Overzeetop

Russia is one of the largest exporter of gasoline.

At the risk of linking an un-cited web page, they look to be a distant 12th in gasoline.
https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=gasoline&graph=exports&display=rank
The source is supposedly https://www.eia.gov/ but I can’t find the original data there in any usable format.

Russia comes in a distant second for general refined petroleum (not just gasoline) according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/refined-petroleum-products-exports/country-comparison/

Based on videos from one of the major lava-themed entertainment venues who has been posting updates for two months, the “barriers” for Grindavik were barely started, with work only beginning some time after January 4th or 5th. The primary focus of the public work was in building the barriers to protect the regional power plant to the east of the fissures (and hot springs resort area just east and north the power plant). IIRC, those barriers took a month to construct.

The subsurface dam/inclusion runs pretty much directly under Grindavik, so if an active eruption opens along the southern edge of the magma inclusion there will be no way to prevent damage to those houses adjacent.

Disc: I’m neither a seismologist nor a volcanologist, but I’ve seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, and I was in Grindavik in October.

maybe get a few of those potatoes up front

It’s good to see such unbridled optimism in these dark times.

It took me searching the blacks to notice. Where I play there’s usually enough glare I wouldn’t get good blacks if you swapped the LC layer for vantablack.

The way I read it was a ceasefire in return for some of the hostages. Nobody floats their final offer with the first contact.

• Some of the hostages for humanitarian lanes
• Most of the hostages for a 7 day ceasefire with monitored evacuations
• All of the hostages for a 14 day ceasefire
• All of the hostages and known leaders of HAMAS for an indefinite ceasefire, contingent on zero future incursions or military operations (you have to offer at least one impossible option past what you want)

Well, lucky for him he didn’t even entertain the ceasefire to see if he could have gotten them all back.

Wait until I tell you that the US is indebted to Japan for that same amount ($1.1T) and to China for nearly that amount ($0.9T). Sure it’s a bigger portion of the available funds in the developing world, but on the scale of superpowers, it’s not so much.

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

Marketing: We need to defend this - what’s something people are really excited about?

Engineer: Stainless steel; you can’t make a good stainless without nickel

Salesman: Oooh - I know! How about nickels? Everybody loves nickels and their worth 5 cents each!

Engineer:

Marketing:

Intern: You know, they use nickel in battery packs for electric cars

Marketing: Oh, right - everybody likes electric cars. Green and vroom-vroom, I love it!

Engineer: You know that electric cars don’t go vroom-vroom, right?

Marketing: I’m going with electric cars, it’s a feel-good use people will get behind.

Indeed. A relatively lightly administered area which was predominantly (3/4) Muslim. Then Britain took it over following WW1 and said “The Zionists supported us during the war so we’re going to carve out a Jewish homeland in this space where they say they used to live a couple millenia ago and we’re going to pretty much ignore that there’s someone already living there.”

Now you have people displaced who felt their homeland was taken and people transplanted who believe their homeland is due them and the most extreme factions have guns and bombs to argue about it. There is no solution where Israel remains and stays at peace with it’s neighbors, some of whom were displaced to make space or Israel.

It saddens me that this is the case. My great grand-parents were Jewish and fled the pogroms in western Russia to come to the US. Zionists are a stain on our religion.

Terrorists and Religious zealots (a Venn diagram which is nearly a perfect, single circle) will never recognize basic humanity, because power and control are more important than any human life. To expect peace in a land claimed as sacred by multiple groups is simply guaranteeing unending violence.

I mean, we sort of set up this fuck-fest despite Britain telling us it was a bad idea. But we were the Victors of the World™ so clearly we knew what we were doing (clears throat). Kind of like our useless embargo of Cuba, we made a decision and we’re sticking with it, no matter how stupid or counterproductive it is, and there’s a very vocal portion of the electorate which supports the move (mostly out of spite, which makes them that much more intractable).

Is the current war terrible? Sure. Nobody should be killing civilians or taking the hostage. Is the plight of the Palestinians real? Yeah, it is. Israel has been an absolute menace, because they can.

LOL

Sorry, in advance, for the long, descriptive post, but the value of a dedicate, slide mute switch is somewhat nuanced.

