It’s not exactly an easy thing to solve. Apparently few plastics are truly recyclable, and even the smallest amount of contamination can totally screw up many plastic products. An expert in plastics (can’t remember the source) said that in many cases plastic waste is so damaging to animal life, and the recycling industry is so corrupted that an enormous amount of plastic shipped overseas simply gets tossed overboard. They actually recommend incinerating it and using the heat to generate power or community heating. Other than that, ban certain plastics and try to reduce usage overall. Pre-1950s soda fountains and reusable drinks bottles anyone? Imagine taking a few bottles to your local supermarket, putting them through a rinser and then filling them with your choice of fizzy sugary crap. Much better than selling a million single-use plastic bottles of the awful stuff every day.

But that’s not even desirable in some cases. Total removal of plastics would increase food spoilage, which is an enormous contributor to climate change. Consider the energy required to plant, fertilize, harvest and transport a red pepper: all that energy and effort is wasted if the product gets damaged en route to your local supermarket.

And while glass is indeed recyclable, that’s extremely energy intensive.

I do wonder about these targets. Are we measuring the right things? CO² emissions and exported plastic waste are the only two important metrics here, as far as I’m concerned.

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

Or something like AWS S3 vault lock. You pay up front and specify the duration. And at that point you can’t even delete the data if you want to. You can remove you’re credit card from account billing, and they still keep the data for the specified duration.

I think that people generally overestimate how much money tech companies like this one actually make. Their profits are tiny. A lot of the time, tech companies run on investment money, and can’t actually turn a profit. They wait for the big acquisition or IPO payday. So if you think you’re actually gonna get 100k off them, good luck. Sometimes they’re barely keeping the lights on.

WAT. I was giving extreme examples to illustrate that personal opinions sometimes have zero effect on your work, and sometimes they really really affect your work. And I specifically called out the fact that they were extreme examples:

Those examples are easy to comprehend because they’re extremes.

How the hell was that comparing being gay to sexual assault? How come you didn’t use the other example and accuse me of comparing being gay to 3d printing?

So they want to ban taxpayer funding.

I’m not an American, but how much tax funding goes into regular healthcare, and where the fuck does that money go? Because we hear horror stories over here in Europe that an ambulance callout in the US costs thousands of dollars, giving birth costs thousands of dollars, moderately wealthy people with health insurance have been bankrupted by cancer. In many European countries stuff like that doesn’t really cost you anything. In the UK for example, a visit to your GP is free, as is most medication. In other EU countries a GP is about €65, unless you’re on social welfare, in which case it’s free. And if your GP refers you for a scan or procedure, you generally don’t pay anything. The issue with free healthcare is the waiting time. You can choose to go private to cut the waiting time (in which case you need health insurance, because an MRI + overnight in hospital + procedure + plus drugs might cost €5k). But where a condition is considered an emergency (heart attack, road accident, possible cancer diagnosis) there isn’t a long wait for life-saving treatment. If a car runs you over, an ambulance brings you to the hospital and they treat you - no money change hands. My older sister had terminal cancer, and throughout the entire thing she paid €0 for various operations, scans, drugs and 2 ambulance callouts. She had health insurance, but with cancer, regular healthcare kinda supercedes it. Healthcare gives your more options, but she found that the “best of the best” oncologists and cancer treatment were available for free at the public hospital.

So, a very long run up to my question: WTF healthcare actually gets taxpayer funding in the US, and how are basic things like an ambulance or insulin insanely expensive?

It’s such an odd word. Not like “fuck” or “cunt” or something like that. You are literally not allowed to write it or say it. I’m not even sure people let themselves think it, instead thinking “n word” inside their heads. I can’t think of any other word that is so much like actual god-fearing blasphemy. And yet, you can buy a random rap album and the word will be all over it. It’s even used as a term of endearment between black men who grew up together.

Can anyone think of any other word that is treated almost as if it has magical powers?

It’s just word policing. It’s a bigger thing in America because that country is basically split down the middle into two groups that fucking hate each other. Republicans think Democrats (or “liberals”) or morons who don’t believe in biology (eg: sex) and they want to abolish the police, but yet they are fascists who want to police your thoughts. Democrats think that Republicans (or “nazis”) are morons who don’t believe in biology (eg: evolution) and they want everybody to own 100 automatic weapons and infinite ammo, but don’t believe climate change is real.

Pretty much everything that everybody in America thinks and says it’s polarised by this filter. If you accidentally say something remotely centrist, both sides will call you a fascist and throw you into the bin. People are desperately trying to signal membership of their group, so they latch onto bullshit like “Which word-de-jour do you use to refer to dried crickets?” (Wait for the answer to this question, pitchfork in hand). You hesitated! You are a literal Nazi!

