Biodiesel might actually be meaningful, given that diesel prices in particular are way up and soy exports are down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel_in_the_United_States

Biodiesel is commercially available in most oilseed-producing states in the United States. As of 2023, it is less expensive than petroleum-diesel,[1] though it is still commonly produced in relatively small quantities (in comparison to petroleum products and ethanol fuel).

I don’t know how practical it is to scale up production, though. And fertilizer’s probably a global market, so fertilizer prices in the US are going to be up, even aside from Trump’s trade restrictions.

searches

It sounds like some places are looking into it.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/brazil-weighs-fast-tracking-biodiesel-tests-diesel-prices-spike-2026-04-08/

Brazil weighs fast-tracking biodiesel tests as diesel prices spike

BRASILIA, April 8 (Reuters) - Brazil’s government is looking at ways to accelerate testing of higher biodiesel blends in diesel, aiming to reach a conclusion this year, the head of ​a soy crushers association said on Wednesday, amid a spike in fuel prices ‌due to the Iran war.
The measure could boost soybean demand in the world’s largest producer of the oilseed, most of which is shipped to China for animal feed. Brazil’s biofuels industry has seized on ​the disruptions to oil and gas supplies in the Middle East as a ​chance to push for higher mandated blends of soy-based diesel and ethanol in ⁠gasoline.

Latin America’s ​largest economy imports about a quarter of the diesel it consumes. ​As Brazilian biodiesel ⁠is now cheaper than diesel, higher blends enhance energy security, Nassar said.
“We have an asset that guarantees energy security and will never be in short supply, as Brazil has abundant feedstock,” he ⁠said. “This ​war could drag on … We need a much shorter ​timeline to complete the tests.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-01/indonesia-s-b50-pivot-shows-war-is-stoking-global-biofuel-demand

Indonesia’s B50 Pivot Shows War Is Stoking Global Biofuel Demand

Indonesia’s abrupt pivot to expand its biodiesel mandate is the latest sign of how the war in Iran is reshaping energy policy, tightening global vegetable oil supplies as more gets funneled into fuel.

The world’s top palm oil producer will implement its B50 program — an ambitious target to boost the level of biodiesel blended in its fuel to 50% — starting from July 1, Airlangga Hartarto, coordinating minister for economic affairs announced late Tuesday. The move is part of efforts to mitigate energy supply disruptions wrought by the conflict, with Airlangga saying it could reduce fossil fuel consumption by 4 million kiloliters annually.

If someone can plant a camera somewhere that they can see your keyboard, they can probably obtain your password.

It kills Iran’s ability to extract tolls from ships that want to get past. Assuming that it’s enforced, which I am not at all sure it will be. Like, are we honestly going to, say, put an anti-ship missile into a China-flagged merchant ship because they paid off Iran?

I think that he’s wanting a physically-rotating-at-runtime mount. Like, where you can just swivel the monitor and use it in another orientation.

You can get VESA mounts that rotate, but there has to be some way to automatically tell the OS to change orientation.

Radius used to make monitors like this for the Mac.

For example: Wine tasters were clear that French wine just tasted better than Californian wine. They were extremely convinced. Then they tried a blind test and hoo boy did everyone get pissed when they couldn’t tell the French wine was better without knowing it was French first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)

Two Buck Chuck (an inexpensive blend of wines sold by Trader Joe’s) also has scored well among California wines. So it’s not like expensive California wines are obliterating more-pedestrian counterparts, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Shaw_wine

Charles Shaw is an American brand of bargain-priced wine.[1] Largely made from California grapes, Charles Shaw wines include Cabernet Sauvignon, White Zinfandel, Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Shiraz, Valdiguié in the style of Beaujolais nouveau, and limited quantities of Pinot Grigio.

The cost of the wine is about 30 to 40 percent of the price, with the bottle, cork and distribution the larger part.

