mikaeluman

It is to Elon's credit that this comes to light. My trust in twitter was gone back in 2018. The covid situation and the election certainly did not help.

Here we get to see the unhealthy intermingling of political agents with a supposed social media platform.

The end result of that has been detrimental to users, free speech and public debate.

I always thought Elon was "too much", but his handling of Twitter is absolutely perfect.

We should rather spend resources on improving animal husbandry and reintroducing wild ruminants where possible.

I don't want meat from a lab, I want it from healthy animals either wild or raised on a farm in good conditions.

It is incredible how the collapse of SA, having happened over a moderately short span of time, has largely escaped coverage.

The infatuation with the "rainbow nation" and Mandela overcoming the evil apartheid government.

But the policies have just been a disaster. And in recent years, it's become so bad that we have to read news like this. Anyone that can get out, has or is getting out. I worked in a project with ppl from Johannesburg; suddenly they had moved to my country.

This categorization of human beings by race and sex is such a large step back in the opposite direction of how I would like society to be.

Like many others, I simply hope this "goes away".

The "discovery" setups of increasingly all social media platforms is a big turn off for my use case of actually being social with my friends when we are away from each other.

In instagram the only redeeming feature left is the "story" buttons at the top. I stopped using Facebook long ago, though I still use messenger.

I also use Slack and WhatsApp to communicate, basically SMS texting but in groups.

Whatever the "social" platforms now are, they are very off putting to say the least. Maybe good for killing time writing for the bus? A reversion back to cute cat and dog videos.

As usual, economically irresponsible countries introduce "free" stuff.

And who pays? How about the EU countries that support them? Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, and more.

Nothing is free. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spain-leads-eu-pandemic...

To your point - White steers the game. People only go for wins with Black when forced to. So I don't see how that changes anything?

How do you mean one can trade when someone has lose? Do you mean that all russians agree to lose to their number 1?

The candidates might as well be the world championship.

But they need to make sure wins give you e.g. 3 points and draws only 0.5.

Even in the candidates this year Ian - having obtained a nice lead - played drawing lines with white to perfection.

I don't blame him, it was the right decision. The incentive structure needs to change.

Even after a draw, the concept of Armageddon games to give another half point would be interesting and useful.

In this thread on Germany I am surprised to read about Jane Fonda (who?).

The European perspective is most strongly influenced by movements starting post Chernobyl.

This happened not only in Germany but also in Sweden and other countries. In Germany, for some reason (please tell us you German HN users) this movement has had an outsized impact and not even Merkel could stop dismantlement of nuclear.

It shouldn't take a crisis to rethink things, but we are humans and so it does.

What is the German perspective?

Just have to admit to being impressed by how succinct and clear yet deep this writing was. Easy to read and understand, and certainly gets the point across.

Always take away at least 3-4 songs to add to my Playlist.

It's not too bad. Loved the aesthetics of Spain this year too

Indeed an interesting topic. The demand for dollars largely stem from the ability to use them. When doing international trade you want to be paid in a currency you know is fairly stable and exchangeable to other goods and services with relative ease.

When sovereigns in developing countries issue bonds they tend to need to do it in USD to get any takers; else the risk of their inflating the value of their currency away is just to great.

As US dominance decreases it's currency will face competition from e.g. the yuan. Ray Dalio writes about this in his "The Changing World Order".

This has come up many times by now. But the supposed transition to renewable energy in Germany was merely a substitution of natural gas for nuclear power.

What bothers me greatly is that Germany still has not come to turns with the fact that they need nuclear power. That is a long and costly investment to make and you need to start right away.

LNG can only get you so far and renewable sources just can't provide the energy needed, as should be clear by now (although it was widely understood for the past 30 years at least).

The FED receive interest payments. They don't make them.

But yes, raising too much too fast will cause stress and defaults, and nobody wants that unless it's absolutely necessary.

This was expected since at least December. The market is pricing in 6 more rate increases throughout the year. They simply can't afford to lag behind inflation too much for too long.

That was much more than I thought.

Still, wind and other unstable sources can never be the dominant source in society. We need dependable power and for that you need nuclear unless something drastically changes with energy storage.

Finland has no other good source of energy. In Sweden and Norway we have hydro capacity that covers more than 50% of need. Then we can cover the rest with nuclear and a small portion of wind power.

In Finland nuclear is the only option. Happy to see it come online.

Completely agree with this guy. New movies inevitably seem to teach strange lessons that make you uneasy and kind of feel bad when you leave the cinema or turn of the screen.

Superhero movies used to be about growth. Yet now it's more often than not the case that the hero was simply born awesome. Completely uninteresting.

Politics also creeps into movies in a disconcerted way. Star Wars is suddenly not about defeating totalitarianism and tyranny, but about some strange mix of feminism and animal rights. I think. Batman has to see Batman become a medic rather than do what Batmam does: beat up bad guys. And of course Catwoman must be with the times and complain about the attention paid to "rich white men" when they get horribly assassinated in gruesome ways by a psychopath - as if murdering the mayor such that his now fatherless son finds him should receive equal attention to some drug deal gone wrong.

