Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.

As to solar, payback is usually 7-15 years depending on overhead costs, while most panels are still at 80% output in 20 to 25 years. Batteries don’t last as long as panels when being used to near capacity, but they’ll still do about half the lifespan of the panels. Batteries prices are also falling about as quickly as panel prices, with us now being in the neighborhood of 100 dollars per kwh of storage.

I also think it’s a bit of a misnomer, especially on this instance, to consider these things completely dead and worthless at 80% effectiveness, especially when that is still far more effective than a brand new top of the line one a decade ago. I think that there are a lot of people in the world who wouldn’t mind the system taking up 25% more space if they could get them much cheaper, it’s just that much like EV battery range, a lot of people are finding that they don’t really need to replace the thing away at 80% capacity in the first place.

Depending on how frequently it needs to be connected and how much tension it needs to hold, it might be worth taking a look at some Wago connectors, as i’ve generally been impressed by how well they hold. Not really an option if the connection needs to be regularly connected and disconnected, but if it’s just occasional it could be an option.

Outside of that I would second Aubeynarf’s suggestion, but don’t have much personal experience with them.

Well, the actually wealthy and well off people will just hire an immigration lawyer and fly there while keeping some wealth, and not working their way from dangerous predicament to predicament one step at a time, often dying in the process.

If you’re well off, you sure arn’t going to give it all up to a smuggler for an asylum claim.

So that’s the one option then, and it’s a good option that a lot of Sunni Syrians (who are not subject to the same religious persecution as converts) take, and as such 30% of the entire nation are refugees or migrants from Palestine and Syria.

Naturally a small desert country, the influx has caused significant strain on the nations water infrastructure, and with a small economy, limited resources, and limited capital, Jordan is forced to sacrifice 6% of the entire nations GDP on the refugee program. Also worth noting that said national GDP is smaller than just the Norwegian government budget.

This on top of an already struggling economy, and the fact the nation is dependent on buying foreign food, and the limits placed on foreign dept by international creditors, the nation has been forced to undertake an extreme austerity program in order to prevent mass famine, which has of course further limited economic growth.

As such not only are people fleeing religious prosecution going to find similar prosecution in Jordan, but the nation is struggling hard to feed its own people and is in no position to take everyone even if it wanted to. As a result it has increasingly turned refugees away, and heavily pushes for non Sunni refugees to go to places where they will actually be safe.

Since most people arn’t dumb, many take said advice and travel to a nation where they will actually be safe, you know, the whole point of the asylum system.

The whole reason it needs to be a wealthy land is because the land needs to actually be able to support the refugees for them to all actually be able to go there without trapping the host nation in a cycle of poverty.

So now that you, as a non Sunni refugee, have been rejected from Jordan, what’s you next suggestion for the nearest safe nation?

And again I must ask the basic question, why are poor nations expected to sacrifice so much so that the rich ones can do absolutely nothing?

edit: Or on second thought don’t, this conversation has already drifted so far from the actual subject of border security methods, and going nowhere if I have to explain the baisc idea of why the rich might have to help the poor or why border crossings between unsafe nations might be harder than a road trip within a single nation.

Going down the list of nations within two hops of Syria and explaining why each in turn may be unsafe for you or turn you away is also going to be exhausting and you can just google it.

Given that it’s takes months of work to cross a border for a refugee but it’s only a three day drive from Sochi to the Norwegian border, yes, the number of borders absolutely matters more than physical distance.

Show me where in article 14 it says that this right only applies the geographically closest nation and all others are except.

Or, because you keep insisting that there are so very many safe nations with unlimited resources and food for people to wait out the collapse Russia and its puppets with only one nation between them and Syria, list them.

Note, these nations must not be a theocracy or limit the freedom of religion, not currently be at war, have an effective refuge program that does not limit the number of entrants, and of course not be in need of significant international aid themselves.

Again, Norway is actually very close at just two nations away, one of which has regular race riots and has still taken in literally millions of refugees, while the other is the one that installed the regime persecuting them and is fucking Russia.

Most of the nations that are closer are either filled with religious persecution, so impoverished as to require vast amounts of western food aid just to feed their own people, or are already taking in orders of magnitude more refugees than Norway.

Why should the aid a nation provides the international community be based solely on geographical proximity? Does this mean that Norway should also not provide any aid to Ukraine, as it is also geographically far away? Why should it only the the poor nations that should do their part to take in people in distress and not the rich?

When so much of the world is impoverished and struggling to survive itself, why is it so ‘suspicious’ that when people are forced to start over from scratch they might try and do so in the lands of over abundance and where their children don’t have to worry about being beaten to death by a mob or living in Putin’s Russia?

This all seems like even more reason to be channeling resources into the security needed to stop well equipped Russian saboteurs, as well as systems to better find people who disappeared or traveled to foreign countries after they were welcomed across the border, instead of a fence that does neither.

