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like Peter Thiel said: competition is for losers. Monopoly is for winners

most of V8 engines need 10+ quarts

I've owned and driven V8 engine powered vehicles since the 1970's and have never owned one that used more than 7 qts of oil for an oil change. Most use 5 qts plus a filter. That is why oil is sold in 5 qt jugs. That's all that most vehicles need. Of course my vehicles are all model year 2015 or earlier.

I checked specs with different manufacturers and find that the V8 engines that need 10 qts of motor oil are the heavier duty trucks typically with a diesel engine. Checking specs shows that most gasoline V8s require 6 qts, some require 7-8 quarts, and the larger diesel trucks require 10 qts, sometimes up to 11 qts depending on the engine.

10 qts of motor oil takes up a lot of space and that is at a premium in most engine compartments. The oil pan would need to be deep and trucks are the only vehicles that have that much room between the engine block and the crossmembers/differentials.


I own BMW and all BMW V8s (engine models N63, N63TU..N63TU3, S63) require 10 quarts.

Same for Mercedes V8 engines models M156..159 that require 9-10 quarts


Thanks for the added context. It made me think.

I guess I should've qualified my comment with a note about those vehicles being American-made V8s. Diesel engines tend to have higher lubrication requirements thus they have larger oil pans. I see that those BMW engines you listed are gassers so I took a look at their specs to see why they would need such large oil reservoirs.

Twin turbos. Mounted in the engine valley. High heat in that configuration and high oil consumption as a result - up to 1 qt/1000 miles. [0]

That's crazy. I can drive my V8 powered, non-turbo engine Bronco 10000 miles between oil changes using full synthetic oil without needing to add a full quart of oil and it has more than 330k miles on the odometer.

I see now why those BMWs may need a huge oil pan. It is an attempt to compensate for the consequences of design decisions that they knew would create problems. Those engines only need a 10 qt reservoir because they would burn through a smaller volume so fast that no one would buy the vehicle because it required them to check the oil every day and to carry oil so that there was less chance of destroying the engine due to running it low.

I was not aware of BMW engines having such huge reservoirs and now that I am I can be glad that I have never considered owing one.

I didn't look at Toyota or other foreign manufacturers who also built V8 engines. Maybe I should educate myself.

[0]https://bmwtuning.co/n63-engine-problems/


these BMW twin turbos are marvels of engineering, 567 horsepowers. The best engine BMW has ever made.

This engine allows you to have a huge family hauler (BMW X7) and drive like a BMW M3 like you stole it. Imagine hauling 3 kids and ski gear for 5 people up the twisty mountain road in the Sierras.

and by the way on the highway, X7 M60i gets you 21 mpg on the road. Amazing feat by the German engineers.

and I never had do top off the oil, just change oil every 7500 miles. Zero oil leaks. All of the notorious BMW V8 twin turbo issues were related to the early design and were solved in N63TU in 2014. The engines are rock solid, but the car has other weak parts (transfer case and front diff)


>All of the notorious BMW V8 twin turbo issues were related to the early design and were solved in N63TU in 2014.

That's great! It sounds like the early engine had lots of problems but BMW iterated until they solved them, and ended up having a high performance engine for those who stuck with the brand. I know that I have been burned buying the first year model of a vehicle and then having to absorb all the downtime for things that I felt they could've addressed before sending them out to dealerships. 21 mpg on the road from an engine like that is pretty impressive. Like I mentioned, I have never considered owning a BMW but it sounds like they are solid vehicles, after all the usual iterations, just like the other manufacturers. Enjoy the drives!


Volume constantly surprises us, doesn’t it.

Strongly disagree with the author.

For dumb simple select group by OLAP queries on medium data ? Sure clickhouse local or duckdb works perfectly well.

But if you need to construct dataset ? Or process existing dataset, do heavy filtering, transformation, reshaping, splitting? The proper ETL work, then pandas is really the perfect use case.

And pandas can work with small memory footprint as well, its actually trivial to do that, plus there are libraries like Modin that are upgrades over pandas with pandas api

Pandas is the swiss knife tool of data science that lets you do anything with the data and it integrates well with ML libraries


It's subjective, but IMO polars's APIs are better and than pandas's for ETL. Notably, pandas ported over polars's use of .col() for the 3.0.0 release: https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/whatsnew/v3.0.0.html#initial-...

Also, pandas's group_by() and window function pipelines made me want to tear my hair out while both are easy in polars.


Use pandas if you want advanced analytics, visualization, or ml.

Use SQL if you need to move data around.


How would you use sql to move data from three excel files (some of them may have arbitrary number of worksheets), pack of json files, two csv files, one mysql, one postgres db, some parquets, some of them in S3) ???

And in the end save processed data in aws s3 in another format like iceberg or whatever

In pandas a lot of these are one-liners that are impossible in sql (depends on what sql engine you have?)


Those are generally rules of thumbs for data pipelines. (Plus duckdb can read Excel these days I think).

AWS acquired DuckLabs recently, there is a chance they will release a product competing with CH/Snowflake as a new RDS offering

They won't be able to resist the temptation of ruining it before launch by deciding to tie it into AWS Glue

why would Exxon allow export ban and lose exorbitant profits ?

