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Stephen Fleming
109.2K posts
Stephen Fleming
@StephenFleming
Obsolete engineer & recovering venture capitalist. 🌵 RT ≠ endorsement.
Tucson, AZ & Atlanta, GA Katılım Aralık 2006
8K Takip Edilen12.5K Takipçiler
Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Dismantling the world's reliable power structure of coal, oil, and gas - without a planet-wide substitute - could be the greatest and costliest error of judgment in history.
Despite decades of installing wind turbines and solar panels - at enormous cost - intermittent renewables remain unable to replicate the dense, reliable energy of hydrocarbons without fossil-fuel backup. Replacing the world grid for intermittent power carries a nominal price tag of $178 trillion 'so far'; McKinsey Global (2022) estimates the total transition by 2050 at $275 trillion.
No one appears to have thought through the colossal pitfalls that lie a decade or two ahead. This building spree already suggests waves of environmental degradation, as picturesque landscapes, coastal vistas, and farmland are hijacked for wind and solar 'farms'. The resulting shockwave could send modern nations into an irreversible economic slide as early as 2030, while blocking all modernisation efforts across the Global South.
It is a stark reversal of history. These universally successful energy sources are credited with the emergence of all modernity - the spark that exploded in the Industrial Revolution. Humankind first used coal in China around 3490 BC and later by the Aztecs. The Greeks and Romans used it for metal forging, and Marco Polo famously documented the use of 'black stones' for fuel in 13th-century China.
Crucially, coal was the primary driver of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, providing the intense heat needed to generate steam and power factories, trains, and ships during the icy depths of the Little Ice Age - a desperate era of cold and starvation.
Today, there are still vast known and untapped reserves of coal, oil and gas. Proven reserves alone are staggering:
Coal: 1.06 trillion tonnes (approx. 132 years remaining).
Gas: 7,299 trillion cubic feet (approx. 143 years remaining).
Oil: 1.65 trillion barrels (approx. 53 years remaining).
Yet the actual volume could be two or three times as much, lasting another three centuries. This abundance challenges the very nomenclature of 'fossil fuels', pointing instead to a profoundly abiotic, self-sustaining origin.
Look to the cosmos: hydrocarbons are a fundamental building block of the universe, detected on rocky planets, icy moons, gas giants, and primitive comets. Saturn’s moon Titan is the reigning champion, with a thick nitrogen-methane atmosphere that rains liquid methane and ethane into massive surface seas like Ligeia Mare. Titan holds hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.
Closer to home, NASA’s Curiosity Rover has detected ancient organic molecules, including long-chain hydrocarbons like propane and benzene, preserved in Martian mudstones inside Gale Crater. Meanwhile, the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are rich in methane, which breaks down under intense pressure to form complex chains like ethane and acetylene. Even primitive bodies - like Comet Halley and the asteroid Ryugu - are heavily laden with complex carbon-bearing molecules.
If the raw chemistry of hydrocarbons occurs abundantly across the frozen depths of the solar system, we must question the sacrifices demanded for net-zero.
Could humankind survive such a bureaucratic blind alley?
Bega, New South Wales 🇦🇺 English
Stephen Fleming retweetledi
The New York Times’ 1619 Project wasn’t some innocent history lesson ... it was a straight-up ideological assault on America, cooked up by Nikole Hannah-Jones to brainwash an entire generation into hating their own country. They shoved 1619 down our throats as the “true founding,” lied that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, and painted the United States as nothing more than a white supremacist slave empire built on evil capitalism.
Pure, poisonous garbage.
Now the adults in the room ... real historians like Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Allen Guelzo, Peter Wood and others ... have taken a meat cleaver to the entire rotting corpse. They didn’t nibble around the edges. They eviscerated every major lie, exposed the fake scholarship, and left this racial resentment scam bleeding out on the floor.
