Overzeetop

Russia is one of the largest exporter of gasoline.

At the risk of linking an un-cited web page, they look to be a distant 12th in gasoline.
https://www.indexmundi.com/energy/?product=gasoline&graph=exports&display=rank
The source is supposedly https://www.eia.gov/ but I can’t find the original data there in any usable format.

Russia comes in a distant second for general refined petroleum (not just gasoline) according to https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/refined-petroleum-products-exports/country-comparison/

Based on videos from one of the major lava-themed entertainment venues who has been posting updates for two months, the “barriers” for Grindavik were barely started, with work only beginning some time after January 4th or 5th. The primary focus of the public work was in building the barriers to protect the regional power plant to the east of the fissures (and hot springs resort area just east and north the power plant). IIRC, those barriers took a month to construct.

The subsurface dam/inclusion runs pretty much directly under Grindavik, so if an active eruption opens along the southern edge of the magma inclusion there will be no way to prevent damage to those houses adjacent.

Disc: I’m neither a seismologist nor a volcanologist, but I’ve seen Journey to the Center of the Earth. Oh, and I was in Grindavik in October.

maybe get a few of those potatoes up front

It’s good to see such unbridled optimism in these dark times.

The way I read it was a ceasefire in return for some of the hostages. Nobody floats their final offer with the first contact.

• Some of the hostages for humanitarian lanes
• Most of the hostages for a 7 day ceasefire with monitored evacuations
• All of the hostages for a 14 day ceasefire
• All of the hostages and known leaders of HAMAS for an indefinite ceasefire, contingent on zero future incursions or military operations (you have to offer at least one impossible option past what you want)

Well, lucky for him he didn’t even entertain the ceasefire to see if he could have gotten them all back.

Wait until I tell you that the US is indebted to Japan for that same amount ($1.1T) and to China for nearly that amount ($0.9T). Sure it’s a bigger portion of the available funds in the developing world, but on the scale of superpowers, it’s not so much.

https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

Marketing: We need to defend this - what’s something people are really excited about?

Engineer: Stainless steel; you can’t make a good stainless without nickel

Salesman: Oooh - I know! How about nickels? Everybody loves nickels and their worth 5 cents each!

Engineer:

Marketing:

Intern: You know, they use nickel in battery packs for electric cars

Marketing: Oh, right - everybody likes electric cars. Green and vroom-vroom, I love it!

Engineer: You know that electric cars don’t go vroom-vroom, right?

Marketing: I’m going with electric cars, it’s a feel-good use people will get behind.

Yes. Yes, they are.

Maybe stupid is the wrong word? Willfully, negligently, and/or belligerently ignorant might be more accurate, I guess. These people get pretty angry when told they can’t build on “their land” because it s uninsurable and it is within the (statistical) flood plane. These are the same people you see crying on TV and angry at the government for not paying to rebuild their house, or for letting them build there at all, after a flood. They conveniently forget how they were told that it would flood and they intentionally ignored the warnings. I don’t know; in my book that’s pretty stupid.

“the country’s flood zones — areas that are deliberately flooded to absorb excess water — were built. But such areas are no longer as sparsely populated as they once were. Local governments have allowed towns in designated flood zones to grow, despite regulations meant to control the number of residents living there.”

"“Is it the government’s fault or is it the people’s fault for moving back to these places?” said Wang Weiluo, an engineer and expert on China’s water system who is based in Germany. “It’s the government’s. All those people were given approvals to build their homes there. They’re the government’s rules and they didn’t enforce them.”

Yeah, so, I happen to work in this field (or adjacent to it) in the US. At least here, everybody knows where the flood zones are - published maps, disclosures when you buy property, disclosures/regulations when you build. And you know what? The dumb motherfuckers I work for will do everything they can to skirt the regulations because they haven’t seen in flood in a long time, and the government is just over-regulating. And in the rural counties where there is little to no regulation enforcement, they just build there without permits - or even with permits that have been issued without due diligence on the part of the building official.

I have no doubt that there are a bunch of stupid fucking hicks in China, and stupid fucking hick government officials, and greedy fucking land sellers and builders who have the same attitude. I feel bad for the people who got flooded out and lost everything, because that’s a terrible fate - especially if you didn’t realize what you bought. But this is the result of human stupidity.

Life is hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.