An Army colonel is in trouble for complaining that a $500k gas station cost $43 million to build

[smut_clyde]

@Medievalist

You could clearly build a cheap, totally unsafe thin tank that will hold ridiculous amounts of nat gas

In the interests of scrupulous fairness, I should admit that the large inflatable rooftop tanks were for coal gas (i.e. hydrogen + carbon monoxide) rather than nat. gas, so they were popular in the UK where household coal-gas supply was already a thing. And coal gas does not respond well to compression – the hydrogen leaks out, the CO breaks down.

[Thebarton_Gamer]

Perfect high-traffic stop for a gas station. I’m guessing the two $20 million Starbucks franchises on opposite corners are next on the building list?

[jerwin]

Hah. I’m pretty sure it’s a a bombing target, A little bit north of the crossroads are a series of runways-- but they’re fake as well.

[Shash]

@redesigned

You can find it happening with MANY governments, but we are the undisputed world champions at this sort of thing! Of course if we aren’t careful China is going to surpass us with their building of entire empty cities.

Trust me, you ain’t… It’s mostly a lack of opportunity for others - the US just has more money to be inefficient with, but if we normalise the baseline, well, I guess the US would still be pretty bad, but there’s lots of competition.

@redesigned

Also, really it doesn’t matter where it happens or how much it happens, it is unacceptable no matter what.

Agreed!

@ethicalcannibal

The feds are really big on not disclosing anything to the media right now. I can’t speak about before the last couple years, but you can be in serious trouble in DoD financial circles for disposing so much as a post it note.

Oh, we’re learning too… Our great lawmakers came up with this abortion of a provision for whistleblowing: basically, a whistleblower can only blow the whistle on publicly available information obtained through the RTI act (RTI is our equivalent of FOIA) to be eligible for whistleblower protection… That is, you can only “whistleblow” on what everyone already knows. How’s that for Orwellian?

@redesigned

In Germany after the war they converted a lot of their trucks, cars, and tractors to run off of wood gassification and straw gassification.

My granddad had one old car converted to run on cooking gas - we had it for a surprisingly long time (well, surprising if you never knew him that is)…

But I wonder what the implications of using a wood burner to generate electricity and charge an EV are…

[redesigned]

@Shash

Trust me, you ain’t… It’s mostly a lack of opportunity for others - the US just has more money to be inefficient with, but if we normalise the baseline, well, I guess the US would still be pretty bad, but there’s lots of competition.

I get your point. I’d also add that, unfortunately, we’ve also been an “enabler” for other shit governments. The USA has propped up some pretty shitty regimes.

@Shash

But I wonder what the implications of using a wood burner to generate electricity and charge an EV are…

You can buy wood gassification generators in Europe, or retrofit one. They have plans online. If you are wanting a setup that is off the grid and would be easy to source material for if the shit ever hit the fan that is pretty much the ideal combo. Most burnable material can loaded into a wood gassifier, straw, peat, but also plastics, styrofoam, etc. but I’d only recommend the latter in an emergency as that isn’t the most ecological choice.

[Michael_R_Smith]

A methane dirigible? I don’t think that idea will fly.

[LDoBe]

Well. It’ll fly. But it’ll be hard to tell where and in how many pieces.

[Shash]

@redesigned

as that isn’t the most ecological choice.

Not to mention, you don’t want to be breathing dioxins and furans in your attempt to go off grid…

[Medievalist]

@Shash

I wonder what the implications of using a wood burner to generate electricity and charge an EV are…

Carbon-neutral, so in that one dimension it’s better than releasing geologically sequestered carbon into the atmosphere by digging up stuff from the carboniferous age. All the carbon in wood comes from the atmosphere, none from the soil.

But humanity has already had several bad experiences with large-scale deforestation, and a poorly designed wood burner emits a lot of health-damaging particulates, so it’s a multi-faceted problem that has no generically correct answer. Your solution will depend on your specific circumstances… I have a woodlot and an EV already, and no access to public transport, so my circumstances are very different from a city dweller’s, for example.