People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

Get out with this class essentialism.

Going from prole renting a shitty apartment who barely owns a car and a washing machine, to forcibly deported or forced to renounce your culture and teach your children the invader’s language and culture is not “potato, potato”.
Sometimes there are other things to fight for than capital, even if this might sound like a foreign concept to Westerners whose country hasn’t been directly involved in a meaningful non-imperialist conflict since 1945.

I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).

It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.

The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.

Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.

It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.

Hahahahhahahahaha

Go read literally any statement from EU officials on the subject. The Euro must legally be adopted by any country which has a good enough economy (exemptions aside such as the UK or Danemark IIRC).

Sweden benefits from a loophole where they legally have to switch to the Euro but haven’t started the process yet. However, there is not a chance in hell that the EU would give the same leniency to the UK, both for political (that’d make us look “weak”) and financial (the British economy is several times larger than Sweden’s) reasons.

The UK getting to keep the pound in a rejoin scenario is a delusion. Or at the very least the political hurdles must be made clear because it is anything BUT given (and should I remind you how the last 8 years of negotiations with the EU went?)

This is not a “will the UK try to rejoin one day” trend, this is a brexit regret trend.

The people responding “rejoin” to these polls probably imagine that EU accession will be done on the previous terms. If you did the same graph but made it clear to pollees that rejoining would entail a switch to the Euro and many more legislative constraints, it would almost certainly read overwhelmingly “Stay out”.

The kind of farming that makes any money isn’t slow work.

It is, however, tangible work with tangible results. Unlike spending months changing the polarity of nanoscopic silicon structure for the non-appreciation of an utterly clueless salesperson whose braindead ideas will have left the world in a worse state than you found it despite anyone’s best efforts.

I should seriously get into woodworking. Kidding. Sorta.

Greenfield nuclear is (probably) not economically relevant.

Refurbishing existing NPPs has a LCOE on-par with renewables and gives breathing room for variability issues that will otherwise be absorbed by fossil fuels until that eventual transition to storage/smart grid.

Any discussion of nuclear’s costs/profitability that does not distinguish between greenfield and existing/refurbished is agendaposting since most of the costs of a NPP are upfront.

Anything to do with seawater needs to deal with corrosion (e.g. offshore wind/tide generation). Also intuition tells me the balloons would be waaay bigger than reasonable.

Compressed air I assume is possible, as are many many other things (gravity, heat, springs, etc.). The question is which is cheaper and grid-scale; a 1 GWh pressure vessel would certainly be a sight to behold.

I’m no hydro specialist but my understanding is that in the Alps/Pyrénées, the hydro capacity is essentially maxed out because any additional projects will be denied on environmental grounds (flooding valleys is, as it turns out, not amazing for the environment). Maybe there’s some pairs of existing artificial lakes that could act as batteries, IDK. But I wouldn’t expect this to magically solve every issue.

In Belgium we have one such installation thanks to a fortuitous topological quirk, but no plans for more. Still, 10 GWh is not nothing and already helping a lot to absorb renewable fluctuations.

Typical Stalinism/Maoism: Anyone who opposes my implementation of Marxism is an enemy of the proletariat and can be persecuted to any extent. These people agree with the mainstream idea that communism can’t be implemented democratically, but come to the conclusion that democracy must be abolished.

This meme is an open dogwhistle to tankies and thankfully meaningless to anyone who hasn’t fallen into or interacted with this small subsection of the far-left.

I don’t think there is one beyond “hey look we all know this thing”.

Americans: “We are a diverse patchwork of cultures and saying the US is one gigantic boring monoculture just because we share a common language is offensive”

Also Americans: hundreds of millions of people literally all relate to the same quirky element of childhood imposed through immense conformist institutions, can’t even process the idea that other cultures exist that do not relate to this specific element.

I need to hear what this connector would sound like when connected to an actual Dolby Atmos system. Do the crackles and pops get spatialized and make an impromptu symphony going around your room? The people must know!

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

A minority government is almost guaranteed to fail, and that’s theoretically bound to make them unpopular (as it has with every prime minister of Macron’s second mandate).

However, this could backfire if they have a majority. It could also backfire because voters are not necessarily that dumb and might just see through this charade. If anyone can handwave piss-poor performance away, it’s the RN.

LR already said they won’t make a coalition with LREM. They’d be at least as likely to ally with the RN. As for LFI/PC… LREM dislike them at least as much as they do the RN.

Only strategic move I see is let the RN govern until 2027 in the hope they flaceplant hard enough with no plan or coalition to hand an easy win back in the next presidential/legislative elections, which makes twisted sense given that everyone knew they were going to win in '27. Except the risk of that plan backfiring is stratospherically high, especially if the RN lands a majority (which is not unlikely as people were pissed off voting this morning, and will be even more pissed off after a dissolution).

Villains are stereotypically older fat queer bald men (e.g. Vladimir Harkonnen). These are all factors people have little-to-no control over.

Media will sometimes subvert those expectations, but most of the time the iconography matters more to the filmmaker than decency. It’s quite fucked up the insecurities these portrayals breed, no amount of positive affirmation will make up for the fact that some natural body types are fundamentally associated with villainy in the Western visual canon.