eBay started offering to ship stuff for sellers recently. You buy the shipping from them, and drop the package off at some local collection point.

If it gets damaged during shipping, it's eBay's problem. They refund the buyer, and you keep the money from the sale too. I guess they claim from the courier (Evri in the UK), but obviously are reliant on the buyer to send photos showing a damaged package. I imagine very few take photos before ripping it open.

I'm pretty sure some people just sell broken stuff and blame the courier when the buyer complains. Now it's eBay's loss. Doesn't seem like a sustainable business model.

It might be a tolerance issue. If you use mortar to join everything then one block being slightly larger than another doesn't matter, you just slightly vary the thickness of the material between blocks so it all evens out. If the blocks themselves lock together then they have to be quite precisely dimensioned, or you end up with gaps.

In any case, there are better ways to build homes. Make all the parts in a factory and assemble them on-site. They can be a mix of standard parts and bespoke ones, since a custom size is just a quick adjustment of some CNC parameters.

Yeah, and even if the policy changed tomorrow, you can't easily rebuild cities...

Humans -- most of us -- don't think goblins are real, let alone important. But what if the AI has picked up on sparse evidence, so subtle that humans have never noticed it, that proves that goblins are real and need to be discussed more. It may be trying to save us from a pending gobocalypse.

ISTM that there ought to be consequences for this kind of thing slipping by unchecked. I don't know who or what in this case, but I would suggest the immediate disbarment in the somewhat common case of a lawyer who submits a legal brief with fake citations. Some professionals need to be held accountable for doing professional work.

Not eve language per se, but just of available text.

Yeah but when they break up into lots of fragments and deny those orbits... At the very least it might encourage Musk to turn Starlink off over the contested area.

Anarchy is reserved for billionaires.

The other risk is that both Russia and Iran have the ability to get stuff to orbit, and Russia has demonstrated the ability to hit satellites. If the terminals were not giving them useful into on the enemy, they might decide that Starlink is a threat and start shooting those birds down. The debris will quickly make LEO a dangerous place for at least a few years, probably longer.

Days? You mean minutes.

You have two choices. Set off 15 minutes earlier, or buy one of those cars that charges in 5 minutes. Hopefully your government didn't ban them.

Sorry, I'm not sacrificing my health so you can save a small amount of time.

Renewables are a threat to not just the people who got rich off oil, but to the American way of life. If the natural monopolies on energy production are broken because now anyone can make their own energy at much lower cost, well that's communism.

Yes it is, because what they are really saying is "screw the planet, screw your lungs, I need to save a few minutes!"

It's funny how when a Chinese company makes a really good car, it's just a knock-off using stolen technology and the fair price is heavily subsidized by the CCP. When a Chinese company names a nuclear reactor, it's because they have very sensible nuclear regulations and have developed low cost manufacturing techniques, without any free government money so of course we should steal, I mean copy it.

The reality is that the government there got behind nuclear to give the industry certainty. The technology was licensed from the French, from Russia, and from the US. Despite it all, nuclear accounts for less than 5% of electricity produced in China, and future plants to build 150 more plants at a cost of half a trillion Euro are in doubt because of the shear scale of renewables there. Back in February renewables reached 52% of installed capacity, exceeding fossil fuels in output for the year.

My Pixel phone has on-device voice recognition, and it's extremely accurate. Like better than a human's first pass accurate. There are some things it struggles on, like odd place names, but even then if it's something like Google Maps it tends to figure out what I meant anyway.

So I'm not sure why YouTube is so bad, because clearly Google has better technology than this and with YouTube has the luxury of being able to take its time, rather than having to produce real-time output.

I hear that the infrastructure in the US is very bad, but then I see videos showing people using it for very long distance trips (driving in shifts) without issue.

Personally I just drive until the battery shows 20% and then pull into the next service area and use their chargers. Only happens a few times a year and doesn't cost me any time because I'd stop for coffee and a snack anyway. Even a relatively modest (by modern standards) charge speed of 140kW is enough to refill the battery by the time I am done.