And what did the Times do when they got caught? After Jake Silverstein sneered “no corrections are warranted,” they quietly started deleting and watering down their boldest lies like the gutless frauds they are.
This wasn’t a debunking. This was a total slaughter. The 1619 Project has been completely gutted, humiliated, and left with nothing but a smoking crater where its “scholarship” used to be.
They tried to murder America’s founding story. Historians just murdered theirs instead.
(article below)
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
“Jefferson was right about everything”
Margot Cleveland@ProfMJCleveland
HOLY CRAP! Judge just dismissed criminal case against Garcia
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
@BruceHoult @StephenFleming Chinese panels are ceap. You might ask yourself why.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Trans people are not a historically oppressed group because they are not a group and they have never been oppressed. There is no history of discriminatory state action against them. There are no rights they don't have. Their only grievance is the existence of sex segregated facilities designed for the safety and privacy of women. What the transgender movement calls "rights" are imperious demands to allow anyone who claims to be something they are not to violate sex-based boundaries and coerce others to affirm them as they thing they are not, inherently an assault on the civil rights and liberties of others that masquerades as a civil right belonging to themselves and as a psychic necessity they require for their survival, which in turn serves as a pretext for threatening suicide and committing violence in pursuit of that alleged imperative to survival.
They are a psychiatric diagnosis that was inflated into an astroturfed identity category in the last thirty years by a small cabal of wealthy male sex fetishists who wanted to cross-dress full time and conspired to brainwash a subpopulation of autistic and gender nonconforming children into medically harming themselves with drugs that stopped their maturation, creating an army of hostages that could be used to blackmail the state into coercing the whole world into granting their imperious demands. Along the way, this cabal corrupted medicine and science and law, turning each of these institutions into a font of misinformation in the service of trans activists goals. Literally nothing that issues from these discourses is true, from denials that men have athletic advantages over women to claims that blocking the puberty of children has ever had an evidence base.
Treating any of this like it is real, like it is a civil rights movement, inexorably will result in the infliction of a cascade of absurdities and cruelties on actual vulnerable populations -- woman and children -- above all those confused children who are being brainwashed from the earliest age the falsehood that any of them can change sex.
Dilan Esper@dilanesper
@itsTAK3AW4Y no i see gay and trans people as historically oppressed groups who need protection and legal rights and whose claims are fairly within the liberal tradition and who have a lasting place in US life. That's part of why I see lefty crap like "Q" to be so substantively harmful.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
In the past, low-agency people were not simply pointed toward long-term good with gentle cultural suggestions. Western Civilization constructed an extremely complex social and legal framework to impose social order by force.
Stigma of bastardy, marriage laws, Comstock laws, regulation of abortion, discrimination of women in the workplace, and even physical violence all served to incentivize monogamy, assure paternity, and bring social order to a population full of short-term thinkers.
But after WWII, we decided that personal choice was more important than the social order and dismantled the social/legal framework that held everything together.
So instead of short-term thinkers being herded into marriage with an accidental pregnancy, we have 1 million abortions per year, falling marriage and a cratering birth rate.
These people are not going to choose the noble path on their own. The idol of personal choice must be torn down and the civilizational structures must be restored.
Tim Carney@TPCarney
People ask why I say the Baby Bust is mostly *cultural.* The dynamic below points the way. Humans in nature are short-term thinkers. It's the job of a *culture* to point us to the long term. Our culture is failing to do that. With only short-term thinking, few people will choose marriage and parenthood.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
One thing I’ve never understood about streaming is that it’s built on “watch hours” yet special features - a thing people love to spend hours watching - haven’t carried over
Fandom Pulse@fandompulse
Peter Jackson laments the death of physical media: “You can get Blu-rays and DVDs, but they’re almost a niche product for aficionados now,” Jackson said. “Since they only sell small numbers, no studio wants to put extended features on them or to extend the cuts. We did hours and hours of behind-the-scenes material for The Lord of the Rings DVDs, and so many people have thanked me for doing them. People would watch that stuff over and over again because it inspired them to make films. That’s all gone now, and I think it’s a real shame.” Do you still get real books and DVDs?
