Palm trees kinda grow in Iceland ;) I had a windmill palm (in an area with geothermal-heated soil) last for like 4 years, though it slowly declined each winter. You can keep them alive by covering them with Christmas lights and then a blanket.

It does get overplayed though, with people acting like there was no reason to name Iceland "Ísland" and no reason to name Greenland "Grænland". There's plenty of ice here (much of the middle of the country doesn't melt until quite late in the year, and settlers approaching from the south and east sailed past the huge terminal glaciers of Vatnajökull), and the places that were settled in Greenland weren't all that different from e.g. Vestfir(th)ir. Grænland was chosen as a name to advertise it, but it's not like it was some sort of lie - most new settlements, even random villages wherever you are, are generally given pleasing names to try to attract people.

Also, Iceland got its name due to Flóki "Raven" Vilgerðarson, the viking-discoverer of Iceland (though the Irish already knew of Iceland). He had a clever trick to find islands, which was having ravens (land birds) on his boat; they'd fly up, look for land, and if they spotted it, beeline for it, but otherwise had no choice but to return to the boat. Ravens are quite large, black birds and thus easily visible to track from a boat. Anyway, his first winter at Bar(th)arströnd was abnormally cold, and there was sea ice visible offshore (something quite rare in Iceland), so he chose the name "Ísland".

It's "ís" (accented), and is pronounced "eece" :) "Eece-land" (land said like with a British accent, not an American one)

Fun fact: while ís does indeed mean "ice", it's not the colloquial word for ice - like, if you want ice at a restaurant, you ask for "klaki" (people sometimes jokingly refer to being in Iceland as "á klakanum" ("on the ice" ;) ). "Ís" these days is used as short for "rjómaís", lit. "cream-ice", aka ice cream - if you ask for "ís" at a restaurant, you'll get ice cream.

So in modern parliance, the country is "Ice Cream Land". ;) (Honestly, our ice cream is really good here - try the bilberry ice cream at Erpssta(th)ir for example :) )

Do you think it is interesting that the century during which an ice age was ending is the one used as a baseline for climate analysis?

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

"The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.[2] It was not a true ice age of global extent.[3] "

Literally right at the top of the article.

Also, for the record, there is no single "baseline timeperiod for climate analysis".

You clearly aren't a fan. If you were, you'd knew the precise movie where instead of being competent and making the right decisions and getting fucked anyway, the franchise turned to supposedly smart people doing dumb shit all the time.

For example?

We will never totally stop using oil of course, but we need to mostly stop burning it for fuel, outside of a limited number of applications. We need to do something about plastic pollution too.

I'd say that will he the harder transition to manage. Electrifying everything isn't too difficult and most of the tech is already mature. Replacing or dealing with plastic pollution seems harder, as will be dealing with increasing costs as fuel oil product consumption is greatly reduced.

That's one of the reasons why so many young people in the West are disillusioned with Western democracy. They want somewhere to live, they can't afford anything. Meanwhile in China the government plans ahead, builds massive new cities, and young people can afford to buy a nice modern apartment or house.

Having visited one such development, it was like walking into one of those show houses. Not an IKEA one either, a high end luxury one. I didn't look too closely to see how much was real solid wood and how much was veneer, but the apartment was spacious and very well furnished and finished. The owner was a logistics office worker and his wife a full time mother.

We really need to figure out how to deliver that with Western style democratic systems, because the old "look how bad life is in the Soviet Union!" isn't going to work this time.

European manufacturers are finally getting their act together on EVs it seems. The Skoda Elroq is probably going to be the best selling EV this year, in the UK.

We need EVs, we need to get off oil. Some pain is inevitable, all we can do is delay it, which makes it worse.

It needs to be inconvenient and convoluted enough that clueless users can't be tricked into doing it via phishing.

False. It's the Dancing Pigs problem.

As long as there's a method, someone will write instructions that people will follow. And malware actors will hijack whatever method to install ransomware. You can bet one step will have people running command line commands and there was that ransomware installed via the command line.

The urge to get pirated apps will drive people to whatever the method is. There will be dozens of easy to follow tutorials, videos, and other things. The only saving grace might be the chance for AI assistants to screw it up completely and wipe people's computers when they try.

Well, better than Hyundai did, where the whole MAGA "oh noes immigrants" overrodw the whole "Made in America" and handcuffed, detained and locked up a bunch of South Koreans in those miserable ICE facilities to the point every one of them filed human rights violations. It took South Korean diplomats a week to get them back.

I'm guessing by the time Trump took over Toyota had sent back all its workers and it's up to the locals to operate the plant, so they got lucky. Chances are though the Japanese engineers that were providing supervision likely left out of caution.

So the plant is there, it's able to make batteries, but it's likely not running at full capacity because the expertise needed to do so doesn't dare enter the US. (Especially after what happened to South Korea).

Though, it's not likely to be an issue, since EV sales have tanked, so it might be too late.

Whatever method it is, it will probably defeat the purpose of ending unsigned side loading. Whatever the hoops are, users will be trained to jump through them.

Obtainium is such a useful tool. As well as open source apps, it can update apps that you aren't allowed to install in your region via Google Play. Very handy if you travel a lot, as developers often put regional restrictions on things like transport and loyalty apps.

Palms also grow in Cornwall.

https://www.cornwalls.co.uk/ph...