The latest Bond movie of course had to kill Bond. Something that should just never happen. And then we have to watch this extremely annoying supposed new 007 get an insane amount of screen time even though she is a transparent, vapid character.

These regions have unilaterally declared their independence since the 2014 revolution/coup.

In that sense the only thing that is new is the official Russian recognition.

It's a messy situation. According to the census on wiki only 1/3 are of Russian ethnic background. Does that mean only 1/3 supported the breakaway from Ukraine?

You can't help but to make comparisons to the Sudeten Germans and the like. "Peacekeeping missions".

People have many reasons for disliking Facebook.

We have the personal data usage and integrity problems.

Then they wanted to get clean from this and did it by way of censoring and silencing what can be called conservative voices.

And now they want you and your kids to waste your life in some VR "meta" world...

Facebook does still serve a purpose. It's a popular and easy way for local communities and associations to stay in touch.

I couldn't stand Facebook though so I find myself not being able to join these conversations. Hoping something better comes along.

I remember growing up being terrified of HIV/AIDS. The idea of something being permanent and transmissible via sex, and literally dismounting your immune defense to all other diseases on the planet...

To this day it still terrifies me, even though the treatments have become so good.

Each year it seems there are new stories about HIV research, and progress keeps being made. I pray for positive results and am really amazed. We have a lot to be thankful for.

Been using DuckDuckGo for about 2 years. Amazed at their progress.

Still local searches in Swedish are subpar sometimes.

But I like the fact that they don't seem to be mangling results and manipulating them based on politics.

Google search is pretty useless as it stands now. If I want to find controversial material - for whatever reason, let's say even debunking it - there's a chance google hides it. The recent scandal with Robert Malone and the search term "mass formation psychosis" is really bizarre.

Thank you DDG.

The true power of markets is that these sorts of editorial mismanagement only mean one thing: people stop purchasing an increasingly subpar print.

I used to read SciAm regularly. But this type of Wokeism into everything and calling great people horrible things after they die is so disgraceful.

How can anyone take the magazine with an ounce of seriousness anymore?

Yes we will of course need nuclear.

But our ministers in charge claim it's an "old" technology.

Makes me wonder if they ever go sailing...

Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid.

I can only speak for Sweden. We had for the longest time the most solid energy base with hydro power in the north and nuclear in the south.

Policy has since decades been anti-nuclear though but it really accelerated 2016. Basically nuclear power gets heavy tax and fee penalties while wind gets the reverse treatment.

If you check https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ you can see the result.

Nuclear and hydro still supply all power - but we now have an erratic additional source of wind power that has such volatility that it can spike its production and reverse in just a day. It's completely uncontrollable and so can't provide a stable base for industry nor homes or offices.

Meanwhile, with nuclear plants now being taken offline, southern Sweden is paying a multiple of higher prices than Northern Sweden.

This is exacerbated by other countries in Europe making similar faulty decisions - notably Germany - meaning that even if Sweden produces energy to export on a good day, prices are high. Northern Sweden is for now safe because there is no bandwidth to transfer the energy produced in an efficient way.

I only hope that the election this year will see policy change to normal again, with a renewed focus on nuclear. Nuclear needs no subsidies, it just needs to not be penalized by inane policies, taxes and bureaucratic nonsense.

During the summer, when less energy is needed, Sweden even had to start its old oil based power plant. The solution is similar in Europe where reliance on natural gas from Russia is becoming normal, in particular for Germany.

In Sweden we have at least come far enough to recognize this as a crisis and the so called environmental party will probably be booted out of the Riksdag come September.

Crude prices have been a lot higher in the past, 2007-2008. The production is fairly in line with the demand.

US actually needs higher crude prices to make sure the incentives exist for shale production to get back to pre covid levels.

The supply chain sluggishness (worldwide) combined with excessive, irresponsible spending (although I hear it "costs nothing"...) explain these figures.

Euro area has higher inflation than pre covid but nowhere near these levels.

It's not transitory, and it's not good.

People pay taxes, not companies.

These taxes are poor, because they obscure who is really being taxed.

Is it the owners? The employees? The consumers? Most likely the last two groups.

The one thing you can do to ensure vaccine hesitancy and distrust is to ban that very topic.

This standard they are setting up, already started with warnings and bans for in any way contradicting the WHO, is impossible to maintain in a consistent fashion.

I can still find thousands of videos on homeopathy, ranging from debunkings to lecture-style videos. There are people who would advocate using this rather than modern health services.

In fact, there are people who would advocate the use of witchcraft to treat cancer.

Will YouTube ban them all? Or will they just ban certain topics based on a whim?

For me WSL has completely replaced dual booting setups.

There are still some quirks with integration such as certificates and more.

I really can’t wait for the GPU experience to be fully supported and also be able to use pytorch from within containers.

Microsoft is so far doing everything right with WSL IMO.