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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of “CO2 emission credits” from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don’t emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

    The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

    Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn’t need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.



  • Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn’t really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

    “Saving Europe from Hitler” paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.






  • The planet’s gravity is not what is causing the time dilation, but rather the gravity of the supermassive black hole that it was orbiting. The black hole is somehow spinning extremely rapidly, causing frame dragging, which creates a particular stable orbit very close to the event horizon.

    Apparently the energy requirements of the orbit would preclude ever reaching the planet except by slingshot manoeuvres around intermediate size black holes or neutron stars.





  • Yeah, “percentage points” is used to refer to a difference between two percentages.

    For example, let’s say some company previously held 25% of the market, but grew and is now holding 50% of the market. The company’s market share actually doubled in size, which we could call an increase of 100%. Or, looking at it another way, because they grew from 25% to 50%, you can call it an increase of 25 percentage points.


  • Rigor in definitions allows us to express a lot of complex things in a compact form. this allows us to treat “Cars” as something different than “Motorcycles” while both a motorized vehicles.

    Meh. There’s plenty of room in the gray zone between “car” and “motorcycle” where things like this or this can exist. The botanical world has worked very hard to create rigorous definitions of fruits and vegetables only to be completely ignored by cooks. The culinary world in general has done just fine for centuries without rigorously specifying whether taco’s are sandwiches and cereal is a soup.

    As long as it is generally understood what people mean by a word when they use it everything will be mostly fine. REST is an understood term, whether the inventor of the term meant something else by it is immaterial.





  • GOG is getting a nice little pr moment off of this but you’re getting basically the same license, no matter where you buy the game.

    The root of evil in digital distribution is the DMCA anti circumvention clause: it is illegal to circumvent a DRM protection to gain access to some copyrighted work, even if you in actuality possess a license to the work. This law gives big platforms far too much power to control how you interact with their products.

    It should be legal to modify a work to allow it to be played offline, to make copies for archival purposes, to fix the work to run on newer platforms, etc. As long as you have a license to the work you should be allowed to take steps to ensure your rightful access to it.

    By the way, the root beyond roots of evil in digital distribution is the insane length of copyrights themselves. Why are patents 20 years, but copyright extends to 120+? The answer is pure greed.