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Let's talk about Cuba. Take away the Soviet checks, the Venezuelan oil, the Chinese rescue boats and the Iranian friends. What is actually left?
An island with nothing to sell and nobody left to pay the bill. No oil worth seizing. No industry worth taking. No strategic mineral buried under the sugarcane.
By every material measure that a normal country is judged on, Cuba leads nowhere. It is a sixty year money sink that bled every patron foolish enough to adopt it, and then outlived them.
So you might be asking, why has Trump set his sights on it? Why is Marco Rubio counting the minutes like a man watching the last grains run out of an hourglass he flipped over himself?
Why are they even bothering?
Not for what's under the ground, for sure. There's nothing under the ground. They're going after what's above it.
Because Cuba was never a country to the people who ran it. It was a billboard. The single surviving advertisement that filthy communism could plant itself ninety miles from the most powerful nation on earth and refuse to die.
That was the whole product. Not sugar. Not rum. Not nickel. The export *was* the communism.
Cuba sold the world a story that communism could outlast America, and for sixty years it kept that story on life support so every campus radical and every jungle guerrilla and every tin pot revolutionary had a poster to point at, while the island was crumbling under the weight of the Castro regime.
That propaganda abomination is about to die and I, for one, couldn't be happier about it.
You cannot sell the dream of the worker's paradise while the workers cook on firewood in the street and the hospitals run on flashlights.
What is collapsing on Cuba, besides the buildings and the barely functioning cars, is the last functioning piece of evidence that the filthiest idea of the last century ever worked anywhere.
Cuba's only real export was communism, and it's about to be permanently discontinued.
And the world will be lighter for it.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Join UCF’s Associate Provost for Space Commercialization and Strategy, Greg Autry, Ph.D., on Tuesday, May 26 at 6 p.m. to learn more about the Online Space MBA. Register today to learn more: bit.ly/4dRYyvJ
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
This is playing out again in socialist upstate New York. Bureaucrats are clearcutting the forests and poisoning farmlands in order to check off square miles and dollars spent on solar installations nobody wants and that the citizens actively reject. So the government told them to shut up and cut them out of the process - and the clearcutting of the Adirondaks continues apace.
Handre@Handre
The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output. This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest. Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose. You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes. Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning. Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Clemson and Georgia are located 59 miles from each other. Them potentially playing in Dallas is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard of in college athletics, and that’s saying a lot.
Chris Low@Clowfb
Most likely site for Clemson-FSU game in 2028 is Orlando or Nashville. Neutral site possibilities for Clemson-Georgia in 2029 and 2030 include Atlanta, Charlotte and Dallas.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
The left never hated nuclear energy because of the environment. They hate it because cheap, abundant energy strengthens industrial capitalism, national independence, and the middle class.
If climate change were truly their priority, they would promote nuclear, not shut it down.
Michael A. Arouet@MichaelAArouet
This one is always funny. Do you enjoy your Green Economic Wonder and your air quality?
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@JoshPhillipsPhD This was a great book. I need to re-read it.
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“In 1978 after separating from his wife & losing his job as a teacher, Heat-Moon took an extended road trip around the USA sticking to only the "Blue Highways"” (blue highways on a map are the old Roads; not the interstate)
*I read this in grad school during my overnight shifts working at a homeless shelter
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@SCShipyards Achilles’ Choice. goodreads.com/book/show/8505…
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That's unironically awesome.
I've long been of the opinion that there should be a competitive sports event with the only rule being, "As long as the competitor can compete and make it to the scoring stand, whatever s/he wants to do is fair game."
Let's see what humies can do.
