bjowen

The microplastics in a product don’t have to originate in a product’s final packaging. Things like airborne particles on the production line, filaments from filters and cleaning equipment, manufacturing swarf, and cleaning processes that are oriented to killing small things with heat / UV / chemistry rather than filtering tbem out is probably more of the answer than leaching and degradation.

Without resorting to abolishing the family kitchen altogether (many years of church morning teas give me the heebie jeebies about foodborne illnesses around community food prep) - there are ways to avoid some plastic packaging. Depending where you are, wholefoods places probably exist and will happily sell you a scoop (metal) of the ingredient you need in a pickle jar (glass). Also a good way to avoid storing bulk amounts of rarely-used ingredients, saves some waste.

Has there been any serious proposal for hydrogen to replace reticulated gas in domestic supply? The cost to refit existing infra would surely make it less attractive than something like power-to-methane.

I just came across the article and came here to see whether it had been posted and I’d just missed it. Glad someone did, amazed it didn’t get same the traction. Amazed!

Yes. You might call the emergence of ownership that is contingent on the whims of a megacorporation rent-seeking.

Syllabic notation is harder to understand, someone talked about it above, syntactical boundaries are harder to parse, and the language’s functional parts - things like tenses and inflections, are mostly written in kana, the rest mostly in kanji.

This article (featured previously on HN) discusses the efficiency thing a bit - https://yakkomajuri.com/blog/language-efficiency - though I think the pixel count metric is meaningless and leads to weird conclusions, there are some good thoughts.

Vague memories of there being some more up to date one, henkan-something, about the same time as the “nazeka henkan dekinai” thing

Dated put probably not outdated - Japanese also retains パソコン (pasokon, short for “personal computer), which shows its age. I recall a Japanese friend explaining it in 2003, at which time the IME for kanji in Windows had had at least a decade of common use and was remarkably sophisticated. It may be that post-smartphone it’s been such a common phenomenon that everyone accepts it as part of everyday life, there are certainly enough articles and posts about it.

Downvotes, hilarious.

If Mark Twain is more to your taste, go have a browse of an early 20th centry edition and see how you feel about teaching the language in that to your kids.

Encourage you to have a look at the number of different English-language translations exist of biblical texts and the kinds of debate that goes into discerning what those words mean.

Children aren’t exactly reading as literary historians. The tropes that have been lightened up in these changes are things like equating disfigurement with evilness, fatness with moral failure, femininity (in women) with virtue. Kids will absolutely repeat the unkindness that they pick up in works like these. If you read through them, the changes are not “covering up” anything or “forgetting” history, they’re clearly there to lessen the ambient amount of ridicule against certain groups of people that kids get exposed to.

And - this happens all the time, you can look at Enid Blyton and things like Biggles for properties that have quietly changed language here and there to keep them from getting too dated. Panties get bunched when the currency changes from pounds and shillings, the _Spectator_ trots out another piece about wokeity sending us all to hell because Noddy and Big Ears aren’t gay any more - but those books stay in print.

The article is written from experience in one paediatric centre, when the pratice between different centres - and laws in different states - differ vastly.

Information about people seeking gender affirming care in different places and stages of transition is not refutable based on this article.

And it is anecdata - how many patients had positive outcomes? Article doesn’t tell you. What did the (brand new) centre learn from these cases with negative outcomes? What protocols was it using? Are they the same now? Are they common elsewhere?

Will be interesting to see how this interacts with the ecology. Normally a complete shading like this would kill off everything underneath, which will mean it’ll produce loose soil and dust. In some hot environments it may produce a bunch of condensation overnight and if the panels aren’t raked at all that’ll be a challenge to deal with.

Love that you’ve named it after an utterly charming little bird

Just. No. Leaving aside the massive pastoral leases, that is the ancestral land of the oldest continuing cultures on the planet.

Mabo vs Qld was handed down in 1992 and the idea that “nobody is out there” was formally and legally abolished then, and should be condemned to Australia’s regrettable, racist past.

> The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city

Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.

The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”

There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.

Important advice is to be that amazing father. Breastfeeding is a huge time/energy drain. And if one of you is full-time working, the other is full-time parenting during work hours. When working parent gets home, that’s when their parenting shift begins. Use parental leave if it’s available, negotiate more if you can.

No need to hypothesize, a perfectly anagolous situation occurred, ten years ago, in the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/23/lethal-injecti...

The reliance on using OTP by SMS has become worse in that time, if anything. Although these days they prefer to set up a fake Linkt website and phish the OTPs since Facebook leaked everyone’s mobile numbers.

Okay, you’re using that word in an unconventional sense. In your usage, the US Congress would be an “offshoot” of the British Crown. Movements that stand in opposition to a prior established manner of thought are usually referred to as something like a backlash or a reaction or a breakaway.

The article makes this point and the headline which several have objected to does not mention rates of infection in the two populations. New infection volumes are also affected by the population infection rate in the respective groups and the time to diagnose and treat. If you wanted to be a bore, you could model the number of expected encounters with the virus in each population and figure out the relative transmission rates too.

The take away from the article is that your risk as a man who does not have sex with men is nonzero and that regular testing is important to personal health outcomes and to keeping infection rates low, and that cheap and effective preventative measures are available, including PReP and PEP. After thirty-odd years of dealing with it, MSM be aware.