You can see it throughout this thread. People kinda admitting that they’re just words and that they change over time BUT don’t use the wrong one or else.

Unfortunately this bullshit has worked it’s way into other countries, even those that don’t have the same underlying political polarising filter.

Language changes over time. Sometimes it’s a slow gradual adoption of new terms, sometimes it’s a cool new slang, and sometimes it’s word policing. I understand that, historically, a certain type of person would use the word “females” instead of “women”, but I can see a shift happening where there number of people using the word “female” is on the increase. Let’s say you’re having a conversation and specifically want to refer to female people - you can’t actually use the word women, which used to imply “female” but now includes males who transition. So depending on context, and what you need to communicate, the word female can be absolutely critical, whereas the word woman may not suffice.

This is something my wife always complains about, so much so that I’ve gotten a kagi account and set up a specific search category for gardening that bans certain sites and excludes hits where words contain American spelling. One thing that might be interesting is a list of translated gardening resources from other nearby countries. I’m sure the flora and fauna in the rest of North-West Europe can’t be that different?

Here’s an example: I translated the phrase “my hawthorn will not bloom” into French and searched for the resulting phrase. Found a website and translated it back to English: https://www-jardiner--malin-fr.translate.goog/fiche/aubepine.html/amp?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Hibernate and suspend are different. I configure my laptop to suspend for 3 hours before hibernating. That means I can close the lid for lunch or a commute and instantly resume, but if I leave my laptop in my bag over a long weekend, the battery isn’t drained. Does it save much battery? Dunno. A few % over a few days maybe.

I run a single headscale node on one of my free Oracle OCI instances, and connect about a dozen devices to it. No fear of adding friends either, since it’s free.

If the wedding designer has a “blank wedding site” package premade and refused to sell it to them then I don’t think that’s right. But if all of the websites are bespoke designs where the designer must create something for the couple, it’s fuzzy.

Personally, I don’t know. There is, and should be, a line between personal life and work life. But depending on what you do for a living, the line can be a thin one or a thick one.

For example, if I churn out hundreds of identical 3D printed characters and sell them at an open-air market, I shouldn’t be allowed to single out a customer and refuse business just because I don’t like the look of them. But if I’m a graphic artist, I shouldn’t be compelled to draw something that I find objectionable. Eg: I might be a woman who has been sexually abused in the past, and someone wants a sexually graphic depictions of a sexual assault (like the Guns ‘N’ Roses “Appetite for Destruction” cover).

Those examples are easy to comprehend because they’re extremes. The difficulty in interpreting the outcome of the case is trying to bring the examples closer to the center.

Can you refuse to sell handpainted greetings to someone you don’t like? No. It doesn’t matter that it’s a creative endeavour. If you created the product without coercion, and are now selling them at a stall in your local town, it’s not ok to refuse a simple transaction because you don’t like the buyer. What if you also offer a service of writing a message in fancy calligraphy on the inside? Can you refuse to write something you find objectionable? I think so.

I don’t think it comes down to who your customer is. I think it comes down to what you’re being asked to do.

Edit: lol, what a typo. Thanks swype keyboard!

People are probably thinking “fuck it, let’s go with the upheaval! Let’s get rid of the silly base 60 system!”. Ok then. First, we could divide the length of a year into 100 days. Wait, no, that has to be 365 because otherwise the seasons would get out of whack.

Ok, but we could definitely have 10 months right? They did that before. Perfection. So every month should have exactly … Uh 36.5 days… fuck

Well, how about having 10 day weeks? Shit. Same type of problem.

Fine, let’s ignore months and weeks. What about the 24 hour day? Instead, we could break the day into 100 units. Each unit would be 14.4 “old minutes” long. That seems fine. You could subdivide that into 100 subunits, each of which would be about 8.6 “old seconds”. To keep things reasonable the final divisor would be 10, so our new short “human counting” units would be about 0.86s. Groovy. Pity that years, months and weeks don’t work out.

So why are there “really” 360s in an hour? Probably for the same reason that there are 360⁰ in a circle. Early astromomers and mathematicians probably thought that the universe was a perfectly created system. They likely modelled dates and geometry on earth’s annual journey through the sky, but we’re a little bit “off”. Like how the months are supposedly lunar. We only discarded the idea of perfect celestial spheres relatively recently.

I wonder what that means for yt-dlp?

Me and the wife play Pandemic with 4 roles. I find that without some of the roles you just lose two often. And playing a 4 character games with 2 people has lots more going on and is far more enjoyable.

What about a cheapo metal detector that you’d use to search for buried treasure?