It would be quite rich for Greenpeace to position themselves as “enlightened centrists” willing to sell & promote fossil fuels on the VERY flawed assumption that biofuels are a) feasible and b) a meaningful improvement, while on the other hand being uncompromisingly hardline anti-nuclear and being at the heart of the plan to shut down existing power plants based on nothing more than their dogmatic beliefs.

If a rando energy provider sells fossil fuels, I don’t care. They’re just playing by the byzantine economic incentives set by the EU in an amoral capitalistic way. When Greenpeace does it, it is inherently a political statement and so deeply hypocritical that the only rational explanation is that they are deeply corrupt and/or profoundly stupid. Which would not matter if they weren’t, ideologically and politically, strongly influential on European environmentalist activism and policy.

Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

• Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
• Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
• Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.

Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

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You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren’t since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.

Yes it’s a flawed system. In particular it’s Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia’s borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of “objective” definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don’t need the 5-ish continents to be “fixed” because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we’re cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. “The Middle East”) when needed.

As opposed to the traditional catholic values of murdering brown people, burning apostates, progroming Jews, policing every aspect of sexuality, and most importantly enforcing a rigid belief in social hierarchy and the divine rights of nobility?

This is not a humanitarian or ethics question. The rules of nuclear warfare aren’t governed by morality but by game theory. From Israel’s perspective nuclear weapons are a last resort for the reasons I outlined. Their leadership and military may be genocidal, but they still have a sense of self-preservation and act somewhat rationally – which you will notice is not at all the same thing as acting morally or honestly. Using nuclear weapons is simply not a tactically rational option for them even if when their explicit goal is genocidal imperialism.

What’s scary about Trump is that none of this applies to him. He is not a rational actor and he does not have everything to lose were he to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.

So that’s making a very critical assumption: that Israel’s territory is being existentially threatened. Iran simply does not have the military capability to do that. And Hamas/Hezbollah is not an existential threat to Israel’s existence despite propaganda to the contrary. We’ve already seen the full extent of their military capabilities.

The Samson Option is a one time, last-resort deterrence option for when all other defensive and offensive mechanisms have failed. Israel’s small size and geopolitical situation basically requires such deterrence against a neighbor who might decide to blitzkrieg into Tel Aviv. Iran simply does not possess that capability.

If Netanyahu pops a nuke for any other reason, he fundamentally shifts his neighbors’ calculus in favor of uniting and attacking Israel because nukes are explicitly not a last resort anymore, therefore Israel becomes an immediate existential threat to all its neighbors that must be dealt with accordingly.

That’s the thing with nuclear deterrence: it works, but only if your enemies are clear on the lines they can’t cross. Otherwise you’re just a threat to be eliminated. And ultimately there’s only so much that propaganda can help with there. Israel may have convinced a majority of their citizens that genocide is good, but they can’t propagandize their enemies into believing that preemptive nuclear strikes are necessary. Netanyahu can whine about Iran’s nuclear program all he wants, none of his enemies seriously believe they are close to having nukes.

Using nuclear weapons as anything but a last resort is therefore an awful gamble that very significantly (if not entirely) weakens nuclear deterrence… All for relatively little military gain. There’s very little a nuke would do that Israel can’t do to Iran with conventional weapons. While there’s a whole lot that nukes don’t do to a prepared enemy with spread out military and command infrastructure.

That’s the point, I can’t see how it would help Netanyahu with self-preservation. Going nuclear would be unpopular and ineffective as Israelis understand that their arsenal is more effective in a “will they won’t they” deterrence capacity. He wants constant war and doesn’t need nukes to get it.

Now what he might do is convince Trump to send nukes and pretend he had nothing to do with it. It’s not like Trump is hard to manipulate and Miller probably loves the idea to begin with.

Nuclear weapons are great at leveling cities, but not so great at destroying military infrastructure. On a per-dollar basis they actually kind of suck as weapons of war. From a purely rational strategic perspective, they’re most useful as a deterrent (which is how Israel has been using them). Netanyahu is an imperialist genocidal maniac but he’s not dumb.

Whereas if and when Trump does get his wish to pop a nuke, it won’t be for strategic gain but because he just couldn’t be restrained anymore. This absolute moron wanted to nuke a fucking hurricane FFS. It’s only a matter of time before he gets his wish since the US military has lost all ability to tell him no.

Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

They’ve got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is “why hasn’t the competition eaten their lunch already”.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If an organization rewards empty bluster and ChatGPT-driven corporate drivel, then that it is because those things are the organization’s purpose.

Corporate lingo is a social filter for humanoid shitweasels to identify their peers and control eventual threats.
Nothing is more menacing to an incompetent manager than an underling speaking the truth. Thankfully corporate lingo allows underlings to be dismissed out of hand because either:

• they didn’t use the correct lingo (“Steve fired the only guy who knew how that machine worked and ain’t nobody got time to figure it out because every other machine is falling apart as we speak” -> you get muted on teams and a meeting is booked with HR)
• they did use the the correct lingo which is - entirely by design! - devoid of negative turns of phrase (“our rightsizing efforts mean that other team members will have to step up and synergize” -> sounds fine, deal with it, next topic).

Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.

It’s not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it’s about not interrupting the flow.

“We’re too poor to afford to risk anything” is insulting to all the popular revolutions which happened because people were actually poor. Like, sorry not sorry, but the median American proletarian may live paycheck-to-paycheck but still lives in untold luxury compared to a 1917 Bolshevik who had to go to war sharing two boots and one rifle with multiple people, or the median revolutionary in Nepal last year (one of the poorest countries in the world).

Americans really have it too good to risk it all, that analysis is correct. They could have it a lot better, sure, but threat of not having it so good anymore is what keeps them complacent.

Convict you in absentia then use the judgement as an excuse to freeze your bank account and ban you from all forms of banking (something that the US has the power to impose on foreigner because they hold every western bank by the balls due to their reliance on the fed)?

I don’t know if they would do it, but it certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional; the US have long made it clear that foreigners on foreign land don’t have any legal rights whatsoever. I would be having a long conversation with lawyers to get some hard assurances before going down that path.

De Wever is a far-right populist, this is just bluster.

Don’t forget about the political clash as well. Flemish separatist movements have always ran into a brick wall: Brussels is majority French-speaking, entirely within Flemish territory, and wants nothing to do with their nonsense. No matter how much Flanders might want to cut off Wallonia and reunite with their orange daddy, they won’t be able to bring Brussels with them, and that would be political and economic suicide.

This American obsession with those awful abbreviations is exhausting. Foreigners should not have to remember if AL is Alabama or Alaska or MI is Mississippi or Michigan, especially when lacking any context clue as to which one it is. “ME” for Maine is straight up evil. Can you name the TLD of Peru of the top of your head?

There are places where abbreviations make sense: where there will be extreme repetition (TLDs, letters) or where space and readability are under tight constraint (license plates, next to the points counter on a football broadcast). An already extremely sparse infographic with no hard layout restriction is decidedly not either of those things and should therefore just use the full goddamn name instead of trying to signal “hey look this is made by an American for an American, fuck everyone else”.

… This is not a made-up thought experiment though? We do have empirical data? Out of the five (5) companies mentioned in this thread, one (1) does not fit the pattern outlined in the OP. Seems pretty clear that something is going on. Unless you can point to some kind of sampling bias (by finding additional counterexamples), I don’t see how you can just chalk it up to confirmation bias.

Sure, it could all be coincidence, in the same way that maybe the dog really did eat my homework. Not a very convincing explanation.

Interestingly I never see this kilometric leeway given to tech companies when discussing, say, their technically unproven surveillance practices, which pretty much everyone readily accept as fact.
That so many people are fighting this particular point is inherently curious. For “some reason” accusations of misogyny require a much higher burden of proof than many other kinds of accusations, which is really more a reflection on the people debating this than on the tech companies themselves (which we already know are run by complete and utter human shitstains anyway).

The complete fracturing of children’s education post-war cannot be understated as a society-wide catastrophe.

Ironically stay-at-home mothers were already not the norm pre-war for the poors/minorities. Which participated in generational poverty as those children had a worse access to parenting and education. But the post-war middle class suddenly fell into that pattern as well, with similar results.

On top of that you’ve got the meteoric rise of car-centric urbanism, fracturing communities. It used to take a village to raise a child, now they can’t even walk across their neighborhood unsupervised because the roads aren’t safe for children. Indirectly, parents trust fewer and fewer community members to watch their children, making the task of raising small children unusually difficult and tiring.

Countries with more socialized childcare and better working conditions were better off overall, but the entire western world is facing a natality crisis because it truly is harder to raise a child now than it used to be. Which is absolutely bonkers because the world is also richer and more productive than at any other time in history.

Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.