guyzero

Everyone loves gas and hates refineries. It's a tough choice.

Weirdly California doesn't get all of its gas from domestic refining.

https://timesofsandiego.com/state-region/2026/04/23/prices-c...

"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.

I don't understand who is taking the other side of all these insane Polymarket bets. Is Polymarket doing it?

More than just the d100 he was a pioneer of being very exacting when it came to making polyhedral dice. See http://www.1000d4.com/2013/02/14/how-true-are-your-d20s/

I expect the average human mother maintains a higher level of sanitation than the average cow.

They very much are not.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/1iydxaa/raw_milk_nearl...

In addition to the incredible engineering work here the OP casually flexes by showing the development happening _in an economy class airplane seat_.

The bulk of those shirts have got to be pirated, but for a while they were selling them at Bandy Melville, a clothing store whose target demographic has seemingly very little overlap with fans of Joy Division. The ultimate triumph of the signifier over the signified.

Congrats, OP has recreated a test/development bench, the bane of developers working on automotive software development all around the world. They're so close to being a real vehicle that you think you'll be able to get a lot of work done, but they're not, so you don't.

EIR == Entrepreneur-in-Residence

The foreign-born population of LA and SF hasn't changed significantly in decades. It was like 27% in LA in the 80s. Housing there is expensive because there's a lot of demand from a lot of people. Immigration is like reason 11 out of 10 for why housing is expensive in those areas.

I just said you're wrong, not that you're prohibited from discussing it.

Framing foreign-born residents as "artificial demand" is definitely a thing you can do, but it doesn't align with reality. Some portion of the foreign-born population are naturalized or are family members of US citizens, so it's not like waving your magic racist wand would actually solve the problem.

There are so many confounding factors that this can't be taken at face value. Immigrants go where jobs are in general and it's demand for workers that causes housing prices to go up. If there was zero immigration there would still be huge housing demand in SF and LA.

Canada has pulled American liquor from sales as a tariff retaliation, so Kentucky bourbon sales have dropped considerably. Thus we have the senator from Kentucky trying to kill off domestic competitors for Kentucky liquor.

It's a historic quirk that the US is a single country. It hardly feels like one most days.

Sybase and Ingres disagree.

You think 4.5% of the world's population is smarter and works harder than the other 95.5%? Maybe there's other reasons.

There's between 5 and 16 million tech workers in the US depending whose definition you use. The tech sector unemployment rate is 2.8% per https://www.comptia.org/en-us/about-us/news/press-releases/t...

That is, at most, less than half a million people in the field and the majority of those jobs aren't the ones looking for overseas hires anyway. If we take CompTIA's number of roughly 5M tech workers it's 140,000 people, not "literally millions."

If you have better numbers, please, let us know.

> Yeah but no offense if you're paid the same as your peers, you're not necessarily exceptional.

Says you. I work in Lake Wobegon.

> Some AI recruitments have seen 9-figure contracts.

These are crazy outliers who would go through a different visa path anyway. US tech companies still need mid-level workers making low-to-mid six figures. Weirdly O1 visa holder spouses will get an O3 which doesn't allow them to work, making it worse than the H1B/H4 visa for some set of people. (H4s allow spouses to work)

Everyone in these threads always points out all sorts of issues with the H1B system, which are mostly true, but it's not like there's a suggestion for a replacement here. This is a de facto shutdown of the program, not a reform. I'd be happy to see a reformed skilled immigration program for the US, but this isn't it.

The US makes up about 4.5% of the global population and it seems silly to think that the FAANG companies and the new AI startups chasing behind them are going to restrict their hiring to this tiny slice of the global talent pool.

The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

I myself became a US citizen two years ago after being on a H1B. I was paid the same as all my peers and for all its shortcomings the program worked for me. It stunning to think this has been closed off, killing the main path for skilled immigration into the US.

I generally like Doctorow's writing and agree with a lot of what he says here, but:

"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."

I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.

The PATH is great as Toronto has pretty variable weather and on a snowy or rainy day it sure beats being outside. One thing this article doesn't note is that post-pandemic half of it is empty. So many empty retail storefronts. There's still the assortment of Shoppers and various food courts and a handful of actual store under TD Place. But compared to a decade ago, it's so empty.

Stanford is skimming the absolute top students from around the world into its programs. There's more than enough capacity in US schools for the top 10% of US grad students and then the US gets the benefit of also getting the top 10% of other countries' grad students.

Well, that was the case up until this year.

Exactly. Farmers vote.

Thank you!

shouldiimplementssl.com

The one near Sunnyvale Community Center is an apricot grove and you can buy their apricots in the early summer.

There's an orange grove here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Tkycx4qdL8Wrq5zY6 near Intel HQ and the new set of SCUSD schools. The only thing from stopping you from picking an orange is a sign asking you not to.

There's a really interesting book about this exact topic: https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/chromophobia

edit: ha, the book is mentioned halfway through the essay. I should finish reading before commenting.

I agree with the book's thesis - there's an impulse to associate colour with "the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological" in contemporary western society. We've somehow managed to other color itself.

"The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse – a fear of corruption or contamination through colour – lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge colour, either by making it the property of some ‘foreign body’ – the oriental, the feminine, the infantile, the vulgar, or the pathological – or by relegating it to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential, or the cosmetic. Chromophobia has been a cultural phenomenon since ancient Greek times; this book is concerned with forms of resistance to it. Writers have tended to look no further than the end of the nineteenth century. David Batchelor seeks to go beyond the limits of earlier studies, analysing the motivations behind chromophobia and considering the work of writers and artists who have been prepared to look at colour as a positive value. Exploring a wide range of imagery including Melville’s ‘great white whale’, Huxley’s reflections on mescaline, and Le Corbusier’s ‘Journey to the East’, Batchelor also discusses the use of colour in Pop, Minimal, and more recent art."