I wish people would stop conflating energy with electricity.

So Germany had ⅔ of it's electricity from renewables, but still has gas for warming homes, petrol for cars, diesel for trucks, and so on.

Chiropractors are basically pseudo-scientists. They claim to be able to do all kinds of random crap by manipulating your back, like getting rid of headaches, helping you lose weight, curing addictions, and so on.

Honestly any real doctor referring you to a chiropractor should have their medical license revoked.

Please stop falling for efforts to divide the working class.

Amy such efforts should immediately be viewed as suspicious. The divide is not old vs young, or white vs black, or even rich vs poor. It is the capital class versus the labor class.

Boomers grew up in a very tiny slice of global history where the working class actually got improvements in their material conditions, so it is hard for them to understand the struggles of people before or after... but they are being ground down by capitalism the same as the rest of us.

Your comrades at work may not understand the importance of unions or collective action, but they are still your comrades. Your grandmother may not realize that all of her extra productivity went to make billionaires richer, but she is still your comrade.

I worked with a French guy in Amsterdam. His parents were Portuguese, but he was born and raised in France. As far as he was concerned, he was French.

Contrariwise, I worked with an American woman in Virginia. Her grandparents were Irish, and she considered herself Irish, in spite of having been born and raised in America, and both of her parents having been born and raised in America.

It is a kind of fetish in America to hyphenate yourself. Irish-American. Cuban-American. And so on.

My own theory is that this is because America has no culture going back many generations, so people try to find one.

I had a friend when I was in college. Her older loser brother who lived in her mom's basement called one day. He asked if he could stay with her. She knew him and didn't want to have him staying with her and her boyfriend, taking their sofa, eating their food, and so on. She said "sorry but no".

Apparently he called everyone he knew looking for a place to crash because their mom gave him an ultimatum. Nobody would take him.

After he tried everyone, he killed himself in that fucking basement. 😖

From RFC 2804:

• The IETF believes that adding a requirement for wiretapping will make affected protocol designs considerably more complex. Experience has shown that complexity almost inevitably jeopardizes the security of communications even when it is not being tapped by any legal means; there are also obvious risks raised by having to protect the access to the wiretap. This is in conflict with the goal of freedom from security loopholes.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2804/

This was written in 2000 in response to US government requests to add backdoors to voice-over-IP (VoIP) standards.

It was recognized 25 years ago that having tapping capabilities is fundamentally insecure.

Tests showed the house covered in the new paint used 30 to 40 percent less electricity for air conditioning than the other houses.

Wow!

Big if true. 😆

Reality is stranger than fiction:

https://www.patrickcraig.co.uk/other/compression.htm

Call yourself an "expat" and apparently you never have to integrate.

We've had a similar ban in the Netherlands for a year or two now. Mobile phones were already not allowed in classes. Kids seem to have survived.

Both Reagan and Bush Sr. got knighted.

https://royalcentral.co.uk/uk/queen/the-us-presidents-knighted-by-the-queen-and-king-george-vi-125671/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If a human did this, they would at least get a ticket with a fine, and have the violation recorded on their license which would be revoked if it kept happening. With the computer controlled car, the cop called customer support and was like, "hey you might want to look into it or something."

I guess we can't expect the people hired to protect capital to act against capital, but it's still a bit disturbing.

This has been waiting months, and I installed it today to avoid a more difficult and important project. 😉

It was stolen from a judge. So the police treated it as important. You know, the same as when a rich person is harmed

Nixon was preemptively pardoned.

You missed a perfect chance to switch to induction! 😔

In the eternal words of Bob Marley:

Some people think

Great God will come from the sky

Take away everything

And make everybody feel high

But if you know what life is worth

You will look for yours on earth

And now we see the light

We're going to stand up for our right

It only took Haiti 122 years to pay off the French.

Liberte, egalite, fraternite. 😑

I work at a company big into AI. We build our own models. Our senior management drank the Kool-Aid. We don't have search on our Intranet any more, just LLM chatbots.

Our TLS certificate expired last week on our main web page. I tried to find the contact details for the team responsible and the thing just hallucinated e-mail addresses.

Needless to say, I'm less excited than you.

Both true and not true.

The idea that you have to register to vote is not normal in most democracies.

For example, in the Netherlands you have to carry ID at all times, whether you are voting or just going for a walk. You don't have to register to vote, you just get mail a while before the election with a paper that you take to the voting booth, which is usually a few minutes walk away.

Such a system prevents fraud (which is already a non-issue in the USA, even with its confusing and difficult system), and also makes it easy for as many people to vote.

The goal of voter ID laws is to provide ways to disenfranchise people, by making things slightly harder and create plausible points to not count some ballots.