D’oh!
Hovering in the low 700s now. So much for this surge. Oh boy indeed. Lol.

Bad news, Ford just announced they give customers a right to repair their own vehicles, unlike Tesla.

Tesla keeps its tech secret, uses proprietary tools they don’t sell, and goes the extra mile to make sure only Tesla service centers can work on a Tesla, allowing them to charge $15000 for repairs that should cost $700 (and do at the few after, aftermarket Tesla repair shops). This is because Tesla is a software company like Apple, and tries to use the same hyper control scheme that Apple does….essentially saying you just rent your Tesla, it’s not really yours to modify or repair.

Ford designed its crate motor, now available for aftermarket projects btw, the same motor in the E-mustang and soon in the e-f150, to be simple to work on with normal mechanics tools. They’ve indicated a willingness to make their systems open source so anyone can fix them. This is going to make Ford a much better choice even if their specs don’t measure up, and it seems they will.

Sorry, @bobknight33, it’s not looking great for your “all in on one stock” plan. So you understand, in order to be a good deal, Tesla stock still needs to drop by 4/5…or down to around $150 +-. That would put its PE ratio around 20….still high, but considered decent these days. 100 PE is just insane.

Um, I notice their data ends in 2012 - 2015, while CCD was just becoming a serious issue. My last 3 hives had CCD.
Can bees be repopulated, yes, by splitting remaining hives and ramping up distribution channels, but that’s not sustainable and lowers the hive production to dangerously low levels. Hives can produce honey or new bees, but not both in large quantities.
Also, it’s an expensive proposition, rehiving. A nuc costs $200, a new clean hive another $250+- with a near 50% chance it won’t survive each year, it’s an expensive hobby and a real loss when they go down. Eventually people will give up trying in large quantities, then what?
And, as mentioned, wild bees pollinate most plants, and no one is working hard and making money producing large quantities of wild bee hives.

Over the last decade, the numbers have changed. There has been a severe decline in domestic bee population while demand has risen. Also, the commercial hives left often have been split many times, meaning 20000 is a far more normal population of a hive than 80000, and clearly does less pollinating, less honey production, and less new bee production.

It doesn’t have to be an either or choice, I’ve had beehives and fostered wild bee habitat at the same time. I have 30 fruit trees, I need all the bees I can get to visit.

I think the real answer to why you don’t hear about it as much lately is 1) War in Europe and 2) Coup in America, both of which dominate any news reports.

What do they mean “running out”? We’ve been out of water for decades.

As bad as this sounds, I think he’s under selling the problem big time.

Federal officials announced in February that California farmers will get no federal water this year, zero (that’s the Central Valley Project), while the state has allocated agriculture only 15% of normal from its distribution systems.
Meanwhile the state has also demanded agricultural water districts and cities stop diverting water from rivers and streams along the San Joaquin River. This includes 200 cities in and around the Bay Area, like San Francisco which gets up to 85% of its water from those rivers and streams.
Some rivers and streams in California have stopped flowing, all have reduced flow. The Mad River, just blocks from me, is usually 6-8’ deep bank to bank (75-100’) for at least 6 months out of each year, the last 3 years it never reached its banks and remained a shallow stream all winter, becoming a creek in summer. It is abnormal, most rivers are worse off.
Aquifers have already been depleted so much that the entire Central Valley is sinking rapidly. Reservoirs are WELL below 50%, despite what this clip said (Shasta is reporting at 40% today, but driving over it it looks like maybe 10-20% full with no inflow).
So far this year along, over 1000 residential wells have gone dry. This includes many entire communities losing their drinking water supplies completely. The number of agriculture wells that can no longer function is uncountable. It’s estimated we will lose 2700 drinking water wells this year state wide.

The California water problem isn’t a pressing future issue, it’s an ongoing unmitigated disaster we’ve ignored for far too long. At this point, it’s likely insurmountable, and a collapse of California agriculture will make today’s inflation seem like the good old days when average workers could afford to eat. Start a garden, it’s going to get weird.

You are so stupid you think the accusation is that violence took place during the planning stage on Jan 5th as they cased the joint in preparation for the planned assault against America and democracy the next day?

Wow, I never gave you any credit for intelligence, but that’s just brain dead sluggery. If you were capable of shame, you would be feeling it now.

What was Benghazi if not dumping on Clinton to try to keep her from running in 2016? Don’t start whining now, snowflake.

The difference is there’s an actual investigation, a bipartisan one at that, going on here, not just baseless accusation, and actually evidence of a plot to subvert democracy and stage a violent coup, where the charge against Clinton was indecipherable and without fact or evidence, and multiple investigations and hearings that SHE didn’t hide from proved it.
Trump tried to stage a coup, but is a loser so he failed. He wants another try, and you want to give it to him despite 2/3 of the country despising him and refusing to go along.

Edit: I wonder, if these tours were so innocuous, innocent, and just normal families….why did Loudermilk spend so much time vehemently denying they ever happened….then more time denying there were no more than 4 people including 2 children, eventually admitting he gave tours to up to 22 red hat Maggots that took photos of back hallways, stairs, security posts, representative escape routes, routes to Democratic representatives offices, etc? False denials are indicators of guilt, and he gave denial after denial that he eventually admitted were lies.
Asking for pardons is also an admission of guilt….who asked for them again?

