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Comment Re:Are We Still Talking About NFTs? (Score 1) 22

Just one example of why slow govt is good govt.

Not really, as we've seen the slower it is the more chance it has to take and strengthen roots. A despotic reigime that takes over quickly tends to be the easiest to remove. The one that has had years, if not decades to move their people into key positions will take a Herculean effort to dislodge.

Comment Re:Chlorine Dioxide? (Score 1) 106

ClO2 is a gas. Liu poured citric acid into bleach (don't do it).

Liu has been making the solution in his rented apartment in Beijing by mixing citric acid with sodium chlorite, according to an account he shared earlier this month on his Substack that revealed that a âoeviolent explosionâ occurred when he made a mistake.

That excuse sounds like "Officer, I swear it's not a meth lab".

Comment Re:Wait, what? (Score 1) 190

More like AC is not needed because generally speaking Europe doesn't get that hot for most of its history. It can get cold, but, it rarely gets very hot.

Indeed, the southermost points of Europe like Spain are really only as far south as Northern California - most of Europe is to the north and thus it doesn't get very hot.

Indeed, air conditioning is needed in the US south, but no equivalent place really exists for Europe, for those latitudes are occupied by Africa and Middle East. And with the Mediterranean Sea helping moderate the southern temperatures means high temperatures in Europe are the exception, not the rule.

Even in North America the Pacific North West region traditionally has never needed air conditioning simply because heatwaves are rare and the region is very temperate. Even reaching the mid-80s during the peak of summer was something that happened for maybe a few days in the past.

Pretty much this.

It rarely gets that warm here but it's pretty bad when it does because we build our houses to handle the cold (and it does get cold) so a heatwave is pretty uncomfortable. It's not enough for me to rush out and buy air conditioning but it's clearly making some people consider it. Larger buildings typically have a HVAC system that does both heating and cooling.

I used to live in Australia where most houses will never have a heater because it never gets that cold but you'd quickly find living in a house without aircon very uncomfortable.

The problem we've got is that climate change means we're having more heat waves up here in the cold places and more cold snaps down there in the hot places.

As a side note, one of the most comfortable places I've ever stayed has been up in the Colombian Andes, a pleasant 17-30 C all year round but the altitude means you don't get the oppressive humidity typical of that latitude. Still get the tropical rain though, it buckets down but usually only for an hour or two (still enough to make Calle 10 into Rio 10 but that's mainly due to the roads being built with poor drainage). .

Comment Re:I have a quesion (Score 3, Interesting) 230

"Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.â
- Authur Schopenhauer , a miserable old bastard who was none the less right about most things.

Its fine to be fond of your own country, but its a dull and useless thing to think it better than any other country. The simple fact is, the US doesn't have the capacity to entirely manufacture a modern computer, and that particular fact doesn't matter since a slab of silicon has no innate features that cares one iota which particular set of national borders it was made in, nor does the remarkably low unemployment rate in the US (low 4%) particularly justify settling for inferior or expensive to aquire one purely US manufactured, even if it was available.

The problem with the US is not just the level of jingoism, but the level of jingoism with the idea of American exceptionalism.

It's not enough for Americans to believe that the US is a good place to live, it must always and automatically be the best at everything. So when they're confronted with the truth that parts of the US and US society are not very good they must create a fantasy world that every other country must be worse. This has lead to some very odd conversations with Americans where they're shocked to find out that we're not having daily riots here in Europe, we haven't been overtaken by whatever bad guy Fox News is spouting, we have decent health care, jobs, so on and so forth because they've been trained to believe that things have to be worse in every other country and the US has reached a point where it can no longer hide the problems it has.

I work with a German guy who moved to the UK and conversations often go "I like X about the UK and I think Germany does Y better", I think most people can happily admit that both Germany and the UK are good places to live.

Comment Re:Pigsty Muddy (Score 1) 63

Wow, someone holding a lot of debt makes them a poor candidate to take on further debt?

Gotta say I'm impressed. This may be the least newsworthy story I've seen on Slashdot yet. With a few tweaks in wording, this story could've been published in the sixteenth century. And still been a major duh.

