[mobile.twitter.com] Here it is summarized: ----------- so my eldest brother, who is a moron, has been playing soldier with his moron friends in the deserts of texas for the last year preparing for the collapse of civilization if biden won (lol).
Silo SPOILERS. DO NOT OPEN THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE READ AT LEAST THE SECOND BOOK
My brain won’t let nightmare go. Just imagining the RNC “longtermist” approach to silos is terrifying. Like schools: how would they combine vouchers and book bans?
At least the anti-union, “just work harder to get advancement” sentiment would go over great.
But then again, every hard right post-apocalyptic fiction ends up with collective ownership by the “good guys”.
@Miguel Arroz The one thing we know works in an encounter is dropping small explosives over the side. This makes them go away, and probably does them no harm, but the Spanish and Portuguese authorities get really pissy about it (mostly the Spanish to be honest), so open discussion of non-lethal methods for dealing with the situation has been difficult.
With the recent celebrity status the orcas has gained, it’s rapidly becoming impossible.
A lot of the blame for this lies with the Spanish maritime authorities who adopted a position of sanctimonious indifference to an escalating threat to marine traffic in their waters for years, until the behaviour had spread to nearly every pod of Iberian orcas. For about 2 years, it was literally just one or two individuals and could have been contained.
Now in winter, they migrate north. The French have demonstrated a rather more “hands on” approach, as demonstrated by one of the animals washing ashore in a river having been shot. 😞
sur que les Portugais sur les océans il ont rien prouvé😁 Diego suarez Diaz &1 certain magelan🤔 on raconte qu il aurait fait le ier vrai tour du monde.. Les Portugais ont colonisé le Japon chère sarah Brown..et quand on sait que les Japonais furent les premiers à défaire une armée de "blancs "(la Russie en l occurence) ça a du être sanglant.. Les anglais ont envahi la chine en la mettant sous opuim certes c est plus sweet😁 Avec leurs cliques françaises du napoléon 3 cela va de soit😉
The absolute best thing about running your own family Fedi server is that when you see wankers pop up on your posts, you can tell them that they’re wankers, tell them that they need to fuck off, and then server block and purge them.
@Richard Gadsden oh, that prick? I don’t think he does social media any more. He used to have a Facebook but blocking him on it starved him of the attention he apparently craves and he deleted his account.
If he’s stalking me now (and I have no reason to believe he is), he’s being very quiet about it.
In another place, there is a discussion about whether someone would leave the UK if money were no object.
There are lots of responses along the lines of, “I would be out of here faster than a blink”, but also plenty saying that people only think that the UK is a “shithole” because they aren’t wealthy.
I don’t think that’s right. I’m fairly wealthy, and like many of similar means I spent some time involved in UK politics as a decently high level. My experience is that it was full of people who wanted to improve things, but then were at some point offered a Faustian bargain: in order to have the power to change things, you need to be part of the British Establishment. To be accepted as part of that establishment, you must be willing to do what is required to perpetuate it.
The result is that the vast majority of people in the UK with the power to actually do anything are the ones who have either been willing to make a deal with the devil, or who are the devil.
The rest give up and walk away.
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In another place, there is a discussion about whether someone would leave the UK if money were no object.
There are lots of responses along the lines of, “I would be out of here faster than a blink”, but also plenty saying that people only think that the UK is a “shithole” because they aren’t wealthy.
I don’t think that’s right. I’m fairly wealthy, and like many of similar means I spent some time involved in UK politics as a decently high level. My experience is that it was full of people who wanted to improve things, but then were at some point offered a Faustian bargain: in order to have the power to change things, you need to be part of the British Establishment. To be accepted as part of that establishment, you must be willing to do what is required to perpetuate it.
The result is that the vast majority of people in the UK with the power to actually do anything are the ones who have either been willing to make a deal with the devil, or who are the devil.
My pronouns are: she/her My adjectives are: caprine/atopic My prepositions are: up/on My nouns are: Sarah/Elizabeth/Brown My verbs are: climb/sleep My interrogatives are: why/what
If all announced clean energy manufacturing projects are realised, solar & battery manufacturing already meet the needs for 2030 to stay on track for net zero. Wind, heat pumps & electrolysers are not yet on track but are expanding rapidly.
