UN workers participated in October 7th attacks. UN currently has no standing on this issue and their current leadership is largely antisemitic.
If you did that, what would happen is that Iran would overrun a disarmed Israel and like what happened in the Balkans or Syria or Rwanda or Jordan or Egypt, the UN would just stand by and let the atrocities happen.
Iâ(TM)m fairly sure on one side that isnâ(TM)t exactly true. You think because it makes sense in your western doctrine, it would make sense everywhere else.
Islam is a religion of death. About 15-25% of Muslims follow Imam that promote the death cult part of the religion. Those people raise their children thinking this world is temporary and the highest virtue is killing apostates, Jews, Christians and unbelievers (in that order). This is a similar mindset of the Hitler youth or many other cults and child soldier indoctrination (even so-called Christians like Jehovah Witnesses have this idea, theyâ(TM)re just not making up a few billion people).
All religions at their core think like that, the enlightenment just hasnâ(TM)t happened in the Muslim world yet and until the other 75% of Muslims start speaking up against those, nothing will change.
On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.
Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?
They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.
SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.
The current
We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.
Slashdot seems to be on a tear making up headlines lately. This one is at least similar to the actual article title.
"No One Buys Books Anymore" implies this is a new situation. The article is "No One Buys Books" which I suppose might seem true to a blog author who gives it away for free: "Is anyone else alarmed that the top tier is book sales of 75,000 units and up? One post on Substack could get more views than that.." right down to the excessive ellipses.
Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?
It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.
These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?
Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.
Weird market!
PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.
This is a myth possibly originating with The Martian, where the main character goes to great lengths to bury his RTG. That was silly, he should have used the thing as a foot warmer in the hab, and to charge his iPod.
They're potentially dangerous if you crack them open and munch on the plutonium inside, but they're generally also designed to survive reentry intact so good luck with that.
Don't worry, they've decided they need to get back to the moon right now because the Chinese are interested. There was a documentary on Netflix about it.
Mars' atmosphere is too thin for realistic passenger flight, it's just thick enough to be a PITA for both landing and taking off, any colony on Mars would have to be pretty self-sufficient right away since resupply is once every couple years, it's too far away and too big to supply anything useful to Earth, and is there actually a practical difference between 1/6 and 1/3 G?
Meanwhile the moon is close, made out of resources that would be useful for a space-based industry, and much easier to come and go from. Also, there's no thought it might have once had life, which means there's no real argument for mining the crap out of it. On the other hand, there's no thought it might have once had life.
It's not that things aren't selling, it's that the stuff they like to push doesn't sell. Tradpub was always hit heavy, with the hits generally not being what the pickers thought was 'good literature'. Combine this with 90+% of their highly advertised biographies being either in kind political donations or personal favorite celebs of the higher ups in the publishing companies and it's no wonder that sales are so lopsided.
I do think the techie / scifi sensibility plays a lot into all this. But the cosmos doesn't owe anything to the fantasies of scifi authors (or the linguistic particulars that make one tech sound more like "the future" than another one, like batteries).
Information tech played out much differently than 20c scifi pictured it. Same for transportation (incl. space flight and cars).
..when we started seeing how lithium-ion powered cars were performing vs fuel cell vehicles, and doing the math on their relative efficiency.
As for Toyota, I think their fallout with A123 Systems (re: the latter's battery patent) defined not just Toyota's but the Japanese attitude in general toward BEVs. There seemed to be a reckoning over there that they just weren't going to be able to compete with the US or China on battery tech. I even think this pro-H2/anti-battery mood contributed toward the ouster of Nissan's CEO, Carlos Ghosn, who brought the Leaf BEV to market.
As someone who has long championed BEVs as superior, I feel somewhat vindicated in reading about Toyota's FCEV flop, especially when people cite long refueling times (a weakness of BEVs). But I will also say that I thought BEV "fast charge" was a dead end and that the future would be swap-able battery packs allowing "re-fueling" in just a few minutes. I still think that makes sense for the future, and I can see how car mfgs would start supporting swap-able "booster" packs which could eventually lead to cars that use 100% swap-able batteries. Otherwise, the Chinese model for battery swap might also take hold. Finally, I think swap-able batteries call for an industry 'surplus' of battery stock that would be queued for re-charging at optimal time-of-day at refueling stations... this would act as a big enabler for intermittent renewable energy (over and above what V2G provides) as consumers would feel less pressure to plan the charging of their cars at certain times of day (and less pressure to find charge points and keep their cars attached to the grid).
They did that in Europe, now they removed those incentives, so employers are telling employees to charge at home.
If your plan only works with continuous, large scale incentives, it is a bad plan.
Too costly and they tend to catch fire, also needs a big footprint for very little energy. You're much better off storing water but that is something California already has trouble with so unlikely to be viable. There is a reason battery banks in eg. datacenter only provide 15s of power, despite having the same footprint as the generator.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
