Petroleum? Oil’s at a five year low. The dollar could stand to be a bit firmer.

I heard Reza Pahlavi is wildly popular in Iran right now and Iranian locals are enthusiastic about seeing the Shah returned to power. Is this true?

What’s the lie about Ukraine?

Yaroslav Hunka scandal leaps to mind. But farther than that, it was the same old “it’s not going to be a quagmire”, “it’s not just about propping up the US arms industry”, “we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” line we’ve been hearing in every international theater.

Even the bit about Trump being “Putin’s Puppet” falls apart on any amount of historical interrogation. Trump was selling anti-tank missiles to Kiev as far back as 2018, three years before the Donbas invasion. He’d laid a bunch of sanctions on the country the first year he took office.

Then, as soon as Biden took office, he’s the one weak on Ukraine, according to the GOP.

Both parties egged their own supporters on by insisting the other party wasn’t Pro-Ukraine enough. Both parties insisted the other faction was “Communist”. Both insisted the other was a fifth column, trying to disarm the US from within. It was always and forever bullshit.

Why not both?

You’d absolutely need to do both, unless you wanted all sorts of malformed incentives.

Generally speaking, the revenue from a pigouvian tax needs to be spent mitigating the problem that generates the revenue. Otherwise, you end up with something of a Cobra Problem, wherein excess consumption is seen as a revenue driver that the state subtly promotes.

Isn’t this article about UK?

I’m just speaking from personal experience.

If you want to talk shit about the UK, you can always point to HS2. Cancelled out of spite by the outgoing Conservative government. Chronic mismanagement of the rail network has been a lead weight around the British economy for decades.

California lawmakers introduce a bill

Belling the Cat

How is the Loonie still losing to the dollar? The Euro is running laps around USD. Carney, get your shit together.

Even then, a 37% markup on $37k is only CA$50.7k

I mean, alternative means of mass transit would be the most effective policy. But we can’t even get a rail line between Houston and Dallas, despite the airspace maxing out and there existing an enormous profitable and general economic benefit to its construction.

Taxes keep the marginal participant out of the market. But the real goal should be to move people and cargo at maximal efficiency, not just to hobble lower income travelers with a consumption tax.

reignite concerns

Either you found another journal of record ten years ago or you kept eating that slop until yesterday. Idk what reignited concerns are supposed to get us. Be concerned. Don’t be concerned. He’s still going to gut the paper and fill it in with gooey reactionary fluff.

If the pricing was similar and one airline had a lower carbon print

Price and emissions tend to track one another, as the price of fuel is heavily baked into the cost of the seat. And everyone flies the same aircraft models. It’s not like there’s a “Low Emissions Boeing” or “EV Airbus” you can select.

The two options always seem to be:

• Option 1: Do the thing that expands the hyper-surveillance police state.

• Option 2: Do nothing and wait for the problem to get worse, until you’re compelling to accept Option 1.

https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-model_3-2026/

2026 Tesla Model 3

Starts at: $36,990

I don’t trust his word because Republican politicians have zero credibility.

They’re highly credible on their professed loyalty and support for Israel.

it doesn’t mean the claim that China used it to push propaganda is false

TikTok is not a Chinese company, it is not run by Chinese apparatchiks, and it isn’t integrated into the Chinese state media system. It is a Singapore based company invested into by a conglomeration of international investors.

my default belief is to assume that they were using it for this purpose

Why would you assume the Chinese government is calling the shots and not any of the governments of other TikTok investors?

It isn’t as though TikTok lacked Israeli-favorable propaganda. The Israeli media simply didn’t trend as well as Palestinian Rights media. How does this lead you to conclude China is to blame? Wouldn’t a Palestine-symathetic state be a more likely culprit? Qatar, for instance?

If I have a choice between two flights A and B, based exclusively on CO₂ emissions, the only thing my selection changes is my body weight/luggage added to the flight. But the emissions calculation (as I understand it) is the total anticipated CO₂ of the flight divided by the number of seats. And the bulk of those emissions come from lifting the plane itself, not the individual passengers.

The plane still flies whether or not I’m on it, though. So my choice of flight does not really impact emitted carbon.

I guess heavy luggage might impact emissions marginally. But do you really believe the flight is staying on the tarmac because you didn’t book a seat?

Mitsotakis is not Cypriot.

He’s the President of the government that claims the Greek-Nationalist occupied end of the island.

Greece pinned its hopes to normalization with “longtime NATO ally” and regional bully to a europeanization of the relationship

How do you Europeanize your relationship when you refuse to see your neighbor as European?

they’re >50k and made in China lol

The Model 3 is $38k and made in Freemont, CA.

This rule exists to exclude BYD, XPeng, and the constellation of other Chinese EV companies, whose enormous productive capacity are swamping the East Asian auto industry with cheap EV compacts and small trucks.

Incidentally, BYD had historically operated an electric bus factory in Newmarket, Ontario. But operations ceased thanks to cut backs in the Toronto Transit Commission. They may try to repurpose the plant to begin manufacturing consumer-ready vehicles, but its still up in the air with respect to US/Canada trade relations and Canada’s own shaking economic situation.

Petro-State gonna Petro

I put zero stock in the word of a Republican senator

He was the primary advocate and original co-sponsor for the bill that Joe Biden eventually signed. If you’re not taking his word at why he authored the legislation, advanced it through his own committee, and pushed it onto the President’s desk, who else are you going to listen to?