The Octonaut

Why should the EU provide protection to Taiwan? If it’s just to have a tech manufacturing industry on a small island precariously adjacent to an imperialist police state with authoritarian tendencies, Ireland’s happy to help.

Look, I get it, but people are allowed to have complex relationships with their language and history. I don’t know the specifics of this guy and I’m not exactly defending him (or his complaints, which seem petty), but nobody owes anything to a language because if their blood.

I’m Irish, and the oppression and near-loss of our language is a real pity, but I can’t deny either that we have have 150 years of real, actual Irish people speaking, writing, creating, singing, dreaming in English. Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, O’Brien, Heaney, Lynott, Sinead O’Connor, Samantha Mumba… they’re not less Irish for having created or performed in English.

It can be hard for Irish, native-English speaking people (i.e. to a statistical approxination, literally everyone) to understand the amount of effort and resources that are poured into funding Irish-language art that the majority of our modern nation cannot read or understand, in a language that they associate mostly with an abusive and failing school system and patriotic guilt, while English-language art in general struggles with the odd and cold assumption from our society that the ready market for English-language Irish art and culture abroad will pay for anything with actual reach. If you have a weird niche idea, you’d better make it even more niche by sticking a cúpla focail in it - now a tiny fraction can enjoy it, but at least you get paid.

The same applies every time I am frustrated with the state of our healthcare system in a waiting room and pass a tall stack of pointless support resources and documentation in the Irish language, the cost of which could have paid for at least one dose of medicine.

We have very little going for us resource-wise in Ireland, but by christ we can write in the global language at least, whether it be for job opportunities or art. If someone sticks a knife in me I shouldn’t be called a traitor for keeping the knife.

Though Meta and Google have withdrawn of their own accord, a spokesperson for Mardi Gras said the companies would not now meet the festival’s criteria for partners.

That’s not what happened.

Mambo No 5

Not every country has ungodly reserves of fossil fuels providing essentially free money. “Richer” is a bit silly - by raw GDP per capita, Norway has been one of if not the richest country in the world since the establishment of State Oil. Combined with not being a dirt poor monarchy ready to sell its resource extraction rights to Britain/America when the resources were found, Norway is nearly unique.

Absolutely it is better than not subsidising EV cars. No doubt. My issue is with the original comment painting this as something “barely any effort” implying that any country could do this. This was a unique situation and I’m glad that Norwegians chose to make themselves feel better about being an educated western petrostate bane on the planet by buying themselves EVs instead of feeding it to a king, ceo, sultan or emir.

Care to point out what hate and misinformation is relevant to this? If other countries didn’t buy their oil, they could not have achieved this. Norway is a small petrostate with a side gig in poaching EU fish. No amount of Irish salmon would have covered the cost of this. If you don’t understand that a country smaller by population than the city of Barcelona exporting the fourth largest amount of natural gas in the world taints this achievement to some degree, you are entitled to your opinion, but it’s not misinformation.

Yes, sorry, I hadn’t thought of apartments. In my defense where I live, having an apartment and having a car rarely overlap, people use public transport.

You don’t need to install an EV outlet to charge at home. EV outlets are convenient but they are just dumb cables. All the interesting technology for charging is in the car itself. You can get plug-in-adapters for charging a car that go into an ordinary socket and they work just as well as the wall mounted direct type.

Am I missing something? While dedicated, wall-mount-style chargers are convenient, car “chargers” are literally just a power adapter. The ones that plug into a socket (outlet?) are functionally the same. They just supply electricity, all the interestingly technology is in the car itself.

Someone mentioned renting apartments which is fair enough, I live in a country where of you’re in an apartment you use public transport so it didn’t factor.

Why are you telling me about America?

Who can’t charge at home? Who is getting an EV before electricity in their house?

To be absolutely clear, Norway has achieved this by selling oil to other countries. This wasn’t a heroic sacrifice or noble vanguard effort.

