Fracking has granted the United States independence from OPEC, and turned the US into the largest exporter of oil. The US now has the pricing power on the world oil market. This has huge geopolitical implications.

Back in the 2000s it was completely different. All of the geopolitical wonks were pushing renewable energy as a means of OPEC independence. And now that independence has been granted, but we still have the oil.

Meanwhile, as others have stated on this thread, the immediate problems from fracking have been mostly fixed, including the earthquakes. Long term, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen with all of that dirty wastewater going back into the ground.

So on balance, there’s a good reason for the leadership in both parties to be on board with fracking: oil still rules the world, and fracking lets the United States rule the oil markets.

Not enough mushrooming in that case.

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Side effects include all of your contacts calling you freakin nerd.

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“Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock has a beer bottle solo credited to Bill Summers.

Stupid freakin reposts.

If you’ve met the deductible for the plan year, the deductible is now off the table. And presumably you need to look at your policy to see what it covers after the deductible is met.

“50% before deductible” is an odd term that I haven’t seen in an health insurance policy. Usually, coinsurance doesn’t kick in until after the deductible is met.

“gradient descent” is a jargon word for one kind of training method.

Pull a Michael Westen and shoot a hole in the wallboard next to the steel door.

Here’s the really crazy thing.

Ark City, KS is located on the Ar-KAN-sas River. But this is the same river that flows through Little Rock under the name AR-kan-saw.

It’s talking about private citizens. But I only know that from history class, not from reading the article or anything.

A large part of food cost is processing.

A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.

A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.

Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.

The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.

If you go on Pentecost, they do this thing where they drop rose petals through the oculus at the end of the mass. Something something symbolizes tongues of fire.

Edit: the Colosseum is also technically a Catholic church.

Incinerated plastic releases green house gases and some amount of micro plastics in the uncombusted ash.

Landfill plastic seemingly just erodes into micro plastics over long time scales.

Those SSTs constantly blow out every window in the city. Seriously, there’s a reason this picture never came to fruition. And it’s because the FAA did a 6-month study of sonic booms in Oklahoma City, and that study was cut off after only a few weeks after citizens angrily called their representatives.

Lucky Charms are an American breakfast cereal containing sugary marshmallow pieces with a lot of food coloring. Lucky Charms are served in a bowl with milk.

Skip aero. Let’s go back to compiz fusion and deskcubes.

Was this 4k video from an arbitrary source, like a random YouTube video? Or from United’s website?

I haven’t flown outside is Southwest in a while, but they have a bunch of licensed video content that is hosted locally on the plane. And therefore cheap.

It’s illegal to use your cell phone’s cell modem on a plane, because of an FCC rule, not an FAA rule. The cells in the cell network are designed for traffic on the ground. At cruising altitude, your modem can see way too many cells at once.

Plane WiFi is a modern technological marvel and you’re lucky to be able to have it at all.

Not so long ago sat phones were the domain of the super rich, because they were paying several dollars per minute. Then it was down to 10 dollars for two hours of multiplexed satellite access. And now apparently it’s down to where advertising will work. That’s amazing.

The mythological legend regarding Lesbos was that all of the women Lesbians started having sex with each other one time when all of the men Lesbians went off to war.

Edit: Sappho was a real poet really from Leabos, and is one of the founders of lyric poetry in Western literature. Lyric poetry here means mostly any kind of poem that’s a lot shorter than the multi-chapter epics.