Yardwork and cleaning can easily take up hours per week. That's why we outsource it. When I was a kid, it felt like all my dad ever did on the weekend was yardwork, fix cars, and drive me to sports practice.
Same- I slowly stopped reading Risks even though I am still a subscriber (as far as I know).
What's weird was, back then, I thought about geography on the internet even LESS than I do now. It's strange now to realize PGN worked at SRI, just a few blocks from where I'm typing this. And he may have passed away at the hospital my wife's working at right now.
I'm moderately horrified every time claude runs the same broken, YOLO SWAG git commands from stackoverflow, gets errors, tries a few more things, then finally figures out how to commit and push correctly.
Tangential: I miss Nate and Maria Konnikova's Risky Business podcast. It only lasted a year (or two?).
I expected it would be resurrected outside the Pushkin network, but hasn't happened yet.
What I _don't_ miss is listening to podcasts on Pushkin. I had nothing against Malcolm Gladwell, but something about having his voice on every one of the network's very numerous ads became incredibly grating.
I enjoyed the old 538 podcast and usually like Nate's work but didn't care at all about Risky Business. His cohost was terrible in the episodes I listened too. She managed to do a lot of talking without saying anything interesting or insightful.
Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
Plus it seems unlikely that the telematics module is even really related to the display screen stuff, let alone being configured to use alternate network connections to transmit data.
"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"
GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.
Huh. It's the exact opposite of what I'd look for in a roadtrip waypoint.
Gas line. Nightmare parking lot to get in and out of. Long walk to the store. Long walk to find anything. Slow checkout.
I guess narrowing it to "cheap gas, availability of familiar goods and bathrooms, with an on-site tire shop" helps make it make a _bit_ more sense, but the (lack of) speed would just be a deal-killer for me.
I'm a bit perplexed on this one-- Yes, we refine our own blend of gasoline, but it's based on market oil -- nothing about the war we started with Iran impacts our domestic refining capability.
Also, oil takes longer to get from Iran to the west coast than to the east coast. Shouldn't the east coast be the first to notice decreased shipments, because the west coast essentially has a stock still in transit for longer?
EDIT: Nevermind, now I see that 25% of CA gas is refined overseas.
CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
People in LA need to breathe during the summer time. So yes we demand a blend that protects our residents. And the refiners are choosing to close refineries. They are not being compelled.
They are being strangled, it’s their choice to tap out is how I would put it.
The improvement in air quality is due to the clean air act, catalytic converters, and the shuttering of industry, the gas blend plays a minor part. Even then, with gas so much higher it will materially make peoples lives worse, at some point society would be better off getting rid of the blend.
There has been no major refineries opened in the US since 1977. There have been a handful of small refineries in the 2010s and early 2020s in California, North Dakota, and Texas.
How do you know California's lack of new refineries is due to California hostility rather than being due to whatever caused the same lack in every other state?
It's bonkers that some of the most expensive gas you'll ever buy is in SF, and Martinez is right there. You could bike there, if they allowed bikes on the bridge.
> CA’s requirement that it gets its own blend of gas is combined with how its openly hostile towards its ever decreasing refineries and that it is impossible for a new refinery to ever open makes it’s supplies absurdly limited
A big one is a lack of pipelines.
As I understand it, California sits on so much oil, nobody has built a pipeline.
Building an energy pipeline in California is like bringing sand to the beach. The energy is already there.
"California’s top foreign refinery supplier of gasoline and blendstocks this decade is Reliance Industries Ltd.’s Jamnagar refinery complex in western India. "
"More than 9 million barrels arrived via this loophole in 2025"
Now, that's a tiny fraction of the 320M barrels of gas used in CA annually, but anything that affects global oil shipments will be felt in California.
> [California] imports about 60% of its crude from overseas--up from 5% in the mid-1980s- about a third of which comes from the
Middle East. About 15% of the state's refined fuels are also imported, much of which depends on Middle East crude.
15% in absolute terms, 22% in per capita terms. And it is state policy to allow no more additional ICE cars in less than ten years, no net emissions in less than 20 years. Investing in a refinery today would obviously be folly.
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