Charles Shaw wines were introduced at Trader Joe’s grocery stores in California in 2002 at a price of USD$1.99 per bottle, earning the wines the nickname “Two Buck Chuck”, and eventually sold 800 million bottles between 2002 and 2013.[2]

At the 28th Annual International Eastern Wine Competition, Shaw’s 2002 Shiraz received the double gold medal, beating approximately 2,300 other wines in the competition.[13]

I’d add that the same sort of thing goes for “audiophile” gear. Things should be blind-tested. It’s very easy to have a perceptually different experience when you know what it is that you’re using.

I remember a point where Joshua Bell was busking in the New York subway.

https://www.classicfm.com/artists/joshua-bell/violin-busking-washington-subway/

He’s one of the finest talents in the classical music world, and in 2007 violinist Joshua Bell went busking as an experiment. Would the public realise just what was happening, alongside their daily bustle?

Music director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, worldwide star soloist, and former child prodigy. His instrument is a Stradivarius from 1713 and his hair is an icon of classical music in itself…

Joshua Bell is one of the world’s great virtuosos, and one of the biggest names in classical music.

And in 2007 he did some anonymous busking, as a little social experiment to see what might happen.

Over a period of 43 minutes, the violinist performed six classical pieces, two from Bach pieces, one Massenet, and one each from Schubert and Ponce.

Out of 1,097 people that passed by Bell, 27 gave money, and only seven actually stopped and listened for any length of time.

In total, Bell made $52.17 (£42.18). And this includes a $20 note from someone who recognised him.

US car manufacturers were incentivized to do that and to push for policy and marketing that encourages pickup ownership because pickups have had a protective tariff, making them more profitable than other types of vehicles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

The Chicken Tax is a 25 percent tariff on light trucks (and originally on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy) imposed in 1964 by the United States under President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to tariffs placed by France and West Germany on importation of U.S. chicken.[1] The period from 1961 to 1964[2] of tensions and negotiations surrounding the issue was known as the “Chicken War”, taking place at the height of Cold War politics.[3]

Eventually, the tariffs on potato starch, dextrin, and brandy were lifted,[4] but since 1964 this form of protectionism has remained in place to give US domestic automakers an advantage over imported competitors.[5] Though concern remains about its repeal,[6][7] a 2003 Cato Institute study called the tariff “a policy in search of a rationale.”[4]

https://www.slashgear.com/1809287/chicken-tax-explained-history-current-impact/

If you’re an automaker, you want to market those protected vehicles to consumers, because it’s more-profitable. You don’t really have to compete with foreign-made autos in that particular class.

And you want to lobby for policy that encourages consumers to buy them. So, for example, the US has more-stringent towing standards than does Europe. You need a bigger vehicle to tow a given amount of weight…which encourages buying pickups. And the US has emissions standards that give special preference to large vehicles.

https://newrepublic.com/article/180263/epa-tailpipe-emissions-loophole

While the new emissions rules have been praised in most coverage for tightening standards and thus speeding the transition to electric vehicles, they also preserve long-standing special treatment for big trucks and SUVs, which exempt larger cars from more stringent emissions standards. The EPA has made a little-noticed attempt in the rule to keep companies from exploiting the sorts of loopholes they have in the past, but industry giveaways that were added into the final rule could undermine their ability to reduce emissions. When the rules take effect, for instance, starting with cars in the 2027 model year, Ford Super Duty pickups will reportedly be able to emit more than three times as much carbon dioxide as light-duty pickups like the still very large Ford F-150, and nearly four times as much as a passenger car.

“The biggest pickup trucks are allowed very gentle treatment. If you create a loophole, that’s what they will drive through,” Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity’s Safe Climate Transport campaign, says of the new rules. “Vehicles are getting larger and larger because the larger the vehicle, the weaker the standard.”

It’s going to be emitting less carbon dioxide, at any rate.

I don’t really think that I’d want to be hauling around $330k in duffel bags. I don’t know how hard it’d be to open a bank account in South Korea, but I can’t imagine that it’d be that difficult.

