Would make a fun CK3 map ;)

Depends on the country. Corn syrup in everything is a distinctly American phenomenon

Fact: pineapple is great on pizza ;)

I also like adding bacon, but my arteries don’t like it as much ;)

Anyone who has read the books want to chime in? I read the books and they had a “painting in a museum” type quality to them, where each chapter was a well described static scene. Fun concepts (in particular, the Dark Forest concept), but really dry prose…

4D conspriacy theory: was actually killed by Airbus, because the negative press for Boeing will push the Airbus stock price up…

I feel bad for the guy. This is going to put a wet blanket on future whistleblowers, regardless of the actual cause.

I’m eating pineapple on pizza right now!

BBQ chicken, pineapple, green pepper, BBQ sauce base.

Somewhere in Italy, a collective groan was heard.

Malicious Corporate Compliance

Hopefully not too depressing of a take, but:

On the scale of the planet as a whole system (looking at the forest, and not the trees): humans are commodity – there are billions upon billions of humans. But there is only one planet, with one atmosphere. If we wait for every human life to have unlimited value in every jurisdiction on earth – we will wait forever. And then it will be too late and we’re all going to fry in our utopian hell on earth.

In whatever jurisdiction you’re in, you should be pushing for large scale planet-affecting changes to how the civilization behaves with regard to our stewardship of the planet.

And yes, you can do both at the same time.

(I’m a huge fan of Iain M Banks’s Culture series. There is a Utopian future that is possible, where everything is simultaneously carefully managed, but individual freedom and prosperity coexists.)

Fire control is going to be a major engineering challenge on a civilization scale in the upcoming centuries if we want to preserve our carbon sink forests. Should be an interesting challenge, politically, to direct money into it. It’s large scale geoengineering…

Meow

I mean, python has pickle and people use that to store config. It’s a weird practice, and totally unsafe, but it works well enough. This wouldn’t be that different.

So – pure curiosity… Which countries could yet still potentially join NATO.

Switzerland doesn’t join anything ever, so it’s the dark horse. But since everything is done by referendum there, it could change on a dime if the public demanded it.

Austria literally has it in their constitution that they aren’t allowed – but in theory they could change their constitution (unlikely).

Moldova has the whole Transnistria incentive – but NATO would be shy about that one, because that could potentially immediately put them in hot conflict. However, suppose they backdoored their way in by creating a union with Romania (not impossible, but complicated).

Ireland has been neutral forever – but the public support for Ukraine is extremely high. So they might even be possible. Higher than Switzerland anyway ;)

Bosnia and Herzegovina is sort of a special case where they’re sort of partially engaged already.

Serbia is extremely unlikely while they continue to be extremely contemptuous of everyone. That’s fine. Although Kosovo is sort of under NATO protection.

In theory, Georgia or Armenia would be candidates, but Turkey would pooh-pooh Armenia right away, and Georgia has contested territory.

In order of odds, I wager: Ireland, Moldova (via Romania), Georgia+Ukraine (in that order chronologically).

KDE for years had a clock option called “fuzzy clock” where you could set the granularity of time, either in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minute resolution. So it would just say “five to six” or whatever in words. It was designed to keep you from clock watching while working. Not sure if it exists anymore :)

Coup after coup

Yes. Built into Android Studio. Has existed for at least five years. However I only ever used it with the apps I was developing and never even considered using it as a means to launch outside apps. That probably would have been painful.

Once in a while, you think to yourself: civilization is self organizing – given enough time, it will develop institutions and such that will tend toward stability, whether that stability is autocratic or democratic or whatever. Then there is Haiti – a country that decided that The Lord of the Flies is a template for a civilization. And it seems that no amount of outside effort does anything ever. Why is that? Why Haiti in particular when pretty much all their neighbours have at least mostly figured it out? Anyone got a pet theory?

Seriously, it feels like 1999 internet. And I’m loving it!

The side effect of running your own business, but not being large enough to hire a bunch of people yet – if you take a holiday, the business just stops for that period. We can’t do that, so no holidays. On call 24/7 essentially (although more realistically, I average about 60 hours per week.)

There are chicken and egg problems involved in getting that holiday. We need an employee to cover the shop, but the income needs to be high enough to afford their salary (they need to be a technical specialist like me). So I need to get to about an 60-80 hour work week to justify the employee and then find someone with the same super niche skills, and then spend a bunch of time on knowledge transfer. Ideally, they want to buy in so they’re becoming part owner, but that makes it even harder to find an employee.

So, hopefully I’ll get a vacation within a year or two…

O7