The mute switch on an iPhone is a physical slide switch. Without looking, you can feel if it’s muted (back) or active (front) position. Alternately, you can see the condition as, when it’s in the “mute” position, it has an exposed orange (painted) indicator. Neither of these verifications require that the phone be awake or to light up the screen. It can also be activated with the device off, so that if you turn the phone on in a quiet place you don’t have to wait for the UI to become responsive (usually after start notifications have actuated, which occur before software buttons can be pressed to mute the phone). It is a single action to mute, compared to a 5 gesture sequence to silence the phones primary sounds (which can be ringtone OR playback volume, but not both) and an 6-8 gesture sequence (depending on the wake-status of the last used app) to silence the secondary phone sound. Note: I’m assuming that face unlock is active and you are staring at your phone obtrusively; entry of the unlock code would add 7-9 additional touch gestures.

While I agree that a button is nice, it still takes at least two actions - press the button and visually confirm its actuation puts it into the desired mode. There are times when you are unsure what mode the phone is in. On an iPhone, that is not visible from any screen until you either a) wake the phone and actuate a volume button (neither visual nor haptic feedback occurs when a volume button is pressed) or are logged into the phone (two minimum gestures plus face authorization) and use the action center (swipe function) to visually verify th volume position.

Now, you could easily argue that this is fucking terrible UI design, and I would 100% agree with you. I would, likewise agree, that most technical features on an iPhone are certifiably obtuse - ex: you cannot turn on your hotspot without entering the settings app; it’s not even an action center icon option as it is on Android. I would add that it’s also monumental dumbfuckery that your hotspot is the name of your phone and cannot be changed. Or that there is no function to alter the Prompt volume in the phone (ie. for GPS directions) unless the prompt audio is actively playing - difficult if the prompt volume is accidentally (or temporarily) set to zero. In 3rd party apps the prompt volume is several menus deep; for the OEM map application, it doesn’t exist - there is literally no setting.

But, it remains - if you want to mute the alerts on your phone, the switch requires fewer actions and zero view of the device to actuate, and zero activation of the screen or login to verify it’s condition. You may never need to discretely silence your phone or check that it is in silent mode without taking the phone out and unlocking it, but many of us find it quite useful.

The author is under the impression that the button will be infinitely remappable. Given Apple’s history, I expect it to be rather limited. I will sorely miss the mute switch which has both a tactile and visible position indicator which does not require waking the phone, or even having the phone on, to actuate (should you want to turn on your phone without getting bombarded with notification sounds).

It will be the think I probably miss the most when I eventually upgrade. The brilliance of the switch is that it is a switch - which means can be verified by feel or by sight to be in the silent position without needing to wake or even take you phone out of your pocket.

100% true - but if people feel the need to create so many mods, then there are probably lots of things people feel aren’t good enough about the game. I’ll admit my gaming time is limited, so just researching and adding mods could easily take all my time. I mean, fuck, I sold my Warthog HOTAS and went back to a cheap thrusmaster not because I liked the thrustmaster better, but because I was spending more time writing and fixing scripts and updating my bindings than actually playing the game. And every time an update would come out that would break a script I would spend pretty much my entire gaming time budget for a couple weeks just getting it running again. It got to the point where I just didn’t play those games because every patch would change something and something (even something small) would break or be incompatible. I’m kind of over that.

I was kind of hoping for fallout and elite; real space flight and exploration, but with an actual story and story line to follow. I’m mostly over real-life gaming that looks like a cartoon, so I’m glad it’s not nms.

Mods are the very first thing that turns me off in a game. I want to play a game, not go stack mods on top of mods just to fix the shit the studio didn’t feel like working on.

Yes. Yes, they are.

Maybe stupid is the wrong word? Willfully, negligently, and/or belligerently ignorant might be more accurate, I guess. These people get pretty angry when told they can’t build on “their land” because it s uninsurable and it is within the (statistical) flood plane. These are the same people you see crying on TV and angry at the government for not paying to rebuild their house, or for letting them build there at all, after a flood. They conveniently forget how they were told that it would flood and they intentionally ignored the warnings. I don’t know; in my book that’s pretty stupid.