Rock Doc Dom

Every February, 70% of the commercial honey bees in the United States, roughly two million colonies, are loaded onto lorries and driven to California. They are going to pollinate the almonds. 80% of the world's almonds come from one valley in California. Over 1.3 million acres of nothing but almond trees, blooming for three weeks in monoculture, requiring more pollinators than the state can produce on its own. So the bees are trucked in from every corner of the country. Florida. New York. Montana. The bees are fed sugar water for the journey because their own honey has been removed to lighten the load. They arrive in the Central Valley to a landscape that is, for three weeks, pink and white blossom, and for the other forty-nine weeks of the year, dead. Nothing to eat. No forage. No diversity. Just almond trees and bare dirt, sprayed regularly with fungicides and insecticides that were deemed bee-safe in adult bees but turn out to be lethal to larvae when combined. In February 2025, commercial beekeepers reported the worst die-off on record. Around 60% of commercial honey bee colonies in the United States dead in a single pollination season. Financial losses estimated well over $139 million. Some beekeepers lost 90 to 100% of their colonies. The almonds are marketed as plant-based. Clean. Ethical. The preferred alternative. The preferred alternative requires the single largest managed pollination event in human history and it is quietly killing the pollinators faster than they can be replaced. Every glass of almond milk is, statistically, a small contribution to the largest pollinator die-off on record. This is not in the advertising.

@2020PHOTOGRAPHY @Iamivy05 It is the same person that posted both.

Ya’ll I went on a date last night & this man spent $600 omg. Dinner was $300, he picked the place btw(& told me get w/e I want) so please spare me lol. & he spent another $320 because my car got towed 😭🤣 lol I parked where he told me & we still don’t really know why it got towed but he was very calm, figured everything out & took me to get it & didn’t hesitate to swipe that card & I love that for me. Mind you this was a first date cont.

Anatomy of a medium sour crude and why diesel is a problem Since US is long crude, that would solve the problem Asia has right, with the Strait of Hormuz shut? Not that simple. Let me demonstrate using 4 different crude assays (in reality there are like 700+ crudes in the world, so I am doing a huge simplification here). Assume Arab Medium represents the medium sour crude that Asian refineries are designed for. Murban is considered a light sour crude that some of the refineries in Asia can also take as base load. The more suitable replacement for Arab Medium would be Mars from USGC, based on the yield profile. But that is the same type of crude that USGC refineries are designed for, so that's not the excess crude length in the market. WTI Midland is the crude that USGC has plenty to export, but based on yields, it is a better replacement for Murban crude. However guess which crude has more jet and gasoil yields? Yep, it's that Murban crude. So with more WTI coming into the refining kit in Asia, we are going to lose middle distillates at the expense of more naphtha. And if we are looking to somehow magically replace Arab Medium with WTI (which is not a 1-to-1 replacement due to hydraulics constraints), then the problem worsens because that high fuel oil yield you see in the simple yields for medium sour crudes will get converted into more gasoil via secondary units. More distillate volume lost. Sounds very technical, and it is. Which crude is going to save diesel? #oott

BREAKING: Trump’s birthright citizenship scheme implodes after lawyer’s JAW-DROPPING courtroom blunder about Native Americans. Donald Trump sent his top lawyer to the Supreme Court to argue that birthright citizenship should be stripped from hundreds of thousands of American-born babies. It went so badly that his own solicitor general nearly argued Native Americans aren't citizens either — and had to be rescued by a Trump-appointed justice. In one of the most jaw-dropping exchanges of Wednesday's already disastrous hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch — appointed by Trump himself — pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on the logical consequences of the administration's own legal theory. The exchange was as stunning as it was revealing. Gorsuch asked a simple question: under the administration's proposed test for birthright citizenship, are Native Americans born today automatically citizens? Sauer's answer was a slow-motion legal train wreck. First, he said yes — obviously. Then Gorsuch pushed him to set aside the statutes granting Native Americans citizenship and answer based purely on the administration's own constitutional theory. Sauer's answer changed: "No." Under the 1868 congressional debates, he explained, children of tribal Indians were not considered birthright citizens. The courtroom went quiet. Gorsuch pressed harder. But under your test — the domicile test you want this court to adopt today — are tribal Native Americans born on U.S. soil birthright citizens? Sauer fumbled. "I think so... I have to think that through, but that's my reaction." "I'll take the yes," Gorsuch replied — essentially throwing the solicitor general a life preserver before he could drown any further. Let's be absolutely clear about what just happened. The Trump administration walked into the highest court in the land with a legal theory so sweeping, so poorly thought through, that when a justice applied it logically, the government's own lawyer couldn't guarantee that Native Americans — people whose nations existed on this continent thousands of years before the United States did — would qualify as birthright citizens. This is the constitutional chaos that Trump's executive order invites. Once you start unraveling the 14th Amendment's guarantee that all persons born on American soil are citizens, there is no clean stopping point. The administration's own lawyer proved that in real time, in front of the entire nation, while Trump was still in the building — before he turned tail and fled. The 14th Amendment was written to be clear precisely because America had already lived through the horror of deciding that some people born here weren't really citizens. The Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship for 157 years. And Trump's lawyer just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly why those 157 years of precedent exist. Please like and share this post if you believe the Constitution means what it says — for everyone born on American soil.

