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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

    Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

    Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

    Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.





  • Question, when you move to a new place in Spain, do you need to register residency with the police?

    I don’t know if Spain does that or not, but I think Italy does some version.

    The United States doesn’t have that, and doesn’t have a national id card. Although most people effectively register themselves to get a driver license, that is only required if you drive. So voter registration nominally provides some way for the government to get the information on residency, which is important for figuring out which local elections you need to vote in.

    Now recently, in the last couple of decades, some states started requiring photo id verification to vote. This defeats the purpose of having a separate voter registration system, because you still have to go to the driver registration system to get either a driver license, or a non-driving photo ID. Nevertheless, the separate voter registration system has hung around in every single one of these states, because the real goal is to prevent people from voting.





  • J6 was a crime against the federal government on government property in the District of Columbia.

    The feds do have this felony murder law, but it seems to be narrower in scope than many state laws. For instance, the case where law enforcement shoots a perp did happen at the capitol, but it seems like it can’t be charged as felony murder under the federal version of the law.

    Also, the federal law lists specific crimes only that can be used as underlying felonies, and I suspect that “obstructing an official proceeding” and even “insurrection” are not specifically on that list. Possibly, the feds would have had to charge and convict on simple burglary to apply felony murder.

    I don’t think any felony murders were actually charged. And a great many J6 defendants were charged with no felonies at all, so they would not be eligible.