woodpanel

Just for fun I maxed out the specs in the configurator. I remember doing that 10 years ago and paying 4K just to be delivered an infamous embarrassment of a laptop (yes the one with the hilarious display issues), which got me this close (pinching my fingers) to leave apple entirely. Today, maxing out yields me 8K and I gotta say, I‘m done. I‘m not paying Apple‘s insane surcharge. The temporary delta is not worth it. Already I‘m seeing corporations buying the lower/lowest tier laptops possible for their devs. Most of their compute is happening outside of the machine anyways.

What’s the price tag for keeping your empire?

IMHO:

The US is doing what Russia did 2022 – Act before the window of opportunity closes. Not just vis-a-vis China. Russia being entangled in Ukraine leaves extra opportunities on the menu. Temporarily.

I’ve been doing just `git branch -d $(git branch)`, what am I missing?

Honest question, as

a) the AI narrative is annoying if not intellectually dishonest as so much money is invested in it

b) this requires a trigger warning

But if we are counting no. of payrolls: might this statistic hide the effect which mass scale deportations had?

Note: not an US citizen

Interesting, I always thought of Palantir to be more isolated from possible AI bubble bursts bc of government contracts.

IF the allegations are true this would change things, but I’m not sure if this would be a permanent correction or just a temporary slip.

Interesting, why would you hope for him to be jailed for life? Bc of a tweet?

I completely agree, I felt the same. It's a cultural thing. But its almost funny once you've broaden your horizon.

Which is ofc complete nonsense.

Wooden structures allow for a lot cheaper adjustment later on (you usually have a few beams that are structurally important, often its just the outer walls that bear the load). If you try that with stone you can start with hiring an expert upfront or your house collapses.

Same goes energy efficiency. The isolation needs require thick plastic-covers on the outside (for stone), which are prone to mold, birds nests and lead to moss. Every residential stone building in Germany that is older than 10yrs provides you with a prime view through its plaster of where its plastic blocks are assembled, because of the moss. If you don't then they already paid the extra cost of recoating.

Every mortgage issuer will calculate 2-4% extra repair costs for the exterior alone. And we'Re not even talking about the venting, which officially requires a replacement and cleansing every 2-3 years, but of course nobody ever does it.

I could go on for hours about our German stonerism, but will end with the most funny thing, which is that most "stoners" are adamant about longevity vis-a-vis wood, pay extra for the stone, have to wait 3-5 times as long before they can actually move in (drying of mortar and screed can take up to year here in Germany) – but then the most important thing for longevity, the roof, will be made of wood ;-)

As a German I have to admit we are culturally odd with this. Our houses are way too over constructed and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another. It thus is no wonder that Americans have way more affordable housing.

Those stigmas are also odd for most of our heritage-like old towns that are full of still-intact "Fachwerk"-Wooden-Constructions - which basically use the same technique, should give us a hint or two. Also wooden constructions do allow to comply with our ever climbing ecology standards, without complicated venting mechanisms to keep mold out (as you need for stone). Those two stigmas are also odd, given, that drywall and wooden construction sectors are actually huge in Germany. Knauf is one of the worlds largest companies in the wallboard sector.

So to plant a row of trees a bulldozer has to level sand dunes. I somehow doubt the exhaust from this process is factored into the CO2 sink calculation.

The whole Epstein-Saga from the victims, the scale of operations, to the sheer range of people he connected from Gates, to Bannon to German Newspaper Editor-In-Chiefs, makes Berlusconis Bunga Bunga parties seem wholesome and decent.

Or it could be just the good old cyclical stock market correction after years of entire segments of the indecies growth being purely driven by software.

Of course such an angle would require much more research on behalf of the journalists for much less spotlight than what you would get for free by just singing to the tune of AI-doomerism.

I like that the pictures are taken by government employees instead of the graffiti writers themselves nor by fans of graffiti.

Because of that the pictured artworks look much less nice, and the images can capture what 99% of the artworks actually provide to their surroundings: dismay, disregard, and a constant reminder that urban anonymity is a moloch that you can enjoy watching from a coffee shop’s window, while it pisses in a baby stroller.