Since someone’s done Hofstadter — Italo Calvino Le Città Invisibili or Invisible Cities. It’s a novel about complexity and civilisation and the difficulty and intangibility of memories, history and storytelling. It’s told in a series of 55 miniatures, each about a city that reveals some aspect of human experience. It’s like nothing else and utterly brilliant.

Others have said it already - it’s harder in your thirties, your existing friends have children or move for work, everyone’s busy.

A couple of things I’d add - there are things like night classes in trades that can super fun as a skill to learn and teamwork helps you meet people well out of your regular circle. I recently did metalwork as a short course and it was great on both fronts. Make it something you’re curious about learning so you’re engaged.

Meet your neighbours. In my neighbourhood it’s easiest if you have a dog to walk, but I met mine by painting my front fence over a sunny weekend and just saying hello to the passers-by. Now we have a group chat and have drinks on public holidays and generally look out for each other. Knowing the people who live around you is really beneficial on lots of fronts.

Find a Discord server of a podcaster / streamer / YouTuber that you like, one that has local meetups. Existing communities like that are usually pretty welcoming and easy to make conversation in.

Not my thing, but I’ve heard that martial arts clubs can be good places to find community, similar to the CrossFit suggestion, but they’re organised around teaching and keeping people on a learning pathway. I do know people who’ve met through a taiko (drumming) dojo.. it takes all types. Find a thing that you want to keep coming back to. Best of luck!

This is a weird way of talking about feeling. Do you correlate your sensations of happiness or impatience or satisfaction against normative models using objective indicia, or do you just, you know, feel them? When someone tells you that they are feeling one of these things, do you tell them that there is no objective way of understanding the words that they are saying, or do you refer to your own experience where you reached for similar words to understand them?

If you live in a society, you are surrounded by archetypes and roles and norms of gender - or of the performance of gender - which might be a helpful way to think about this post. Things like what clothing and grooming is appropriate are easy examples - and depending on where you are in the world, those standards may be radically different - in some cultures men are expected to adorn themselves to be attractive to partners, in some it’s women. But it’s also what emotions it’s appropriate to display, what kind of authority is afforded to a person, what physical strength and which ailments are reasonable, what kinds of body hair is attractive. We have words that describe a favourable performance of those gender roles (womanly, manly) and unfavourable words (effeminate, mannish). They are enforced, or at least patrolled, in all kinds of ways. Easy example is the kind of differential permissiveness around alcoholism. Why is that? If we have a social or a moral standard, why is it gendered?

You have without a doubt experienced this in your life - and if you’re lucky it’s been internal and not at the hands of the local bully. If you’ve ever checked or modified your demeanour or your outfit or your tone because you are aware that it is too girly or too butch or too macho or too slutty, then that is the sensation of being trained back towards the model.

There are of course also people whose identity is non-binary, whose experience may be more difficult for cis people to understand, but are a better example of a gender identity that is not easily relatable to sex characteristics.

I found learning about fa’afafine was helpful to show where gender identities from my (Anglo) background did not adequately describe a material situation that is uncontroversial in its own cuktire.

There’s a lesson here in what “value” means.

But - try to handle some fine gold one day. It is lustrous, but also incredibly easy to dent - drop it and it’ll scratch like a 2010s-era phone. It is easy to work, but won’t hold its shape. If we had oceans of the stuff, we still wouldn’t use it to make a car or a laptop or a pistol or a building, it would take the place of lead in things like counterweights and radiation shielding, maybe home insulation or cooking foil, places where its softness and density aren't too much of a drawback but the low reactivity is beneficial.

There are occasional headstones with recipes on them. I love to imagine those aliens trying to figure out Aunt Naomi’s Spritz Cookies.

Yep, plenty of gravestones are weathered to the point of illegibility after 100 years. Pick that mineral carefully. Or maybe go with a ceramic?

Those people are required to and have taken vaccine in order to attend. 95% of Australians have at this point. There are check-ins and density limits and other mandates to limit the spread, and it is still spreading at a rate faster than testing can keep up.

Post infection immunity does not of itself prevent taking vaccine, and having both is the most protective, though their individual effectiveness is comparable [0]. Acknowledging post-infection immunity in place of vaccine-mediated immunity doesn’t make sense as a policy for the country: it doesn’t materially affect many people, it decrease the number of susceptible people at all, and the vaccines are free to all and easily available to most.

In the case of the tennis player, if the recent tests are correctly recorded, and there is significant reason to doubt that they are[1], this is the second time he has been infected with COVID [2].

None of this is to say that the Australian federal government hasn’t embarrassed itself at every opportunity with this fiasco. The visa was issued apparently in contradiction to its own rules, the player was allowed to travel anyway and treated badly, overnight staff at the airport had to decide to overrule a departmental error and trigger this circus, breaching procedural fairness in the process - and then instead of making a prompt decision, the minister waited until the Friday night TV news had started to announce the decision to cancel, in what appears to be an effort to manage the message. Atrocious. Inept. Governing by press release to distract from their failings.

0: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8475821/

1: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/novak-djokovic-we...

2: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-24/novak-djokovic-charit...

There’s definitely an aspect of suburbia - eg a lot of Hachioji, although the zoning is a bit different and that’s shaped the way they’ve emerged. It reminds be a bit of the way London has expanded - suburban areas centred on stations of train lines that were laid out in the 60s, with low-rise houses that are larger with modest outdoor areas. Tokyo proper is also smaller than the Tokyo conurbation that includes parts of Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama prefectures, where the density really starts to fall off and give way to agriculture.