Aviation biofuel is mostly a distraction. Any serious effort to decarbonize the transportation industry would focus on a scalable system, presumably high-speed rail.

(And whoever is thinking about being a smartass, don’t you dare come at me with bullshit about trans-ocean flights, they obviously can’t be take by train, but biofuel is still utterly incapable of supplying even only ocean flights. It’s not ever going to be a viable product. We’d be better off trying to scale up carbon capture than try to use all our arable land to grow crops for fuel.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MO9CUyuwf4

“. . . and you can put so much stuff in there, you wouldn’t even know!”

That’s basically the wave in the water planet scene from Interstellar. That’s terrifying.

Love love Hark! A Vagrant. And a lot of the other comics are way funnier, especially the historical ones. The comics about “marauding women on bicycles” (like this one) crack me up. I still think the “strong female characters” series is one of the funniest things ever.

I wish Beaton would keep doing Hark! A Vagrant, but given what her family went through and her sister’s misdiagnosis and death from cancer, I understand why she finished it up. Her graphic novel/memoir, Ducks, was one of the best books I read last year.

Have automakers gotten so used to fat profit margins from SUV sales, particularly during the post-pandemic boom, that they consider anything that requires investment to be “insufficiently profitable”? Or has the high-return mindset of Silicon Valley infected Detroit as well?

Not a surprise, but still somehow crushing. It’s a loss for us all.

Put a fraction of that in wind, solar, or forced geothermal, and you’d get a real benefit. But the fossil fuel industry demands a fig leaf to cover its naked greed, so here we are.

yahoo

Nowadays, I don’t know that they could, but more than a decade ago they still had enough mail and search users to be somewhat relevant, and Marissa Meyer had just taken over after she left Google. There was a real thought that Yahoo! could so something new. It obviously didn’t pan out, but for a hot minute, people really talked about Yahoo!

It looks like the Scorpion was not selected by the USAF for the light-strike or patrolling craft role, in favor of pursuing turboprop options (Beechcraft AT-6 Wolverine and Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucano).

Is this why China is a regular powerhouse in badminton? So much temptation!

Like, two owners ago. Wordpress took Tumblr off Verizon’s hands for $3 million USD, ~six years after Yahoo! bought it for $1.1 billion.

I liked this bit about Rob Johnson near the end, that he “has just the right mix of passion and affability to nudge labels in the right direction.” I think that’s a very effective combination. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that the labels can make some money in the process.

Sounds like the beginning of a supervillain origin story.

I don’t have much sympathy for the McMansions, but there are huge sections of Pacific Coast rail line threatened by coastal erosion, and it sure would be nice to get some nice high-speed rail along there.

100% agree with this. Dune 1 sets up the world, Dune 2 gets to tell more of a story.

Remember when GRRM was so pissed that people criticized his friend Robert Jordan for faffing around for over a decade and never finishing the Wheel of Time series? Yeah, same.

Hey, while we’re on the subject, does anyone remember the forum thread that went viral a few years ago of a guy whose HOA booted his car, and he managed to hide the booted car in his garage and the towing company freaked out? He updated the forum posts as the saga developed, and it’s a very funny read.

https://www.jeepforum.com/threads/epic-hoa-parking-boot-battle.572540/

our Search Choices might be of use here

Thanks, I think that’s a valuable option! It’s probably not what I was looking for. As I understand it, the “bang” use is just a way to use the search on a specific webpage, and is just a nice little hack to speed up searches on commonly used websites (i.e., Wikipedia, YouTube, BBC, etc.) I can probably get used to going straight to those sites, but it was a feature that got me using DDG at first and broke my reliance on Google.

For anyone seriously considering this tactic, they already have your license plate and VIN when they boot your car. If you manage to remove the wheel and destroy the boot, many jurisdictions will come after you for damage to city property and it will cost you a lot more than paying to get the boot off. I had a buddy who found this out the hard way.

Mojeek

Thanks for the rec, I’ll give Mojeek a try for a while. So far the results seem better than Brave (which I didn’t seriously consider using regularly anyway) but I miss the bang options (!w, !yt, etc.) that DDG has.