It was with Biden, in 2021. He truly went dark Brandon on that one, Macron and the entire French government learned about it through the news.

Though the Australians did stiff themselves spectacularly. They will have to pay billions to the French with nothing to show for it, then billions more to the Americans for nuclear submarines which they could have gotten from the French if they hadn’t told them to design a diesel submarine based on their own nuclear design!! Except now Australia is tied to American nuclear fuel and maintenance, further vassalizing themselves. 5000 IQ move.

Plus now the project is in the hands of Trump and his fox news host of a defense minister so uh good luck with that. By the 2040s I project they’ll have been officially integrated in the Russian chain of command and the submarines will be delivered to Australia in the form of perfect replicas of the Moskva.

All Russia did was give a nudge to the literal trillions of dollars in capital held by elites who wanted nothing more than full-blown fascism. All the Kremlin had to do was finance whoever could sow the most distrust in democratic institutions and wedge themselves in existing divides within the US. It’s the most boring coup in history, people voting for Hitler not because of Bolshevism of whatever but because they’re triggered by fucking vaccines and pronouns.

Conversely even if the EU went full hybrid warfare (which we aren’t because we can’t even do anything about the open fascists in our own Union), the counterplay is rebuilding trust which is harder by orders of magnitude than just buying up a social media, deleting moderation, and promoting the Nazi stuff.

Best we could hypothetically do is sanction y’all into autarchy and hope the subsequent recession/depression acts as an electroshock to the population, but you’re already doing it to yourselves and besides I see no reason why the two thirds of y’all who either don’t care or actively support fascism would change their minds. It will be just like Putin Orban or Erdogan, 15 years from now shit will be worse than ever for the 99 % but Republicans will still win elections without even needing to cheat much thanks to their complete control over state propaganda. Your democracy is dead, you should be moving through the stages of grief and planning your next move.

I’d love to be proven wrong but there’s too much historical precedent, and zero precedent to Americans being even remotely close to politically conscious enough to engage in “forceful” political change (unless the force is being exerted on Black people, then the “well regulated militia” comes out the woodwork). Hell, the videos from “protests” I’ve been seeing this week in your major cities look so pathetic it makes Denver look like a large village.

Fictional characters also have a bunch of naming rules that real people don’t. Quite importantly, unless you’re GRRM they should not have the same or similar name to another character in your story (i.e. what you’re saying, one name per person and one person per name). Else shit’s just confusing, as knows anyone who tried to learn anything about Elden Ring’s lore.

Names also should match the character’s personality. John’s John because he’s meant to be pathetically average and John is the most average white american name there is. Naming him Bartholomew or Rico would not have worked for that particular character.

I would therefore posit that if John as a fictional character did transition, Jane might be a better fit due to being more common while still being familiar enough not to be confusing. Or perhaps Jess which retains an alliteration but sounds even more “basic” then Jane IMO.

For Ukraine yes, but as far as Ukraine’s allies go? Only in principle. In reality we help Ukraine because it fucks up Russia, but we don’t give Ukraine the support it really needs or asks for because of [insert litany of excuses for years of delay on new weapons systems].

Proxy wars are nasty business, and Ukraine has precious little say in any of the macro decisions. Russia and Russia’s ennemies collectively hold all the negociation leverage.
Zelenskyy’s only hope is that domestic pressure will force the West to make a genuine effort at preserving as much of Ukraine’s sovereignty as possible, hence this media intervention.

And he’s right to be worried, because the situation in Palestine shows, again, that most Western governments only stick to their stated principles when it’s politically convenient and shrug at literal genocide when it’s not. And the Russian propaganda machine is going to work overtime to make us think that any Russian concession to Ukraine would be against European interests.

From “missile” (me-sigh-lll) to “messuhl” to “m-ssl”. Then Americans will make fun of the Brits for dropping vowels from town names.

English has clearly evolved beyond the need for its vowels, and certainly beyond the intended goals of the Latin alphabet. How about we settle on a variant of Hangul, and as a bonus we can probably simplify it by replacing all vowels with a generic placeholder because English clearly doesn’t respect them anyway what with consistently dropping them or replacing them with schwa; when they’re actually there it’s almost systematically accent-dependent which vowel actually gets used.

So you could write missile “me sel” and then everybody would be free to drop as many or as little vowels as they want when reading it.

Sweden has some of the cheapest electricity in all of Europe thanks to all that hydro.

This year my final electric bill was ~ 25 c/kWh. Gas was ~ 8c/kWh (both after distribution costs, and funnily enough for electricity I pay amongst other things a fee to subsidize other people’s solar panels’ negative impact on the grid).

Not “comically expensive” but to be cost-effective a heat pump must average a COP of at least 3.1 (which is possible in most climates with a decent enough HP), so it’s not yet a “jump on it first chance you get” kinda deal because it will take many years to recoup the initial investment. And people remember last year’s winter where the electric costs were more than doubled; gas prices tend to fluctuate much less. This makes heat pumps even more of a very long term investment for people who can afford very large surprises in their power bill… Or who have excess PV generation capacity in the winter (that requires a very large house).

Gas is on the way out but all the political sabotage of electricity prices in Europe (nuclear phaseout, asinine financial regulations and fake competition with useless middlemen, misfiring PV legislation meaning PV owners are being subsidized by everyone else, etc.) means it will take a very long time before HP costs drop enough for people flock to replace their existing gas heater with a heat pump.