No, someone with lots of debt is clearly in capable of handling more debt. /HomerSimpsonLogic

What annoys and confounds me is that someone who lives their life with little or no debt is considered a bigger risk because he hasn't been borrowing money their entire life. So someone who saves, buys things outright, pays their bills on time from their own money is more of a risk than someone who uses their entire pay cheque to service last months debt so they are forced to put next month's expenses and rent on more debt. So when they do want to get a loan for a house or nice car, lenders are reluctant to speak to them because they've not been paying lenders before, despite clearly being able to handle their own finances.

Comment Re:Just conserving energy (Score 1) 84

There was already so much energy wasted by producing the answer, why waste more on critical thinking and confirming the information?

Yep, if it's a simple query that doesn't have a complex answer such as "what year was the Forth bridge completed" or "what kind of paint do they use on the Forth bridge" I don't really need to check a link. It's not something that is vital if I don't have a 100% correct answer. Then again, AI is useless at producing a complex answer like "how do I automate a daily email", especially as that has zero context, getting that wrong means it doesn't work or worse, works but in a way that'll get me fired for spamming the company.

Comment Re:Falling birthrate (Score 1) 160

I personally see very little use for the Department of Education, so removing it would be fine by me. I think what little good they do could easily be done by the states and that's where it should be done (not by the feds).

All that does is give states like Kansas a pass to plaster the 10 commandments everywhere and do away with science because it contradicts their beliefs. Funny how that argument stops when you want to display passages from the Quran. Oh you have a problem with pausing class to pray towards Mecca? The country needs minimum standards.

Which will just result in some states becoming a cheap labour class as other states are the only one's producing students to an acceptable level for tertiary education... Which is what the Project2025 overlords want, except they would prefer all states to become a cheap labour class that doesn't have the ability to question them.

It's take 10-20 years to pay dividends, but it'll reach a point where someone from Kansas will just exist to work in the local store whilst companies employ talent from out of state to do the jobs that pay more than minimum wage. These won't be the best imported workers either because there's no way they'll want their kids going to a school in Kansas.

Comment Re:The UK gave up its sovereignty (Score 1) 53

When it exited the European union. The entire point of the European Union was to create a unified front against the United States. A single European country cannot stand up to the economic might of America. The European Union was explicitly put in place to deal with that situation so that individual countries couldn't be picked apart by America and controlled.

It's far from the entire point, although it is one of the considerations.

I'm originally from a developed nation outside the EU (Australia) and people in the UK had no idea how much power the EU gave them vis a vis with the United States, not just the US but everyone really. A trading bloc of 400 million gives you a lot of leverage. The UK is still learning the hard way that on it's own, we're nowhere near that powerful. One of the reasons we're not learning is that the US is not leaning on the UK like it does other countries like Australia (the US is having it's own problems, like a mad leader committed to the downfall of it's hegemony).

The EU was about not just trade (prosperity) but ensuring peace within it's members. Part of peace is human rights which the EU cares quite strongly about. In fact the openness on trade is somewhat more loosely enforced with members regularly skirting or even flat out ignoring the rules. France famously refused to import British beef, I believe they are also turning their nose up at Irish beef too, and I'm not just picking on France, the UK abused the system too, the EU largely ignored it as the system was by and large working as designed and it understands that you pick your battles. Let the little stuff go so you can take care of the big shit that goes wrong.

Comment Re:Seriously stupid (Score 1) 13

You need to conduct your transactions on multiple independent systems, simultaneously.

Think of it as RAID for applications and data.

Have your shit redundant, such that if any one goes down, it doesn't matter. Further, when that system comes back up, it's automatically brought up to date by the living systems.

Not cheap, or easy, which is why most places don't do it.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's a lot harder than it sounds as you usually end up with a few single points of failure.

Also you're thinking about the problem from a technical perspective, C-Levels will be considering it from a financial perspective where the Ford Pinto effect, where they determined it was cheaper to compensate the victims than to fix the Pinto. Given a system that isn't life or death, they will be considering the costs of not operating vs the cost of increasing complexity for mitigation.

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