Data from International Energy Agency (IEA) graph from Energy Monitor.
Ok, so I need to say something about the orcas, or rather the response to them, because this is pissing me off.
There is a popular portrayal that they are somehow proxies for a class war hunting down and destroying the playthings of the rich, invading their habitat, and this is absolutely not what is happening.
There are two types of vessel that can broadly be described as "yachts". The first type are the ones you're probably thinking of: things owned by multi millionaires who cruise about living a life of unattainable luxury. These vessels have price tags that start at 7 digits for a modest one, and go up from there. They are owned by multimillionaires, centi-millionaires, and billionaires, and they are completely and utterly immune from orca attack.
This is because they are motor vessels. They steer by vectored thrust, or by directing propeller wash over a relatively small hydrofoil. As a result, there is nothing for the orcas to attack, and even if there was, these people don't like to be kept waiting on their way to Monaco or wherever. They h
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Ok, so I need to say something about the orcas, or rather the response to them, because this is pissing me off.
There is a popular portrayal that they are somehow proxies for a class war hunting down and destroying the playthings of the rich, invading their habitat, and this is absolutely not what is happening.
There are two types of vessel that can broadly be described as "yachts". The first type are the ones you're probably thinking of: things owned by multi millionaires who cruise about living a life of unattainable luxury. These vessels have price tags that start at 7 digits for a modest one, and go up from there. They are owned by multimillionaires, centi-millionaires, and billionaires, and they are completely and utterly immune from orca attack.
This is because they are motor vessels. They steer by vectored thrust, or by directing propeller wash over a relatively small hydrofoil. As a result, there is nothing for the orcas to attack, and even if there was, these people don't like to be kept waiting on their way to Monaco or wherever. They have power plants the size of road haulage vehicles and can outrun the orcas.
The second type, which are the boats that the orcas are attacking, are sailboats. These travel at about 5 knots, which is the cruising speed of an orca, and have huge rudders because they need to balance turning forces from the sails that power the boats. The smallest boats that are capable of sailing in the waters where these animals are have rudders comparable in size to an adult human. The orcas seem to regard these as prizes and love detaching them.
While the very rich sometimes do buy these kind of boats, they are not the typical person who does so. Most of them are bought second hand, and they have very long lives (a lot from the 1970s are still in perfectly good condition). They are generally bought for the price of a used car, or less A lot of people live on them and pay for mooring and maintenance fees by doing casual labour. This is still cheaper than renting a one bedroom flat in a lot of Europe.
I live in the area where these animals operate. Friends of friends have been attacked. They aren't "yachties", they're just people with day jobs who have enough disposable income to invest in a hobby they enjoy.
So either, best case, you are gloating at people of modest means facing a salvage and repair bill that they can't afford and is more than the value of the boat, or potentially you are laughing at terrified people watching their home and everything they own get sent to the bottom of the ocean by one of the most sadistic predators on earth, and who will then have to get in the sea with these predators which, if they're lucky, will decide to leave them to drown.
This doesn't make you an online class warrior, or the left-wing equivalent of an edge-lord. It just makes you an arsehole.
@legumancer Davy I’ve seen videos of them playing volleyball with seals before killing and eating them, and obviously having a great time doing it. If the shoe fits …
Thanks for this insight! It's really helped me understand what's going on with the Orcas and boats, and why it's a problem. I've thought about this post a number of times since seeing it a few days ago, so I wanted to come back and thank you.
I also appreciate your insight in one of the replies – that there's tagging, tracking, and communication going on to combat the problem and avoid encounters. I find that really interesting and resourceful.
@Acorn Squashbuckler It’s already paid dividends. We were notified last night that one pod has started migrating west. Before, the first we’d have known about it was when boats were suddenly attacked off Faro. Now we know to stay away.
@Noodlemaz You may not think playing volleyball with seals before killing and eating them isn't saidstic, but if so, you and I have very different definitions of that word.
Lots of dolphins in general are, let's be honest, bastards. Orcas aren't the worst dolphins, but they are certainly up there.