Polymarket@Polymarket
JUST IN: The Enhanced Games are set to debut this weekend in Las Vegas, with athletes allowed to use steroids, testosterone, HGH, & other banned substances.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
"My reaction to reading this book is pretty simple. If I’d read it when I was 13 years old, I would have thought it’s one of the greatest books ever written. From the perspective of being 60 years on down the road from that point, I still thoroughly enjoyed it and think it’s an excellent yarn."—James Reasoner
jamesreasoner.blogspot.com
Buy it now: passage.press/products/ath-1
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
~20% of Muslims in the West are radical
Their beliefs in 🇬🇧🇺🇸🇫🇷🇩🇰🇦🇹🇩🇪🇪🇺:
🇬🇧UK
63%: burning the Quran should be a crime
57%: compulsory halal in schools
52%: illegal to show a picture of Muhammad
39%: Hamas didn't rape & murder on Oct 7
32%: sharia law
32%: men & women should not be together in public
27%: outlaw homosexuality
27%: dogs should be banned from public spaces
25%: support Hamas
21%: support Jihad
17%: support Hezbollah
15%: support Al Qaeda
14%: Support the Taliban
9%: support ISIS
🇫🇷 France
46%: Sharia should be applied in France
44%: Islam rules are more important than French law
38%; approve some Islamist positions
24%: support the Muslim brotherhood
20%: Muslims can't leave Islam
15%: full Sharia in all countries
8%: approve of ALL Islamist positions
🇩🇰 Denmark
11%: the Quran should determine ALL legislation in 🇩🇰
7%: drawing the Prophet Muhammad deserves death
🇦🇹 Austria
35%: the man should make all decisions
🇺🇸US
80%: concerned about Muslim extremism
31%: only 1 way to interpret Islam
17%: great deal of support for extremism
🇩🇪Germany
45%: Western morality is depraved
43%: only Islam can solve our problems
40%: open or manifest Islamist
28%: Jews can't be trusted
25%: Quran rules more important than 🇩🇪 law
24%: an Islamic theocracy is the best form of government
10%: Islamic rules should shape society more
10%: manifest islamist
8%: prefer a Muslim council to rule 🇩🇪 (vs democracy)
🇪🇺6 EU countries
70%: only 1 true interpretation of Islam
65%: religious rules more important than secular ones
55%: don't want homosexual friends
53%: the West is out to destroy Islam
43%: Jews can't be trusted
And this is in the West, where they're selected for being more open to Western thought
So no, radical Muslims are not 1% of Islam
That doesn't mean most Muslims are radical!
20-30% are quite moderate
10-50% are conservative but tolerant
But trying to hide the radical minority abets it and makes the problem fester. It should be exposed and fought, not hidden, for the benefit of the majority of Muslims, who are not radical
On the data: some surveys are more reliable than others. None should be trusted standalone. But the picture that emerges across all surveys is pretty consistent.
All the sources, more data, and details here
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/what-do-musl…
Maliq@MasterMaliq
Radical Muslims are less than 1% of 2 BILLION Muslims. Yet you people judge the entire religion by the actions of a tiny minority? Be honest you just hate Muslims. Period.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
We should’ve taken Cuba and the Yucatán in the early 19th century but it’s not too late.
Franco-Saxon@FRANC0_SAX0N
The only ways in or out of the Gulf are the Straits of Florida and Yucatan Channel, both influenced by Cuba. All that energy and trade must pass right by them. Since we foolishly didn't finish the Cross Florida Barge Canal, this is our geographic reality. Cuba must be friendly.
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Thomas Sowell on engineers vs intellectuals:
“The engineer is judged by the end product. If he builds a building that collapses, it doesn’t matter how brilliant his idea was—he’s ruined.”
“Conversely, if an intellectual has an idea for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all.”
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Stephen Fleming retweetledi
Every aspect of life beyond Earth is mediated through soft goods: spacesuits, inflatables, spacecraft components, thermal insulation, radiation shielding, and parachutes—all textiles, all Anatar.
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