The proof that these assholes don’t believe their “good guy with a gun” lie is they don’t allow guns at the NRA events.

I wish some nut(s) would attack the NRA event, shooting a few dozen gun proponent politicians that normally hide behind their armed security and bullet proof podiums. I’m sure their tune would change significantly if some of their ilk were silenced permanently. No one deserves it more than Abbot.

Edit: BTW…more unarmed school children have been murdered in school this year than police officers in the line of duty. For all their bravado, their whining about how dangerous it is to be a cop, the necessity for more militarized equipment for their safety, it’s actually more dangerous to be a 10 year old student. I guess those kids should all get vests, rifles, pepper spray, armored vehicles and buildings, etc. ..that’s the solution.

Also, guns are the leading cause of death for children under 19 …have been since 2020.

Fucking worthless cowards and thugs, every single one. They deserve one more bullet each…delivered at high speed.

Already proven that Trump tampered with the official call log in the whitehouse because phone calls on record to senators from the whitehouse, on their official call logs from the WH number, we’re not on the call log Trump’s team turned over (with 7 hours of calls erased).
Proven within days to be a fraud, obstruction of justice, and creating a false government record for the purposes of court.

This is you guy. This is you pick?

Yeah yeah, I know….”BUT HUNTER” you say. Sorry buddy, Hunter isn’t in the government, doesn’t work for the president, and is a private citizen, so keep going after uninvolved children of politicians, it doesn’t tarnish Joe one bit, and so far hasn’t produced anything against him, only baseless accusations that he might have used daddy’s position for personal gain, not something the Trumps want criminalized to be sure, since we have the recordings of them doing exactly that.

Unlike the Trump crime family that absolutely took in hundreds of millions in gifts and sweetheart deals from (hostile) foreign nations while working for the administration and during trade negotiations they were involved directly in….that’s normally called bribery, and it’s not a guess or fantasy, it’s public record….and they did work for the government in as nepotistic a way as possible.

I also had no idea about her alopecia, and don’t care. She has the resources to buy wigs indistinguishable from her real hair if it mattered, but I don’t see why it should. She looks fine bald, why get upset over nothing?!

I had hair below my ass in my 20’s, then cut it to 1/4 inch long one day when my hairline started retreating, now I shave it. I’m lucky my head looks ok bald, because I have little choice these days.

Nothing wrong with being weird, lots wrong with being normal or average. Let your freak flag fly!

When I was like 20 something I had a moustache which I mistakenly considered manly. I was in a theater when one of the actors chose me as the member of the audience to mess with. He leaned over a couple of rows of seats and grabbed my prized facial hair and shouted "take that off I know its fake. stop resisting". I normally dont like to be the center of attention but in the context of the show this was hilarious (even for me).

If something similar happened to my wife or kids it would be much harder to process and my first concern would be are they OK with this? If not, how do I stop this from happening?

Bob, do you need an adult to show you how urinals work? If you put your dick in them, you are using them wrong….and you better get checked out.

Leave it to you to not know how to use a urinal….something normal two year olds pick up by themselves.

Or have you been peeing in the glory hole?

🤦‍♂️

If youre a normal country you are always living on credit, if for no other reason, then because it is super easy and cheap to borrow. Also you have to, to make it to the next pay check (tax collection). First your subjects have to produce and sell, then you can collect taxes.

You dont base the value of the dollar on anything. You offer it as a commodity to the market. If your economy sucks or you print too much money the dollar goes down, which can help the economy. Printing money doesnt automatically help the economy though, it just creates space and time to make it possible for the economy to improve.

Improving the economy means creating more or better products and services that are in demand at a competitive cost. Governments in non-dictatorial countries cant really do that directly, they can only create the conditions for this to happen.

Moderate inflation hardly plays a part, except as a moderator (is that a pun?) of shocks. Deflation (and a strong gold standard in a developing economy IS deflation) is deadly, it makes the economy less flexible, less able to adjust.

If you never improve your ecomomy, all you will have left will be to bitch about inflation.

What is too much debt, too much inflation, too much intervention? I wish economics was a science.

Theoretically the economy can get to be so bad that the structure collapses, there are countries which have notoriously bad historical records, and yet every time they restart they have to borrow money to get things going again. Reserves in general are useless. Production, services and a functioning market, recursive production of valuable goods and services which freely and easily find customers is the only thing you can consider a reliable pillar of civilization. Currency is one of those goods and services.

If for any reason yor currency cant freely circulate (see China or the USSR errr... Russia) you can hardly be a superpower, at least not in the economic sense.

Adopting a gold standard so strong that it would destroy the international dollar standard has no advantage for the USofA or for any developed first world country. Even just having the Euro wreaks havoc in weaker European countries economies, but that is another can of worms.

A lot of what is wrong about the gold standard would apply if a country decided to adopt bitcoin as its sole currency btw.