If you think that enjoying inflicting pain and suffering, and killing for enjoyment, is something that is unique to humans, then you're a fool.
Reddit just asked if I was enjoying it. I clicked “not really”, so it offered me feedback. I thus provided some:
You asked if I’m enjoying Reddit. I used to. Now it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, with the rush to “enshittify”. I hate that the trend in the tech industry is to race to r the bottom in terms of user experience in order to suck up to the money men, and I hate that you have declared war on your user base.
I'll admit it's been a while since I listened to the books, and I haven't watched the show. Do they not have anything to view the outside world in the show? I remember them describing watching the condemned going out and cleaning the camera lenses and acting happy.
The problem I have going faster is it all has to be technique. My poor 49 year old heart won’t actually go any faster. Graph below shows the speedrun ringed where my heart went to 175bpm for 8 minutes and stayed there.
I did feel while I was up there that my muscles simply couldn’t get the power they wanted. Maybe I can go faster in winter when heat dissipation is easier.
Note that although your heart rate is capped, you can still train your blood to hold more oxygen, so you'll get more oxygen to your muscles at the same heart rate. And the good news is you're already training it.
Saw young Dr Bacalhau (yes, that really is his name), the dental surgeon, today. In March 2020 I had a cracked tooth removed, with the intention that it would be replaced with an implant a few months later.
3 days later, the world went into lockdown. I never got the implant.
In the years since, I learned to live with the gap. It’s next to a tooth I lost for orthodontic reasons as a teen, so it’s quite a big gap.
But I have been told that the asymmetry in my bite and lack of support for adjacent teeth is causing a problem, so I need an implant.
Fist thing they did was a CT scan of my jaw. The resolution is really quite incredible. He showed me the 3D scan. Bicuspid next door has a really kinky root.
The bad news is, the jawbone there is only 6mm thick, and he wants 8-10mm.
So I need a bone graft. They scheduled me for one in September. Double appointment, done under local anaesthetic (not hugely looking forward to that, but I’ve had worse. Don’t ask. Really). He’s gonna do the graft (new technique I think - some sort
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Saw young Dr Bacalhau (yes, that really is his name), the dental surgeon, today. In March 2020 I had a cracked tooth removed, with the intention that it would be replaced with an implant a few months later.
3 days later, the world went into lockdown. I never got the implant.
In the years since, I learned to live with the gap. It’s next to a tooth I lost for orthodontic reasons as a teen, so it’s quite a big gap.
But I have been told that the asymmetry in my bite and lack of support for adjacent teeth is causing a problem, so I need an implant.
Fist thing they did was a CT scan of my jaw. The resolution is really quite incredible. He showed me the 3D scan. Bicuspid next door has a really kinky root.
The bad news is, the jawbone there is only 6mm thick, and he wants 8-10mm.
So I need a bone graft. They scheduled me for one in September. Double appointment, done under local anaesthetic (not hugely looking forward to that, but I’ve had worse. Don’t ask. Really). He’s gonna do the graft (new technique I think - some sort of synthetic scaffold), and put the screw in. Then 4 months later, they place the tooth.
Will be nice to have my ability to chew properly on the left side back.
Whole lot (including today’s consultation and CT) is going to come in at under 2000 euros, and my experience of Portuguese dentistry thus far is that they do really, really good work.
The HUDOC database provides access to the case-law of the Court (Grand Chamber, Chamber and Committee judgments and decisions, communicated cases, advisory opinions and legal summaries from the Case-Law Information Note), the European Commission of H…
We went to the V&A recently and saw their Korean Wave exhibit. One part spent time on the Korean beauty sector and the myth of the 10 step regime. They had a 3d printer for personalised face masks, which was interesting, but looked like a glorified plotter (either very limited or no Z axis).
Since there's so much snake oil in this area, and your face is so visible, people are willing to latch on to whatever hope they can.
It's interesting talking to people about skincare. From purely medical (I've a few friends that suffer from Psoriasis), through to managing effects of hormones (it comes up a surprising amount teaching teenagers), through to purely cosmetic.
