u/Tar_alcaran — Tar_Alcaran

American consumers pay it to the importer, who pays it to the US government, who funnel directly into the pockets of Trump's cronies.

The EU might sell a little less over it, but it probably means that a lot of "To: USA" labels are getting swapped out for "To: China"..

It's mostly used in an international political context. In the UN, it's what everyone uses, so why not?

Generally, ambassadors and leaders of UN missions get the form of address too, so I guess it makes sense, even if it's a bit archaic.

In the UN, everyone is addressed like that, including the heads of missions. I wouldn't be surprised if the presidents of the European Commission and European Council also get addressed like this.

It's important to note what purification tablets do and don't do. They kill bacteria, some viruses and many parasites. They don't remove chemical pollution, or biological toxins.

You should use them if you want to drink from open water like steams and ponds, but it won't, say, remove factory effluent. It will prevent getting diseases from human or animal waste, which is the main risk.

But it won't make the water taste like it didn't come from a pond.

Well that, and a multi-decade headstart in solar panels

Battery parks are definitely the new hot thing, but it takes a long time to get enough capacity that you can take the entire solar peak on a sunny day

The Netherlands has a huge grid capacity issue, but there are two much more relevant problems stopping the growth of renewable power: space and the fact that the earth is round.

The Netherlands is the most densely populated large country in Europe. Wind turbines take up quite a bit of space, and we've got a very large part of the country covered with stuff already. There isn't much room for new wind parks. There is also a steady expansion there already, and we don't have unlimited will turbine builders either.

The problem with solar is that we already have a lot of solar. Solar panels all produce the most power at the same time, which often causes an excess of electricity turning the price negative, meaning producers will turn their plants off. So a solar park will stop producing exactly when it would have been most profitable otherwise. This means the return on investment is significantly lower, below other safe investments, so people will just invest elsewhere..

And private solar panels suffer from the same issue,along energy companies charge extra to compensate for fixed-rate contracts, making them much less financially appealing for people.

Yes, and now we want to change those laws. It should be easy to follow those too.

Oh no, people are being prioritized over profits!

>For example, [Hungary has] dropped to 26th place among EU members in terms of anti-corruption controls and to the last, 27th place in terms of the quality of regulation.

That's out of 27, just to be clear

Do note that "establishing a no-fly zone" means you'll need planes over the border. Which means you'll need to bomb the shit out of every AA missile in Russia. Which means you'll need to destroy every airfield as well, because their planes will defend their AA missile launchers.

I mean, I'm all for it, but it's important to note that the Libya no-fly zone was established mostly through bombing the shit out of Libya, not through air-to-air engagements. Russia will be worse.

Yes, doing something useless is often cheap.

For art owned by individuals, it's easy. Yes, absolutely.

But imagine Amsterdam gets ransacked and they steal the Nighwatch. A hundred and fifty years from now, the painting gets returned to the great grandson of Femke Halsema, the last mayor of Amsterdam.

Is that right? Should it go to the grandnephew of the king? Or the son of the last museumdirector, who had it under permanent loan? Or the granddaughter of the final prime minister? Should it be donated the the people of Nova Hollandia (the fictional successor state)?

There are no easy answers here

I feel rather mixed about this. They're not going the national archives or anything, but into the private collection of some dude whose ancestor happened to be king.

I have no idea if this actually benefits the people or just the dude.

"we can just remove the brakes from this car, it hasn't crashed yet and we barely even use them!"

Fingers crossed that we've finally grown a brain after half a century of right-wing shit. But I doubt it

>We should honour these nuns for saving 85 % of the children rather than bashing them for only having the knowledge and tools of their age.

Should we honor them for tossing the dead babies into the septic tank against the mothers wishes, after letting them die from neglect when promising safety, and then hiding the evidence and trying to stop any investigation until very recently?

This wasn't in the 1800s, it didn't end till 1998.

>Also didn't the Nato general secretary recently say that Russia is outproducing the entire NATO in terms of tanks, ammunitions, etc.?

Not too surprising. Russia is on full war footing, NATO is at very-slightly-above-peacetime production.

Fair, I was mostly talking about LLMs and other generative AI.

Here's a big important test you can use to see if something is actually useful and effective.

Pick a random tool and ask all your friends and neighbors what they last used it for. "Hey bob, I was wondering, what was the last thing you used your belt sander/hammer/paintbrush for?". You'll probably get a very accurate answer about something that needed doing. "Oh, I had to sand down the windowsill because the paint was cracked" or "I tightened the screws on my coffeetable"

Now do the same for AI.

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The big problem with asking if AI is useful is that people suck at figuring out how to do someone else's work, but they've got a pretty good idea what their own work is like. As a result, it's very easy to think that AI can do someone else's job, but for YOUR job, that you actually understand, you can easily see what bullshit AI spouts and how it misses all the important bits.

Sure, if your idea is that "Programmers write code", then yeah, AI can do that. Similarly, "authors write stories" is true, and AI can write stories. But if you know very slightly more, you realize that programmers only write code like 10% of the time, and authors probably write words less than 10% of the time. The job is about structuring and planning and laying out, the typing is just the final details.

But if you understand fuckall about a job, then yeah AI can definitely generate stuff that looks like other stuff, because it's a machine specifically designed to make stuff that looks like other stuff.