For new cars, probably correct, but old combustion engines aren’t just going to dissolve away. I have two over 50 years old in my driveway. They can last a long time.
Also, India and China don’t seem very interested in skipping their turn at combustion engines (sad), so tack 50+- years on before the entire world even really wants to switch over.

I don’t deny average electric vehicles should soon outperform average normal gas engines (let’s ignore exotics as exotics). My point is switching technology across the board is a slow, painful, expensive process that won’t likely happen in 5, 10, or even 20 years IMO….and electric motors won’t ever totally replace combustion for all applications as some suggest.

I don't normally make fun of speeling or grammar mistakes, but I do find this funny. The logical place to match the quote in the title made me read it as sarcasm:
"Report" blames Biden administration for chaotic withdrawal.

I'm sorry to say it, bob, but you've been so thoroughly discredited over the years that I automatically skip any of your political vids on the assumption that they're misleading as best.

The issue is the wrong guy, a dishonest blowhard trying to cover his own failures, claimed this early on with absolutely zero evidence. It was a clear dodge, his normal MO. Refusing any responsibility for ending the international pandemic response team that would have been able to actually say when and where the outbreak started, and likely be able to keep it relegated to one small area in China. By blaming it on a Chinese lab, actually saying it was intentional, he deflects from his abject failure to protect America from a clear, obvious, incontrovertibly deadly threat on the horizon….or any time after it’s discovery.
Were the Chinese studying Covid, yes, so were we. That’s not an indication of where it came from. There’s no evidence it came from any lab, only supposition at best.

Edit:Even if the guess that it came from a Chinese lab is correct, it doesn’t excuse one second of Trump’s (lack of) response and outright denials for months-years. The origin has nothing to do with the danger level, in fact, if it WERE enhanced/created in a lab as he claimed, that’s more reason to consider it MORE dangerous, not reason to claim it’s just a cold or mild flu and will disappear like magic in a few weeks. Granted, it was fun to see him (only after his trade deal fell apart) blame this deadly virus on the Chinese as an unforgivable deliberate act of germ warfare and accuse them of minimizing the danger and hiding the size and severity of the outbreak and in the same breath claim it’s nothing to worry about, not dangerous, probably not deadly, not worth any action to protect against, and just a minimal annoyance soon to disappear….but also disappointing to see how easily so many Americans glossed over the two faced hypocritical responsibility shirking stance he took.

This guy claims most, nearly all viruses can’t both infect people and be transmitted….what utter nonsense. If that were true, there would have never been epidemics, pandemics, not even outbreaks. Credibility destroyed.

I guess he didn’t hear about swine flu, or bird flu, or flu, or colds, or any transmittable virus. 🤦‍♂️
I guess they haven’t heard new mutations are far less deadly (but more transmittable) than earlier versions, so they are getting less dangerous, contrary to his claim.

Not transmitting well outdoors means it’s not natural?! Bullshit, animals nest together. Many natural viruses require close contact to transmit.

DNA testing proved early on that this is not a man made virus. Is it possible a Chinese lab made a natural virus more dangerous, then a lab mistake released it? Yes, but there’s no evidence that’s the case, even these people who’s livelihood relies on people accepting “the lab hypothesis” (hypothesis=guess) admit it’s all conjecture, there’s no evidence, certainly no proof. It’s not the lab theory because it’s unproven.

Duh.

BTW, this couple are married, anti vaxers, Ivermectin proponents, and were thrown out of Evergreen College, and are now both now discredited and disgraced. Their main source of income is now their anti vax, pro Ivermectin, Covid isn’t dangerous podcasts loved by morons like Joe Rogan, and a source of much of his misinformation that’s getting him removed from his platform.
“Bret Weinstein is one of the foremost purveyors of COVID-19 disinformation out there,” says Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and professor at Wayne State University who also debunks quack remedies as managing editor at a website called Science-Based Medicine. “Weinstein can be ‘credited’ with playing a large role in popularizing the belief that ivermectin is a miracle cure or preventative for COVID-19, that the vaccines are dangerous, and that the disease itself is not. Why are Rogan and Maher attracted to his messages? Contrarians and conspiracy theorists tend to be attracted to each other.”
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/09/16/bret-weinstein-and-heather-heying-go-unvaccinated-take-ivermectin/

Downvote discredited shills who profit from misinformation. No surprise at all, considering who posted this dishonest propaganda from discredited propagandists.

interesting video, but many of his same examples were in this 2012 NASA video: https://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw

Also, not to detract it's usefulness (and cool factor), but many people seeing this photo think that's how the Earth actually looks at night - it isn't. That composite uses satellite data from Suomi NPP's VIIRS sensor, which can detect much dimmer light than the human eye, and part of the compositing process was to normalize brightness of individual pixels (so dim lights get brighter, and bright lights don't washout adjacent pixels). More details here:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html

Even some cool night-time videos from ISS (example: https://youtu.be/FG0fTKAqZ5g ) are made using still photos with long exposure time (1+ seconds) See FAQ.

This did lead me to a live webcam from ISS that I didn't know existed: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/