Mastodawn

I’d rather live next to wind turbines and solar panels.

https://apnews.com/article/refinery-explosion-texas-coast-60ecf6d9a70a2f1d5494fb8e38a84c4a

Oil refinery explosion near Texas coast forces residents to shelter in place

Officials say a large explosion at an oil refinery near the Texas coast has shot plumes of smoke into the air and forced nearby residents to shelter in place. Mayor Charlotte M. Moses says no one was injured in the explosion at the Valero refinery in Port Arthur. The explosion comes amid a spike in gas prices driven by uncertainty over the global oil supply because of the Iran war. Valero's website says the refinery has about 770 employees and can process about 435,000 barrels of oil per day. The plant refines heavy sour crude oil into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

AP News

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

SnoopJ 3h ago

self portrait

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

Brent Toderian 6h ago

Safe, protected bike-lanes are:

Better for business

Better for emissions

Better for air quality

Better for public health

Better for noise

Better for space

Better for equity

Better for affordability

Better for public cost

Better for safety for EVERYONE

Better for oil independence

Better.

Graphic by our URBAN TRUTH COLLECTIVE. Check out our website: https://www.urbantruthcollective.com/content

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

Kit Bashir 6h ago

A rant about electric bicycles:

* For e-bikes to be viable car replacements they need cargo-carrying and hill-climb capacity. The practicality test for an e-bike is to carry four bags of grocieries, or a child.

* The 250W and 20km/h limit for unlicensed bicycles is *far* too low. Human cyclists comfortably exceed this in both power and speed leading to e-bikes holding up traffic. When. I ride the bikeways, human-powered traffic cruises at around 35 km/h.

* The "you must pedal or the motor stops" requirement is some Calvinist bullshit.

* The perl-clutching "but the children" scare in the news about "unlicensed motorbikes" HAS to be some kind of car-industry astroturfing. From what I can see on the bikeways, commuter e-bikes and scooters are HOT items and anyone with a head can see a dent in vehicle sales coming. Users LOVE this emerging mobility sector.

* I work in an industrial area with zero public transport service. I observe large numbers of workers riding scooters in the direction of the nearest train station.

* If governments *really* want to stick to the 250w 25km/h bullshit for "bicycles" then we need URGENT legislation to create a vehicle class for say 1000W 45km/h vehicles. The Australia post electric delivery tricycles are a worked example of the practicality of this class; I don't hear *anyone* having a meltdown about "dangerous monster tricycles on our footpaths".

#MicroMobility #ebikes #solarpunk

ETA: absurd panic-fueled legislation from the fossil-fuel captured Literal Nazi Party: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-24/queensland-ebike-escooter-ban-children-licence-reforms/106487910

E-bike and e-scooter riders to require a licence in Qld under proposed laws

A raft of new rules around the use of e-mobility devices will be ushered in after the Queensland government accepted the recommendations from a parliamentary inquiry.

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

Natasha

🇪🇺9h ago

Please read ALL directions before assembling your cat.

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

mcc 4h ago

So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

Bowie 7h ago

Ask ghosts.

Nicolas Saunier 3h ago

Tim Bray 11h ago

Got maximal hair-on-fire financial doomerism about the #GenAI bubble if ya want it: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/

Genuinely scary.

[But: Too long, I stopped reading after I got past the data-centers-and-GPUs narrative and into the software engineering stuff, which was not particularly penetrating.]

The AI Industry Is Lying To You

Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my independent reporting and analysis, why not subscribe to my premium newsletter? It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5000 to 18,000 words, including

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

Nicolas Saunier 10h ago

Jason Lefkowitz 11h ago

"You can demand anything you want. That doesn’t mean you’ll get those things. But when one side is begging for talks and backing off threats, and the other is making maximal demands you know who has the whip hand."

🎁 https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/iran-has-trump-over-a-oil-barrel-sad/sharetoken/7839ee13-64e7-485c-a526-61c7b1e05ff9

#USPol

Iran Has Trump Over a (Oil) Barrel. Sad.

This post follows up on the previous two posts about President Trump’s...

TPM - Talking Points Memo

Nicolas Saunier 11h ago

JP 11h ago

degrowthers and anti-car folks looking at the International Energy Agency's "sheltering from oil shocks" advice like the Jack Nicholson Nodding Lustily GIF

themes	transport, artificial intelligence, open science, open source
homepage	https://nicolas.saunier.confins.net
blog	https://opentransport.bearblog.dev