Exactly. These numbers don’t seem that impossible if one considers that the state‘s force rests upon (enough) ideological support within society. Given that, the distribution of regime supporters will be rather even across the country, and therefore sending in death squads wont mean bussing them in from Teheran but rather sourcing them locally.

He doesn’t need a list of people he can quote for his observation to be true.

And it’s not far fetched either: With a state‘s power structure ultimately resting upon (enough) support from society, there is an implicit legitimacy assumed in their actions.

The same can not be said about mass executions of citizens by an invading foreign power structure. Which is why you see the typical propaganda rush to make the victims look like perpetrators.

> Graffiti is a population's expression of ownership of their city.

Is of course what art-students, pol-sci and social-sciences majors construct out of it because it fits their narratives. Never mind that the scratching of some roman soldier in a brothel's restroom has nothing to do at all with the NYC-born graffti culture. This top-to-bottom social astro-turfing would be just laughable grandstanding if it didn't result in real consequences for less affluent kids: crime, drugs, and deadly injuries as well as filing for bankrupcy at an age where Mrs. cultural-capital has acquired her prestigous arts degree.

> You don't want to fine, jail or otherwise ruin the lives of thousands of kids to get them to stop.

Oh yes, you want to (with an asterisk). As a former Graffiti writer myself I can speak from experience that the judge will be the first person in those kids life taking their actions seriously, giving them any sort of guidance.

Better spend a couple of hours per month doing social work than letting them slip further away until no softer juvenile criminal code is there to protect them.

Exactly. Here in Europe, SMS feels like the fax machine of mobile communications.

Sounds more like you have some axe to grind

https://epicompany.eu/members

what ever "money extraction business" means - wero is a real thing people (me included) are already using and developed jointly by many european banks.

> If you have a central power nuclear/gas/coal station and a bomb hits it, nobody has power.

if that happens it can be repaired more economically and faster – as has been repeatedly shown in Ukraine.

These guys...

after decades of destroying nuclear, German energy independence and thus pegging German energy sourcing to Russian pipelines, resulting in the geopolitical mess we and Ukraine are in – to have the gall to even pretend they're doing any good here...

If I wanted to permanently erode trust within the alliance, which by the way just lost 859 European soldiers into America's idiotic Afghanistan adventure, this is how I'd do it.

There are already 10 times more US soldiers present on Greenland's Pittufik Space Base.

Question is, to whom this fact is more embarrasing: EU politicians or the US admin?

Hence, you don't hear anything negative from Putin about it.

Wikipedia has been the proto-Reddit for a long time, that is, it was relatively easy for ideological bubbles to manufacture the Chomskyian Consent, just by being early adopters.

As such it rapidly developed into heavily biased page, as Wikipedia‘s co-founder Larry Sanger keeps pointing out.

It helps if you are proficient in multiple languages so you can at least „hop“ between the (some) bubbles. But the gatekeeping is always there.

This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.

But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.

Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.

> head of a sovereign state

Err

> Since 2019, more than 50 countries, including the United States, have refused to recognize Maduro as Venezuela’s head of state.

Including the EU and its member states

> a country of 30+ million people

If those 30 M being the remainder after ~8 M fled the country (20% of the population) within the last 10 years, the „destabilization“ was already there.

> 20 mil bbls of oil per day

Almost double that of Saudi-Arabia, roughly 20 times that of Venezuela

Imported heavy crude rose from 12% 50 years ago to 70% today.

> pretty much anything you can distil from heavy crude, you can also distil from light crude

You can, but at what cost and where? The largest raffineries are apparently built for heavy crude and you can’t just retrofit them to handle light crude.

> with about 2/3 of imports coming from Canada

There are just two other countries equipped with large enough resources to compete for that market share: Russia and Venezuela

> The US has no use for Venezuelan oil.

Actually it's just the exact opposite. The US might be the biggest oil producer, but it still imports 60% of its oil that it uses from Canada. Why is that? Apparently because US infrastructure was built for heavy oil, not the light version the US produces.

Well, well, well ... It just so happens that Venezuela sits on the worlds largest repository of heavy oil.