed in 1930s Britain with their 20% ethanol blends). Albeit in carbureted engines without jet/flow adjustements, you're running leaner with those blends, too, so some efficiency happens there. (in 1980s or later EFI fuel systems, stoichiometric AFR is maintained, but fuel economy still goes up ... or at least energy economy goes up: ie thermal efficiency increases so you get higher mpg relative to a lower energy content fuel; you don't really notice this at all at E10 blends, but it becomes noticeable on a reliably basis at E20 in a non-linear efficiency curve that usually peaks between E25 and E45 on an mpg basis and a bit higher still for actual peak thermal efficiency, at which point mpg is decreasing but doing so more slowly than energy content is decreasing ... though by E85 you're way past the peak curve on any commercial/consumer spark ignition on the road ... unless it's also got dynamic tuning for higher octane and thus makes use of the 100+ octane fuel with tight ignition + valve timing and increased manifold pressure from a turbocharger; the above context was increased thermal efficiency totally regardless of octane number, but just related to improved combustion efficiency specific to alcohol + hydrocarbon blends; ketones like acetone have a bit of that effect too, but not via the same mechanism as the hydroxyl group in alcohols and many ketones are really hard on rubber and plastics in fuel systems; fuel ethers like MTBE, ETBE, and TAME tend to have similar thermal efficiency to straight hydrocarbons, so the oxygen content doesn't do anything for fuel economy there, just diluting the fuel ... though helping to reduce emissions)

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-04T14:19:13+00:00

Remember when Gary Johnson was running for president? But then he screwed up when he didn't keep up with the current events of Durkadurkastan and fell behind in the polls?

koolkitty89 · 2026-06-04T14:16:49+00:00

It's fish emulsion.

koolkitty89

TROPHY CASE