I latched on to some "advice" from a (I think) GQ article in 2003ish. George Clooney was interviewed about skincare and he said to keep it simple. Use a face cleaner, scrub a few times a week, and use a SPF moisturiser daily. I've been happy with that advice.
You know you’ve turned a corner in language learning when the employee in McDonalds doesn’t switch to English in order to point out that you should have used the pluperfect instead of the perfect.
What if we, like, dig 50 really deep holes in Fulton County Georgia to put it in? I’m sure that would work out fine, right? abc.net.au/news/2023-05-26/tre…
Operators of the Fukushima nuclear power plant are set to release treated wastewater into the ocean. But already Japanese authorities are facing a barrage of criticism from fishermen.
Imagine being Jacob Rees-Mogg; he desperately wants to be Brideshead Revisted, but is actually an (albeit well read) idiot cousin of the Boswells in Bread, and all the upper class old money he sucks up knows it, and judges him for it.
He’s not like Nadine Dorries; going through life oblivious to her own stupidity. Jacob knows he’s both very very stupid and a transparent imposter who will never get what he wants: the acceptance of the inbred wazzocks he deifies, and it must utterly torment his every moment.
Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HBO Max, and countless more: we have reached the stage of late stage capitalism, web edition, where the fashionable thing to do, having eradicated your competitors, is to deliberately make your product utterly fucking useless.
I’m particularly noting that on Reddit, as communities start to shut down, the bulk of the notifications I’m getting there now are porn spambots following me.
#Musk shares video of pro-russian Tucker Carlson blaming Ukraine for #Kakhovka dam blast
Carlson has now launched his show on #twitter His first episode accused #Ukraine of destroying the Kakhovka dam. Carlson argued russia, occupying the east Dnipro bank, gained nothing as it would flood that very area.
Musk significantly increased the video's reach by sharing it. Before the retweet, Carlson's video had 57 million views; Musk added another 29 million
Twitter owner Elon Musk is amplifying the baseless claims of former Fox News television host Tucker Carlson – known for his pro-Kremlin and anti-Ukrainian views.
@Ghost of Hope @Eugene McParland Yeah. I've followed him for ages and have always been excited about SpaceX, but he has just turned into a bigger and bigger twat as he got older and it's so very disappointing.
Whew! Lot of follow requests this morning. If I had a gripe about Friendica (actually, I have many but that’s the nature of using a really neat but ultimately cottage industry bit of social media software), it would be that it makes dealing with them all kinda long winded.
This is really weird, strange, & seems to this only very very occasional redditor to be EXTREMELY sudden. Has this been looming, or is there something in the water lately? @theory
@theory I find the idea fascinating that there might be some kind of watershed caused by Twitter's decomposition. Like, people are suddently skeptical of social media hype, & that translates into being skeptical about things they maybe shouldn't be that skeptical about. Like how a lot of solid companies cratered in the dot-bomb because the market lost faith in fundamentals. HP e.g. had a rock solid record of improving numbers for decades, but suddenly that wasn't good enough.
Once again, seeing the whole, "Fediverse is full of Europeans who keep refusing to frame social justice issues strictly from the point of view of USians and this is definitely very problematic everyone!" thing.
And I can't help thinking, "Have you tried taking your cultural imperialism and shoving it up your arse? Maybe that will help?"
To some extent I have the same issue with Brits who have never seen other cultures except as holiday destinations!
I have lived and worked in France, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg and also spent 3 years living in Thailand.
In each of those countries I have learnt of the massive cultural differences that divide us one from another. Some are highly amusing, others deadly serious.
Some of my more narrow minded "stay at home" British friends accuse me of being a turncoat; of abandoning my 'Britishness' for 'Europeanism' and I guess that is true.
However, I am reminded of a friend of mine who is of Vietnamese origin and who was raised in Vietnam; only leaving to move to western Europe when she was about 20. Talking about the end of the Vietnam war, she referred to the defeat of the USA in Vietnam at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army, as "the liberation". I don't think too many Americans would see it that way. What you perceive depends on the point of view from which you perceive it!
I have learned not to answer you publicly, way too many people are finding me. It was a throwaway remark between friends! I didn't think anyone would notice!