@cmenguy @TechLayoffLover Drives down cost of labor, replacing established engineers with younger/cheaper talent, people are less likely to ask for more money also.

@TechLayoffLover I don't get it. They have these endless cycles of layoffs, yet like clockwork they keep reaching out every quarter or so to discuss a role. Layoffs would make sense if accompanied by hiring freeze, but it sends a very weird signal to do layoffs + aggressive hiring together.

Meta just confirmed a 20 percent company wide headcount cut but insiders are screaming the real story is way uglier than the efficiency memo. Direct word from multiple sources deep in the org. The announced 20 percent is only the near-term floor. A senior manager told me it's the starter number. Top leadership is already modeling two to three times that long term. They dug into developer activity logs after rolling out heavy AI tools across engineering. What they found floored them. Hours worked have plummeted for a huge chunk of the org. Many seniors now clocking under 10 hours of real productive time per week because the tools are handling so much grunt work so fast. One staff engineer said leadership pulled dashboards showing commit rates holding steady or climbing while logged hours tanked. Same output. Way less human sweat. The math was brutal. If AI is letting one person do the work of three with half the time input why pay for three. They have been quietly running knowledge extraction sprints for months. Senior engineers screens recorded 24 7. Every prompt logged. Debugging flows captured in brutal detail. Entire decision trees filmed under the banner of process documentation for continuity. One engineer described being forced to whiteboard his whole system design playbook. Trade offs. Failure modes. Scaling hacks. All while cameras rolled. They called it knowledge transfer to support the transition. The transition is agents and remaining skeleton crew armed with those exact recordings prompt libraries and heavy Claude+Gemini access. Replacements are already shipping changes 40 percent faster using the precise workflows they ripped from the outgoing engineers. They are not slashing for cost alone. They are turning 15 plus years of Meta engineering DNA into structured training data. Every document your process request is not teamwork. It is feeding the beast that replaces you. The strategic AI pivot line they are feeding the press is cover. They are replacing the entire engineering organism with agents trained on their own seniors captured minds. CTO level playbook is already locked. Extract. Document. Automate. Repeat at two to three times scale. If you are still at Meta and someone pings you to please record a quick walkthrough of your workflow for the team run. Do not document. Do not hand over the keys. The knowledge extraction is complete. If you are inside watching more engineers get gutted because AI made their 40 hour week look like 10 hours of value, DMs are wide open.

@HayekAndKeynes @FreightAlley Hopefully this cracks the regulatory seal on UK and EU oil and gas development too. They should be looking at reopening Groningen and other North Sea assets to explore.

The Middle East is on the verge of blowing itself to pieces and while it will be expensive for households, the US will become the most dominant energy player on the planet and potentially a manufacturing powerhouse (especially with the revival of the EPCA which prevents the export of US oil).

@TVietor08 @WAR527 @citrinowicz They didn't have any technical specialists or nuclear engineers with them I bet.

@Comefindme88X @hispanicnomad There are only 5 countries with ICBM capability to reach South America also.

If there's one thing that will help you in the 21st century... It's flexibility The world changes faster than any plan you can make: ❌ Dubai got attacked by drones ❌ Paraguay started tracking crypto out of the blue ❌ Portugal killed its NHR program The guys who had ALL their eggs in one basket got wrecked in all cases But if you're truly flexible? You'll barely notice This is why flag theory isn't about finding the "perfect country" You're just playing the system and building a life that can adapt when the rules change And they ALWAYS change

@TVietor08 @citrinowicz IDK, seems to me those negotiations were just for show. People were itching for a war with Iran.

The media has not adequately reported on the fact that Witkoff and Kushner just didn't understand that Iran had offered them a deal that was stronger than the JCPOA. Talk to @citrinowicz about the fact that this war could have been avoided.

Man was not meant to monitor this many situations.

@ibnpalabras @apexpredator_36 @CRUDEOIL231 The US has abandoned Kurds in Syria and Iraq multiple times. I doubt their interests align enough to be potentially forsaken yet again.

Honest question here. I’m not doubting Israel’s surgical precision or the insane firepower of the US military. But do you seriously believe they can just wipe out every single threat and keep Hormuz wide open against a country that’s basically one giant natural fortress? Iran’s southern coastline is over 2,000km long, and most of it is nothing but rugged mountains dropping straight into the sea. You really think they can spot and take out every single threat across that whole stretch? I guess everyone’s already forgotten about the USS Stark getting hit in ’87 or the USS Samuel B. Roberts getting blown up by a mine in ’88. Look at the South Korean military—over 500k active troops, and their only job for decades has been watching and hitting North Korea. Even they can’t fully monitor the southern coast of Hwanghae Province, and that’s a tiny joke compared to southern Iran. Get real. Iran has been prepping for this exact moment since the Tanker War in the 80s. How many weapons do you think they have aimed at Hormuz right now? Can you really flush out every single one hidden in those hellish mountains? We already learned this lesson the hard way in Afghanistan. Most of the ppl who shorted oil bc of that blind "nothing’s gonna happen" optimism lost their jobs this week. It’s wild how many people still haven't learned a damn thing. #oott #iran

@fmercaldo @jcreidtx This doesn't change how concentrated the meat packing industry is though.