Other Arab

Didn’t tell on yourself until the second sentence this time, well done

So your assertion is that we need to seriously consider that a ‘wild’ coronavirus with the same signature as Covid-19 evolved somewhere in China, spread to Italy and elsewhere in Europe and probably dozens of other untested places in the summer of 2019, and - coincidentally - Covid-19 itself mutated in bushmeat or was engineered in Wuhan in an unrelated zoonotic transmission or, uh, “biocrime”?

Which of us is stretching probabilities to breaking point for political purposes, ‘HK’?

I don’t know. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to Wuhan having a lab that studies coronaviruses if the pandemic didn’t start in Wuhan, which even now is still repeated as if it was truth by proper journalists and DW alike.

Covid’s presence in Europe before Wuhan was known all the way back in June 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J8/

By November 2020 it was pushed back as far as September 2019: https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-17/COVID-19-was-spreading-in-Italy-by-September-2019-study-indicates-VuSqUttP8s/index.html

Here’s a scientific source:

Overall, the results of this blind retesting of a selected set of samples indicate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some SMILE samples collected in the prepandemic period. The oldest samples found positive for IgM by both laboratories were collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio), the latter with neutralizing antibodies. Two additional samples collected on 17 December 2019 (Campania) and 28 January 2020 (Lombardy) tested as IgG positive by VisMederi and positive for IgG S1 and IgG S1+NP by Erasmus. Additional IgM positive cases could have been detected also by Erasmus by lowering the cut-off of the commercial IgM assay. The older among these putative additional IgM positive samples was collected on 3 September 2019 in the Veneto region, one of the first and mostly severely affected COVID-19 regions.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8778320/

Removed by mod

Because it makes no sense. Covid has been detected in waste water in Italy from summer 2019. That’s not to say it originated in Italy but that connecting the Wuhan outbreak in December 2019 to a lab - or indeed a wetmarket - makes no sense.

The waiter approached.

“Would you like to see the menu?” he said, “or would you like meet the Dish of the Day?”

“Huh?” said Ford.

“Huh?” said Arthur.

“Huh?” said Trillian.

“That’s cool,” said Zaphod, “we’ll meet the meat.”

…

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox’s table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

“Good evening,” it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, “I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in the parts of my body?”

It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters in to a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

“Something off the shoulder perhaps?” suggested the animal, “braised in a white wine sauce?”

“Er, your shoulder?” said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

“But naturally my shoulder, sir,” mooed the animal contentedly, “nobody else’s is mine to offer.”

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal’s shoulder appreciatively.

“Or the rump is very good,” murmured the animal. “I’ve been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there’s a lot of good meat there.”

It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

“Or a casserole of me perhaps?” it added.

“You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?” whispered Trillian to Ford.

“Me?” said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, “I don’t mean anything.”

“That’s absolutely horrible,” exclaimed Arthur, “the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard.”

“What’s the problem Earthman?” said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal’s enormous rump.

“I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there inviting me to,” said Arthur, “It’s heartless.”

“Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten,” said Zaphod.

“That’s not the point,” Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. “Alright,” he said, “maybe it is the point. I don’t care, I’m not going to think about it now. I’ll just… er […] I think I’ll just have a green salad,” he muttered.

“May I urge you to consider my liver?” asked the animal, “it must be very rich and tender by now, I’ve been force-feeding myself for months.”

“A green salad,” said Arthur emphatically.

“A green salad?” said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

“Are you going to tell me,” said Arthur, “that I shouldn’t have green salad?”

“Well,” said the animal, “I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am.”

It managed a very slight bow.

“Glass of water please,” said Arthur.

“Look,” said Zaphod, “we want to eat, we don’t want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare stakes please, and hurry. We haven’t eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years.”

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle. “A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good,” it said, “I’ll just nip off and shoot myself.”

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said, “I’ll be very humane.”

Grandmother.