Then deal with having the banks transfer it.

so I figured that using pipewire to co-ordinate this would be the easiest way forward, except it turns out that it’s a (GUI) user space process, which doesn’t make sense on a server with no GUI users.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “(GUI) user space process”, but if it’s that it’s a systemd user process (e.g. it shows up when you run $ systemctl --user status pipewire rather than $ systemctl status pipewire, which appears to be the case on my system, where there’s one instance running per user session), then you probably can run it as a systemwide process, where there’s just one always-running process for the whole system. IIRC, PulseAudio could run in both modes. I don’t know if you have concerns about security on access to your mic or something, but that could be something to look into.

searches

Sounds like it’s doable. Not endorsing this particular project, which I’ve never seen before, but it looks like it’s possible:

https://github.com/iddo/pipewire-system

PipeWire System-wide Daemon Package (Arch Linux)

This package configures PipeWire, WirePlumber, and PipeWire-Pulse to run as a single system-wide daemon as the root user. This setup is optimized for headless media servers, HTPCs, or multi-user audio environments.

every hardware website I’ve checked so far, either don’t have any mini pcs, nucs or similar, or they have zero information about the hardware.

Well, if they give you the manufacturer and model number, you should be able to look them up with the manufacturer.

It doesn’t look fake to me, but if you want a way in which it might look different from similar images…

Cameras have changed over time. Like, I can’t list all the technical changes, but I can tell, when I look at an image, whether it looks like a photo that was taken in the 1970s or so.

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/4a41b101-86c7-4102-b7b0-8ca9d3d7a0cf.jpeg

I think that saturation on some things might be higher, gamma lower, film grain is present, might be depth-of-field differences, dunno. I’m sure that someone expert in photography could do a better job than me in listing technical differences.

Widespread use of image-editing software to do things like normalize images and change gamma to keep things from looking washed-out may be part of that (and cell phones, that do their own post-processing — redeye reduction, sharpening, etc may also be a factor).

The last time we had photos of people being hauled out of those capsules after coming back from Moon missions, those were the cameras in use:

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/93cf055a-31ca-4744-9734-482da219103d.jpeg

And so that might look “normal” and present-day cameras might not look “normal”.

I know that I get a bit of a shock, feels weird, when I see things like re-enacted American Civil War or World War 2 scenes shot with modern cameras, because most of the images I see of that, the photographs, are black-and-white and suddenly the world of color has collided with it.

I’m not on there, but you might have more luck in !localllama@sh.itjust.works

You might also want to list the hardware that you plan to use, since that’ll constrain what you can reasonably run.

Oh. I don’t mean people posting memes or reaction gifs or stuff like that. I don’t recall the specifics of the community, though.

EDIT: Though the only meme community I subscribe to is !linuxmemes@lemmy.world.

No; I’m not subscribed to any communities that deal with trolling. I wasn’t even aware that there were any out there.

I think that all of the people I’ve blocked for a reason that I can recall have been users who were repeatedly spamming comments in threads to try to make them unreadable for other users. One was just commenting over and over with a couple of giant inline Simpsons images.

Ah, so I bet what they’re doing is looking like a single VPN from the Android OS level, setting a default route into that, and then doing routing in userspace.

I have not used such a configuration, but I believe that it’s fine to have multiple WireGuard VPNs concurrently up, at least from a Linux client standpoint. I have no idea whether your phone’s client permits that — it could well be that it can’t do it.

Your routing table would have the default route go to a host on one of them (and your Internet-bound traffic would go there), but you should be able to have it be either. Or neither — I’ve set up a WireGuard configuration with a Linux client where the default route wasn’t over the WireGuard VPN, and only traffic destined for the LAN at the other end of the WireGuard VPN traversed the WireGuard VPN.

From Linux’s standpoint, a WireGuard VPN is just like another NIC on the host. You say “all traffic destined for this address range heads out this NIC”. Just that the NIC happens to be virtual and to be software that tunnels the traffic.

EDIT:

It sounds like this is an Android OS-level limitation:

https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/261526/are-there-technical-limitation-to-multiple-vpns

In the Android VPN development documentation you can find a clear statement regarding the possibility to have multiple VPNs active at the same time:

There can be only one VPN connection running at the same time. The existing interface is deactivated when a new one is created.

