2x4s, I guess 😃

but seriously, there’s many old buildings in Europe where you probably should consult a statics person before placing a large tub in your bathroom. Just guessing, but if you take a 300L bathtub which alone is a surprisingly light 30kgs and then put two people in it, you have a ~ 400kg load on a very small area

You seem like a rational, polite, and thoughtful person. Charming, even. So I’m blocking you.

Any time someone brings this up I wonder if they’re financed by the fossil fuel industry as it’s just such a weird point to make.

First: consider the alternatives: Every form of energy has an environmental cost associated with it. Surely we agree that while not perfect, PV is vastly superior in this regard to gas/coal/oil? It might even be less polluting than nuclear, but it’s early here and I’m too tired to research this.

Second: PV modules have a very long life span. At least 20 years. After that time, they’ll probably be operating still, but at maybe 60-80% of peak performance. That’s probably not good enough for commercial use, but I built myself a nice little garden shed solar array using “old” modules because they were basically free and I don’t care that much about peak performance in my use case. That’s to say, these things can still be used for a long time.

Third: if they ever do need to be completely recycled, well, that’s doable. In the EU, it’s actually compulsory. The processes are there, although they don’t quite scale yet. That’s mainly because there’s just not that many old modules to recycle yet.

sooo with all that going on, what exactly are you basing your point on?

I can scream Free Palestine and announce that I am the Pope while doing so. That doesn’t make it true.

I mean, him stating a name and his motivations and verifying that it was indeed this man and those were his motives are two different things.

I like journalism that verifies statements. Is there a man by that name and is he deceased? If the answer to those questions had been “no”, it would have been an entirely different story.

Scandinavia

I just wanted to downvote initially, but consider this:

a) your premise is wrong (“I read somewhere”) b) if it were true that there’s some innate tendency in Dutch people to not want to strive for anything, how do you explain their fairly advanced society? c) if it were true, they’d also not have a functioning government

your’s isn’t a good take

lots of good advice here. I just want to restate: do yourself a favor and migrate your HDDs over to any solid state drive. Whether that means “classic” SSDs with a SATA-Port or M.2s is your prerogative, but in either case you’ll start wondering how you could ever stand that s pinning noise and the vibrations and the slow, slow data transfer.

They very much did choose it. Makes you think what the other parent was called. If it’s a tossup between Blow and Finger, probably the right choice.

I clap really loudly. I cup the fingers off my right hand and bang them into the palm of my left hand. Sometimes people are annoyed by my choosing because it’s so loud. But we’re clapping? It’s supposed to be loud?

you’re probably right. I might have gotten misled because there’s an ongoing debate about unemployed refugees here and it’s mostly because we’re terrible bat getting them permits to work.

I mean yes, that too, but there actually is a labor shortage as well. We have 2.7M unemployed people and 700k open positions (source).

However, we need to account for

a) unemployed people that are not able to work due to illness etc b) those 700k open positions are only the ones that are reported to our labor agency (Arbeitsagentur).

If you account for that, we probably have closer to 2M open positions.

Imho 2M open positions makes more sense as there about 100k open positions in child care (Kita) alone.

I mean, you’re going back a to true/false dichotomy.

How did you jump from a discussion about opposing perspectives on a single, unknowable truth to “one must be right and everything else a lie”?

Very much this. I was an exchange student in the US in 2005 and my US history teacher (yes, their history classes are commonly split between us and “rest of the world”) exclusively worked with excerpts from Zinn.

I understood once I leafed through the official textbook. It was about as bad as you can imagine.

So yes, Zinn is far from “objective” or “neutral”. It’s a deliberate choice because

a) it’s supposed to counterbalance the terribly whitewashed school books and b) there’s a case to be made that no text, not even scientific ones, is ever truly objective or neutral because reality is a construct.

The latter is a more philosophical debate, but nonetheless an important one. Since there is no single objective truth, you’ll usually dare better by considering varying interpretations of “truth” before making your mind up.

In other words: you’ll never get the full picture, but if you assemble enough puzzle pieces you increase your chances of understanding the bigger picture, and, more importantly, you’ll gain a sense for when somebody is just off their rocker.

A 7 months old random fediverse account is a bot? You know that the entirety of the fediverse is like 0.001 percent of the user base of the social media giants?

That would be money really badly spent on astro-turfing bots.

I can’t help but feel like your sampling might be skewed.

Vollautomaten (I. E. Fully automated coffee machines that brew espressos and cappuccinos etc) tend to make worse coffee, I agree. That’s why I don’t use the one in the office.

Having an experienced barista grind you an exactly measured dose fresh for your coffee at a good Café is quite nice, on the other hand.

But that’s nothing to do with Germany or Australia.

translating animal languages

“How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth With ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to decipher what animals are saying. Their hope: By truly listening to nature, humans will decide to protect it.”

Wired Magazine August 2023

Because I’m not a native speaker and I thought that was the right word 🤷‍♂️

I think part of it is that movies are edited differently now. We’ve become used to much faster pacing, much denser storytelling and sweeping drone shots of everything, so older movies generally feel a bit lame now