Trump is just accelerating the course of history. The fall of American hegemony, the humiliation of the MIC, the petrodollar, the fossil fuels, the USD as reserve currency is like speedrunning the historical events to reach the next more balanced equilibrium state

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


"MIC"???

Military industrial complex. all the companies who make an supply weapon or technology to the US military basically. lockheed and palantir and so on

military industrial complex

the reason China was using stockpiles is they want to time the gasoline price shock right to the midterm elections. The moment they stop using stockpiles and start purchasing the prices will jump

Blaming the current situation on the actions of China is beyond bizarre.

China has some influence. They did do what was said - but only if you take the absolute most charitable reading (which is a expected here).

Eh? They didn't/aren't using their stockpiles to anywhere near the extent the US has! There reserves are much bigger - they have about a years supply - yet they used less in absolute terms than the US!

What they did was aggressively reduce demand by accelerating the switch to EV's and firing up a few more coal powerstations.

In terms of influencing the midterms - I suspect China isn't anywhere near the front of the queue in hoping Trump get's a beating given the chaos he is causing.

Complaining about foreign interference is ironically straight from the Hillary playbook.


They are strategically using their stockpiles. There are a lot of factors in their strategy and some of them conflict. This has an effect on the world market.

How much of their strategy is to change elections vs other concerns I don't know.


Well roughly now would be when you’d time a huge shock

OTOH midterm generic ballots are much more stable than top line presidential horse race polling. So it might only matter at the margins.


> time the gasoline price shock right to the midterm elections.

Donald Trump can end this at any time if he wants. It would have been better to not have started it, thou. Less killing of innocent people, less spending on weapons, better mental health for USA soldiers...

And why is China suddenly at fault for America's actions?


He can't. Bibi is in charge.

Partially true. Seems most likely that Trump didn't like the Iranian provisions for reparations to end the war. A hard stance they've taken, one Trump would never go for (because of how incompetent it would make him look), and here we are.

> Donald Trump can end this at any time if he wants.

I'm not really sure that's true. The US is no longer a credible negotiator. I'm not sure negotiating a peace would necessarily end the situation immediately.


> The US is no longer a credible negotiator.

The US isn't even negotiating. Fairly sure they don't have a full negotiating team and they're doing it via 1-2 Trump flunkeys and Pakistan intermediating.


It's so amazing to watch people (presumably Americans) over and over make everything about American domestic politics. That the only way to explain Trump's behaviour is on the domestic terms that Americans know and are comfortable with.

I see this over and over again with the Canada stuff. Or Greenland stuff. Not taking it seriously because "oh that's just Trump deflecting cuz of [Epstein|Midterms|etc]." Meanwhile the actual blast radius here is far far far outside of the domestic arena.

When will people just take this guy at his word? He says he wants to conquer or do X Y and Z. That's it. He said those things. Believe him. Stop trying to make it about yourself. (And also he wants to make personal money off manipulating the stock market and oil prices.)

It's not a good look, esp to the victims of Trump outside the US who have no power to vote in American elections and yet are victims of American power.


> He said those things. Believe him.

He says a lot of things he doesn't do though. Beleiving him is a bad heuristic and so is disbeleiving him.


lol. The orange man is doing more damage to the USA than China could ever do short of actual war. He is destroying the US militarily, economically and politically. They emphatically support his efforts.

At some point they might prefer stability and sanity. I would bet that at this point they don't care much either way.

China is playing long, most of the ~unchanging things are in their favor and the US already proved that they're unreliable. People won't forget that soon even if Trump is gone.


Stability and sanity is not happening whether the conflicts stop in Yemen+Hormuz or not. At that point it's just going to go back to tarriff wars and new terror campaigns that the US admin will start somewhere else

The context of this is which party China would prefer to win the midterms. The dems winning would distract Trump from being able to fuck up the rest of the world a bit.

My bet would be that China doesn't care much either way, they win regardless.


We agree that China won't care long term. They cannot lose in the current setup

In my view the worst that can happen for China is that Trump gets limited by anything. He's hurting US relations more than he's hurting China short or long-term. Relations take longer to build than trade

"Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"


> "Don't interrupt your opponent when they're making a mistake"

Yeah, that's the obvious answer, but I suspect there's a point where if the US fucks things up too quickly and too messily, there's fewer customers for China's crap and/or the random throws of monkey shit drag China into messes they don't feel like dealing with.

Slow erosion of the US's global power is likely better for them than an implosion that might cause collatoral damage.


I'm curious what you think that may be.

The situation you're imagining is one of a global all encompassing depression caused by a single government.

Not unthinkable, but the Americans would feel that deeply. Do you think they want to?


> The situation you're imagining is one of a global all encompassing depression caused by a single government.

Doesn't even have to go that far (though it pretty easily can, the US is a big enough market). If the US causes a refugee crisis that affects one of China's allies, or fucks with the global oil supply enough or a thousand other things, that stuff is still annoying to China even if it's usually relatively better for them than it is for the US.