The greatest trick the petrochemical industry managed to pull was convincing people who think of themselves as "environmentalists" that a few lithium mines are somehow worse than the entire global oil industry (which, remember, is also where the plastic being dumped in the sea comes from).
then there's the part where the conflate 'battery' with 'lithium'. Battery tech is developing REALLY FAST & the most interesting stuff is specifically designed to make the tech cheaper & less environmentally disruptive. (E.g. I love those massive iron-salt batteries - they're packed in large-size shipping containers & installed in massive arrays as buffer storage for wind- & solar-farms.)
I understand why people don’t want lithium mines at their doorstep. But on the other hand, I think there’s always an element on colonialism in many of those protests. People want to enjoy the goods that come from extraction, but are happy if extraction is done half the world away, on poor countries so they don’t have to see of suffer through the consequences. Anyways I think the solution to mobility is less cars, not just making all cars EVs, that should be the main goal.
Existing cars definitely need to be EV. But solving the “too many cars” problem isn’t hard. Netherlands does it. Even Spain has the largest high speed train network on the planet only second to a much bigger country, China. The real hard problem to solve is finding people who are good at, and want to solve hard problems and are also willing to go into politics and win elections. EVs won’t fix this, among many other problems: twitter.com/visionzeroyvr/stat…
@Miguel Arroz And yet Spain runs zero long distance trains to Portugal, and cancelled the only sleeper services it had with no plans for replacement.
Meanwhile the Algarve Line has exciting infrastructure plans to increase the average speed from about 60kph to about 75kph.
I’d love, love, love ubiquitous fast convenient rail, but the promise of it at some unspecified future date is frequently trotted out as an excuse to not need to decarbonise road transport, a thing that is already happening, and is quite easy to accelerate.
Yeah, I’m not saying decarbonizing and depolluting out cities isn’t important. I’m just saying that isn’t the panacea people are led to believe it is by the car industry. Long distance and cities are different problems, but living on a city core, I honestly think politicians should face trial every time someone gets hit by a car, because they do exactly jack shit to stop this mayhem. I’m preparing myself mentally to move out of Vancouver because I can’t take this shit any more.
It’s ironic that when I visit my parents in Portugal on a shitty Lisbon suburb, I can have the window open any time and not feel any real difference in the noise levels. Here, if I open the window, even during nighttime, my living room turns into a highway. The noise is unbearable. And I live in the city that calls itself “the greenest city”. This experience made me deeply hate cars and politicians.
@Alisdair Calder McGregor We don’t hear much about how you guys are getting on in the news. I was told there were going to be sunlit uplands. Sounds nice.
@Baroque Mongoose I could see how they would be a concern in the UK. Every time I go back there, the lamentable state of the mobile networks surprises me every time.
There was a period during which VoIP-only lines (FTTP) were provided with a battery backup. They dropped it as just not worthwhile, landlines are rarely the mechanism of last resort these days.
Here's what The Counteroffensive is reading today:
Tensions between Wagner and Russian forces have been a routine side show of the conflict so far. In a new escalation, a Russian officer is accused of drunkenly firing on Wagner members as they drove by.
Apple Watch workout app doesn’t track course for paddling for some strange reason, so I looked for an alternative that integrates with workouts, but adds course tracking.
Seems there are two. One is free, the other is 6 euros a month.
I hate this subscription crap. Just let us buy things and stop trying to turn the whole world into a glorified Company Store. I’d have gladly paid for either, but I’m not renting a workout tracking app, especially not at that price.
Developers: if I have a choice between a product I can buy, and one I have to rent, I will always go for the one I can buy.
: j@fabrica:~/src;
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to : j@fabrica:~/src; • •@Joseph Holsten In the silos? They definitely wouldn’t!
They really, really, really wouldn’t.
: j@fabrica:~/src;
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •My brain won’t let nightmare go. Just imagining the RNC “longtermist” approach to silos is terrifying. Like schools: how would they combine vouchers and book bans?
At least the anti-union, “just work harder to get advancement” sentiment would go over great.
But then again, every hard right post-apocalyptic fiction ends up with collective ownership by the “good guys”.
Sarah Brown
in reply to : j@fabrica:~/src; • •