That same page does mention that you can have apps running in different profiles using different VPNs at the same time. That might be an acceptable workaround for you.

Anecdote: some years back, when Google was just getting their self-driving program going, I remember pulling up next to one of their early self-driving cars, rolling down my window, and pointing out to the safety driver that they were supposed to merge into the bicycle lane if doing a right turn and that his car wasn’t doing that.

Today, I was sitting in traffic in the right-hand lane of a road, and a Waymo vehicle — that program, after years more of development — pulled up, merged into the (large enough for a car) bike lane, and then properly stopped and did a right-on-red.

https://catholicvote.org/pew-poll-52-of-catholics-including-61-of-white-catholics-back-trump-over-harris/

Pew poll: 52% of Catholics including 61% of white Catholics back Trump over Harris

Should be interesting to see how that plays with the electorate.

EDIT: Also, I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the Catholic Church in the US, but the current pope, Leo XIV, was the first born in the US. I know that John Paul II, Polish, was the first Polish pope and was highly-regarded in Poland, and I can imagine that there might be a similar effect in the US among American Catholics.

My own personal thoughts on things that might change to improve:

• I’m pretty interested about the prospects for something like “curated lists”, where people can publish ban lists or “upvote lists” or something like that that users can subscribe to if they decide that they like a particular curation list’s material. Something that can leverage positive and negative recommendations more-readily. My understanding is that Bluesky has something along those lines.

• Reddit originally was intended to rely on voting to do per-user recommendation. Over the years, it kind of drifted away from that. At the time I left, it still didn’t do that. I think that it’s probably also possible to create automated recommendations based on things like a user’s upvotes. I suppose that there’s some echo chamber potential here, depending upon how one votes.

• I see a lot of people being negative on the Threadiverse, people that sound often depressed or something, but not really people fighting between each other that much. There are people who could be nicer, but in terms of interpersonal fighting, I don’t see that much. That being said, I do avoid some instances.

• Beehaw.org has a relatively-restrictive moderation policy. That’s not what I personally prefer, but I will say that it has a fairly-upbeat set of discussions on its communities compared to most instances. It defederated with lemmy.world, but has not with lemmy.today (my home instance) and a number of others, so if you’re specifically on the hunt for more-positive conversation, you might investigate it.

• My own personal belief is that making votes public has reduced the amount of “I disagree with you, so I downvote” stuff. It’s also possible that there are other factors going on, but I think that after lemvotes.org in particular became widely-available, the amount of what I’d call downvoting in discussions on controversial topics declined on here. There have been some instances that disallow downvotes entirely (beehaw.org is an example of an instance that does this).

• From a moderation standpoint, there are some policies from Reddit subreddits that I think were generally successful. /r/Europe had a pretty hard “do not edit article titles” rule. This went further than I personally would have, as sometimes I think that adding context to a title could be useful, but that avoided a lot of issues where people would insert their personal positions into post submissions rather than in a top-level comment. I think that some form of that can be a useful convention.

• On an directly-opposing note: I think that a lot of articles are clickbait (and some are ragebait, and the latter tends to drive unpleasantness). I’ve seen various proposals to try to let users submit alternate article titles and those be voted on or something like that. Maybe it’d be a good idea to let users submit alternate titles and mods pick from them or something like that. Reddit didn’t do that, but maybe things along those lines could be successfully done.

• In general, I don’t think that Reddit got many things wrong. One thing I think it did get wrong was to change how blocking worked at one point from “I ignore all comments from a user” to “that user cannot respond to me”. The Threadiverse software packages presently work like “old Reddit”. I think that that’s a good idea. On Reddit, this change to how blocking worked resulted in a lot of people posting inflammatory content, then blocking the other user so that they couldn’t respond, so it’d look like the other user had conceded the point. Then the other user — now infuriated — would go start responding to other comments in a thread pointing out that this first user had blocked them. That never ended well.

• We do have automated stuff to try to detect tone, sentiment analysis. This sometimes gets used to do things like identify users getting upset in automated calls and direct them to a human. It might be possible to automatically flag potential flamewars for moderators, to reduce the time until they get noticed.