> Not unthinkable, but the Americans would feel that deeply. Do you think they want to?

The people in the US choosing do not care if the rest of America feels it or not.


Germans didn't want Stalingrad yet it happened.

IMO it is a good thing that the USA is no longer paying for (among others):

- NATO - Maintaining security on the high seas for other than USA shipping,

- tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades):

https://wjno.iheart.com/content/2025-03-17-qa-how-many-count...

The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!)


Wow, how shortsighted.

> - NATO - Maintaining security on the high seas for other than USA shipping,

NATO consists of a lot of countries, why would they only work for USA shipping? And where do you think that shipping comes from?

> - tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades):

Of course they do. But they're not usually idiots about it.

> The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!)

You advocate for tariffs but don't understand how tariffs work...


I didn't "advocate for tariffs". I merely pointed out that other countries have had tariffs on USA goods for decades.

Yes, as does the USA.

So your point is moot: tariffs are a tax on your own population, ostensibly to stimulate local manufacturing but in practice it is just another tax. Protectionists will immediately reach for this mechanism because they believe - in spite of all the evidence - that this time around it will work. It never does.

Manufacturing is so intertwined now that all tariffs do is to reduce the buying power for those at the bottom of the totempole, whereas those higher up hardly feel any concrete effect. Whether other countries are stupid or not has no bearing on the discussion, that's just a distraction and the way the USA has been wielding tariffs over the last period is destructive in ways that will affect the country for decades to come.


jacquesm says

"Whether other countries are stupid or not has no bearing on the discussion, that's just a distraction and the way the USA has been wielding tariffs over the last period is destructive in ways that will affect the country for decades to come."

I said nothing of the kind. You are injecting that statement here yourself.

---------------------------------------------

Returning to the topic of interest:

Tariffs do work: they protect certain industries and keep them onshore.

For instance the manufacture of nuclear warheads by the USA is an onshore industry and will remain so. I am certain that Japan or North Korea could eventually make a cheaper and probably even a better nuke but b/c I don't want to be forced to do periodic quality control tests and checks. The USA chooses to keep the industry here.

But as far as I am concerned, I'd also like to keep hand tools as a protected onshore industry.


The Smoot-Harley Tariff Act of 1930 is usually used as the counter example of this argument. It is believed to have been one of the reasons the Great Depression was so bad. It is credited with reducing USA exports by ~60% if I remember correctly.

> The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens

How is that going? Any progress there? Are US citizens richer than they were before?


Well, the southeastern USA is going through a Renaissance of explosive growth b/c it is the intent to industrialize that region and recapture the USA lead in manufacturing. Maybe we can get you a job, dgellow, since your country is dwindling and predicted to actually disappear in a matter of decades:

The End of Germany as a Modern Economy - Peter Zeihan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmEhTFjQB1g


> Are US citizens richer than they were before?

Some of them certainly are richer, specifically people with the last name Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/trump-presid...


> The USA can use the money saved for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!)

I was feeling miserable reading this thread until I saw this, thanks for cheering me up.


I apologize: the first bullet of my post above should have been three separated line items instead of two. This has apparently caused great confusion.

As usual, none of you spotted the error and, of course, several misinterpreted my scribbling to best suit their own malicious intents, much to my chagrin (though no surprise).

I offer this rather late correction and apology: I so rarely make a mistake that I do not usually revisit a post but, in this case the piling on was merely too much to ignore. I shall try again:

It is a good thing that the USA no longer intends to pay for:

- NATO - Leaving NATO (STILL not done) would save the USA money! The USA pays approximately 16% of NATO's total budget and the USA is the largest spender on defense within the alliance, accounting for about 60% of NATO's total defense spending.

- Security on the high seas was primarily the task of the US navy. That will no longer be so.

- tariffs imposed by other countries (yes, other countries have been imposing tariffs for decades).

https://wjno.iheart.com/content/2025-03-17-qa-how-many-count...

The USA can use the money saved from the above for its own citizens (possibly even lowering their taxes!).


The USA can use that money that way. It's not though. Spending isn't decreasing and any savings in tax has easily been overwhelmed by the increased costs facing consumers, especially in the last two years.

this might be a AI driven attack and readthedocs was just a test target.

What surprised me is how easy it was to evade the cloudflare defenses. I know it was easy to evade CF, but I would expected CF to do a better job at blocking L7 DDOS.

CF is really good in defending against the L4 DDOS, but not L7.

this means that cloudflare is really not useful much in the era of Agentic DDOS driven by thousands agents across the globe


Cloudflare is totally worthless actually. It is trivial to evade any part of it.

the cc fraud (and fraud protection) is THE main selling point of Visa/MC credit cards.

it is that different treatment of debit/cc fraud that pushes people towards high fee cc.

it is cc fraud protection that justifies high cc processing fees.

without cc fraud there is no need in visa/mc duopoly.


I thought the main selling point was that they work almost anywhere. Whereas my EFTPOS card only works in Australia, my Girocard only works in Germany and my Pix account only works in Brazil.

excellent article, very thorough and nuanced explanation.

Thanks!

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