Ma’am, that is a 33 cl mixture of gas station sludge. It has no syrup, leaves, or apple juice. It is an amalgamation of the industrial output of several laboratories, distilled, mixed, powdered, re-liquefied, and ultimately inexorably joined in an unholy water chalice. God had no hand in the creation of this abhorrence. The fact that this terrible liquid exists proves that God is either impotent to alter His universe or ignorant to the horrors taking place in his kingdom. This prism of water is more than gas station sludge. It is a physical declaration of mankind’s contempt for the natural order. It is hubris manifest.
We also have a higher glucose variety if you would prefer that.

🤓

Carburetors are still the norm on small ICEs (e.g. garden tools), and very common on vehicles that don’t need a license plate. Motorcycles also commonly had them until about 20 years ago, or less depending on the make/region.

Granted car mechanics do not generally care for carburetors unless they specialize in antiques.

The Algorithm has been A Thing long enough to have impacted young adults during their formative years.

At 25 I’m barely old enough that I entered adolescence just as “youtuber” became a career for many people (around 2012ish). The Algorithm has been part of it all my teens though I witnessed it becoming increasingly eldritch throughout and teaching its final untethered form in the second half of the 2010s. Today’s 20 year olds never knew anything else as they were 13 when elsagate was in full swing.

TL;DR how are your knees grandpa?

Removed by mod

Source?

In the EU at least this is demonstrably false. LNG has slightly risen since 2000 but other fossil fuels (namely coal) have gone way down. Total consumption has been steadily declining in the past few years and is down to 2004 levels. So overall our electricity is a whole shitload cleaner.

The story is even starker for domestic heating. Gas and coal are vanishing since the mid-2000s.

Kids finish school around 3 pm where I live. They have time to do their extracurricular activities (partially) during daytime even in the dead of winter. So of course it’s the mornings they find dreadful. If school finished around 5-6 pm I think they’d be miserable then as well.

Speaking of which, I’m about to end my work day and the sun is setting right now. FML.

Yes it would. I, like most 21st century humans, wake up for work and have free time after work.

In practice for my relatively northern latitude this means I get a little bit of daylight before work (except perhaps around december/january), but winter time is very specifically designed so that today the sun will set exactly 6 minutes before I end my work day.

Were we to keep permanent DST I would get an hour of free time in the daylight today, and at least a little bit of light outside for all winter except perhaps for a month around December. As it stands, I do not get any free time in sunlight for 5 days a week for the entire duration of ST. The switch to ST means “bye-bye sun” and I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I FUCKING HATE IT.

The 24 hour clock is a made up construct. So are business hours. But if we already agreed to change one of these twice a year, can we make it so that it is not optimized to trap me inside for the entire duration of daytime???

Or just :set mouse=a if your terminal emulator was updated in the past decade. gVim has nothing to offer anymore, except that it bundles its own weird terminal emulator that doesn’t inherit any of the fonts, themes, settings or shortcuts of one’s default terminal. Blegh.

Also if you’re not going to leverage Vim’s main feature and just want to click around on stuff, just install VSCod(e|ium), which is genuinely amazingly good.

The studios! Think of the studios! Their execs couldn’t live off merch sales and shitty reboots anymore! They might even have to - gasp - develop original IP if they want to milk an exclusive license. Some other execs would make money off some of last century’s licenses! The horror! The tragedy!

That can’t be. Clearly the best thing about Indiana Jones and Jurrasic Park is the death grip the studios have on those IPs. Ever since Steamboat Willie fell into the public domain I’ve been unable to enjoy the Disney Classics. All joy has been snuffed out from my life.

The lack of even the most basic understanding of parliamentary politics flying around in this thread is appalling, but certainly illustrates the reason why there are so many wild takes flying around on Lemmy.

To summarize:

• The right got a 2/3rds majority in parliament. The united left had the most votes of any individual group, but that’s only around 1/3 total.
• The reason the left proclaimed they “won” is they came “first” and thought the center-right party would ally with them rather than the “hard right” (welp)
• That, in isolation (!), isn’t antidemoratic. A majority of French representatives (presumably) approve of the government. Simple maths. A government can only govern with the approval of parliament, it literally can’t work otherwise.
• However the French voting system very strongly relies on strategic voting, and the far-right came very close to having a parliamentary majority. Therefore the center-right party only got the seats they did because everybody left of the far-right made electoral agreements to pull out their candidates so only the candidate with the most chances to win against the far right would be running. This heavily benefited the center-right party who then allied with the hard right, which is being perceived as treason (for lots of reasons that I’m not going to get into). Strategic voting is a democratic failures and leads to suboptimal choices for representatives (thought that is still miles better than whatever the fuck the CCP is doing, since apparently that needs saying on here). Furthermore this whole shift to the right certainly isn’t going to help with the socio-economic issues and is going to end up benefiting the far-right.

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That’s… not a war crime is. I don’t want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that’s fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there’s not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

I’m as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that’s like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it’s not like there’s a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks… How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

France’s historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it’s much of an improvement.

And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it’s stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn’t call it oppression.

So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow’s erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn’t make it unimportant.

I wonder how many terrorist (and “terrorist”) plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone’s group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it’s an open secret.