I'm not saying no to alcohol, or no to driving. I'm saying no to the combination of alcohol and driving.

This might surprise you, but it is possible to eat a meal without drinking alcohol. People do it all the time. It's also entirely possible to travel to and from a restaurant or a bar without operating a vehicle, if you do want to enjoy alcohol. It might be less convenient, but it sure as heck beats running someone over on the way home because you had just one drink too many to be able to brake in time.

Not drinking and driving isn't some insurmountable obstacle. It's incredibly simple. If you feel otherwise, you might have an alcohol problem.

The only one that makes sense: if you're going to drive, you don't drink. Period. Reaction times can be measurably slower as low as 0.02. Drinking alcohol and then driving is not some human right that it makes sense to legislate based on people that have high tolerance. It's extremely easy to keep track of "have had a drink/have not had a drink", whereas it makes no sense to have people ingest a substance known to reduce judgement, then asking them to judge whether they are impaired or not.

The only thing that makes sense is to effectively just not allow alcohol and driving to co-exist at all, legally and culturally. I'm trying to play devil's advocate and think of good arguments for the opposite, but I'm having a real hard time. "But, I really like wine with dinner, " or "but, if you can't even have a drink or two, alcoholics won't be able to drive, " is about the best I can come up with. Neither seem like terribly strong arguments. And that comes from someone who very much identifies with the first of the two. Driving is a privilege that just isn't compatible with alcohol.

IMO, making drunk driving illegal, would be a good start.

The US legal limit is so high that you can drive drunk, legally. Just not really, really, drunk. Telling people they can drink until their judgment is getting quite impaired, but then stop if they're going to drive, is not a great way to cultivate a "don't drink and drive" culture.

As a contrast, the US legal limit is _four times_ what is where I live. Here, driving at the US legal limit would mean a mandatory prison sentence, loss of license for a minimum of 12 months, and 1.5 times your monthly salary as a fine.

nt

I honestly thought they changed to purely reality content decades ago. If these "actual Music TV" channels were still available where I live, they seem to have been hiding well. I would be sad, if I didn't hold my MTV lament some time around the turn of the millennium. Still, a belated toast from my teenage self for the after midnight version of Poison.

This means they didn't just take the old files and upscaled them.

Hear, hear. On the desktop it can at least be be made somewhat configurable via extensions, but on Android TV we're stuck with the mess YT decides to saddles us with. I just don't get why they don't give us tons of options to customize it to personal preference. Well, I guess I somewhat get it for non-premium, in that their incentive there is to keep people watching in order to generate ad revenue so that's their sole focus (and presumably the annoying choices they make serve that purpose), but for those with premium there's just no excuse.

According to Agora Energiewende, Germany has been a net importer since 2023.

Phasing out nuclear power before replacement sources were built, was probably not ideal. It's one of several reasons electricity prices across Europe has shot up since 2021, after being stable since 2008 (as far back as I found statistics for in the time I wanted to spend digging).

I see. As long as you can think of cities that are not affected by a heat wave, heat wave does not exist? Looking at the weather map, it seems to affect about half the continent. Just because you're not in that half, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Do you live in every area of every country in Europe, or just one that happens to not be hit by a heat wave? Because I'm in Norway, and the place has been melting for a while now. Here, heat wave is defined as five consecutive days with temperatures above 27 degrees, we've been getting 35 at times. Today's peak where I live was 30. The forecast currently indicates it might drop to 25-26 next week (which is still above normal for anything but a day or two across all of summer). Making it extra special, it has been hitting the entire country at once, something that's almost unheard of.

As for the general trend, the statistics point in one direction. The frequency of heat waves here have doubled compared to thirty years ago. Areas that have never before recorded a heat wave, are now getting them.

Thankfully, I have a heat pump, otherwise my life would have been utterly miserable for the past few weeks.

Thanks for the input.

What mainly caught my eye were phrases from the summary like "The problem is that the AI being used here makes human voice actors obsolete," which just doesn't seem to be applicable to this use case at all. There's just no conceivable way this feature could exist without TTS. If the summary had indicated it was over whether or not the estate had the authority to agree to the use, or that this wasn't cleared with the estate, or something along those lines, I wouldn't have thought much of it.

But, it seems JEJ had licensed his voice specifically for this type of use, and got paid for that. Based on other bits in the summary, where they claim to support the actor/estate's ability to do such licensing, this seems like it should be a non-issue. In the end, I don't care enough to dig into it. I was just wondering if I was missing something obvious.

From what I've seen, it's an LLM with a Darth Vader text to speech on top of it that players can interact with by voice. Are they arguing that they could provide a hundred thousand Darth Vader voice impersonators to interact with players real-time? Or is it a more generic "there is a voice there, give us money now" sort of thing?

Curious, I have no idea why someone would label that as trolling. I'm referencing events that have been in the news recently. Oh well.

I don't pay all that much attention to these things, but from what I've read they wouldn't be the first country to sign a Starlink contract in the apparent hope that being nice to Elon will make the trade war easier on them. If so, yes, bribery.

That seems like a bold claim to make. An entire country's grid goes down and you figure they instantly understand the root cause?

I mean, it would have been great if someone back in 2003 had stood up after a few minutes and yelled "there's a race condition in the management system!" when the US north east went dark, but that really only happens in movies. In reality, things like this can take months to investigate. Of course, the cause here might be a lot less subtle and more readily identifiable, but still.