Um, so let’s think about this. Why are people fleeing the Russian military and its operations to secure the power of its chosen allies in Syria not rushing to seek asylum in the country that blew up their homes in the first place? I mean Russia is obviously such a great nation to live in, with its very high standards of living and no possibility of being forced to either join the Russian military or being handed over to the very regime you are claiming asylum from.

I also didn’t realize that Türkiye and Russia, the two nations between Syra and Norway, represented ‘the whole of Europe and large parts of the Middle East and North Africa’.

I guess the one poor country already hosting 3.2million refugees is handling it very well, as there have been absolutely no race riots, violence, or mass deportations back to Syria, and we should expect every single refugee to stay there instead of attempting to make a claim in any other nation.

I also missed that line in the UN declaration of human rights that says you can ignore applying these rights to people if the Russians are also being dicks to them. /s

I thought you just said the issue the government needed to solve was random people wandering across the border without realizing it. People crossing or being trafficked across Russia in an attempt to exercise their right as a human being under article 14 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, an agreement specifically drafted with the goal of facilitating large movements of persecuted people in the wake of nations turning away people fleeing the Holocaust, well those people are either trying to find and be collected by the border agents or being trafficked and falsely terrified they’ll be sent back to horrific abuse if their discovered by the border patrol instead of welcomed in, so why would a fence change anything about the number of them trying to get out of a dangerous foreign nation?

I mean it’s not like Norway would be trying to discourage them from holding it to the obligations the nation signed and agreed to that require it to thoughtfully and thoughly analyze each of their claims in court, now would it? I mean if they don’t have even proper shoes, Norway is of course going to spare no expense in welcoming as many of them as show up as quickly as possible, and as such undercutting human trafficking by showing how easy and risk free the alternative is, right?

It apparently has all this extra money to spend on a changing a border system that is currently working very well in your own words.

Also, you realize we are talking about a press release about the Norwegian government considering future fencing of more of the Russian-Norwegian border, and not the system as it exists currently, right?

And that this boarder fencing functionality requires a nice, level, drivable trail to be cleared through the wilderness either side of it to be built and maintained, right?

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Neglecting the silliness of assuming that we were talking about where the road crosses the border, or alternatively showing a map where the Russian road parallels the border for sections and where not a single part of the border is more than 10km from the Russian road while meaning it to show that no vehicle could even drive near to the border much reach it, surely what you said about the guards always knowing when someone is coming from kilometers away and being ready to meet them makes the case for a fence over the whole length worse, as it is evidently is and has not been needed for that purpose?

I guess it is nice though that the issue is just Norway considering spending a lot of money to help solve the issue of lost Russian tourists instead of trying to solve any security concerns.

Is it the people actually studying effectiveness of preventing security threats from crossing borders, or the politicians and leaders who want to be seen as doing something visible to deal with the ‘migrant issue’ dispite the pure absurdity of suggesting that people who crossed continents will see a fence and just decide to stay illegally in Russia of all places?

Again, fences are like cheap locks, they are creating a social barrier to tell people not to pass, not a way of significantly reducing the speed at which someone who wants to will take in doing so.

How many seconds do you think it takes a truck to drive through one, or someone to hop out of a truck to prop a ladder up against one? What else could be built or funded with the cost of building these expensive signs?

If your going to spend massive amounts of money on securing a border, at least spend it on the things that actually have an impact, like more patrols and guard posts, not on more extensive signposting.

How does any easily cut through or driven over fence help at all, much less justify the significant expense? It doesn’t help stop people, or even particularly slow them down. You’re still relying on guards actually responding and getting out to meet them, now just with higher maintenance costs because there is a hole dozens of kilometers from anything else.

All that a fence does is take resources away from the things that actually help intercept people crossing the border, because fences are primarily a social barrier rather than a way to practically slow people down.

As the traditional saying goes, show me a five meter high fence, and i’ll show you a six meter high ladder.

More seriously, if you want to catch people at the border, you do mainly just need to have cameras, sensors, and people monitoring it, and you then just need to send some guards out in a truck to go out and talk to the things that walk through it.

If their arn’t guards, then there is nothing to stop anyone with bolt cutters or a cutting tool coming along and getting through, or as the US found out, coming along and stealing parts of the unguarded fence in the middle of nowhere whenever the price for scrap metal got high enough to be worth the trip.

The only problems with this approach of just sending guards out is that it doesn’t look as imposing in stock footage, and that it’s harder to deny people a chance at the universal human right of asylum if they’ve set foot on your territory and you have to talk to them and escort them back instead of pushing them away from a fence with your fingers in your ears saying I can’t hear you.

To be fair, Ukraine has managed some pretty impressive saturation attacks on Russian ammo depots recently, so the total number of launched drones might not be as far off as it has been for most of the last few years.

What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.