Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization
-Jo Walton, Among Others
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization
-Jo Walton, Among Others
Every presidential election is important, and it never makes sense to make a “protest vote”. That’s just not how voting works.
I’m sure somebody has cried wolf at every election, but McCain and Romney never aimed to become dictators. Republicans currently have a published plan to institute fascism. It’s pretty obvious that these elections actually are exceptional.
It’s a thingy for making video games
taken from their github page:
Godot is a popular Free and Open Source game development engine and toolset.
They are the 3rd most popular engine behind (commerical) engines Unity and Unreal, and seeing a major surge of interest after Unity altered the deal so bluntly that Vader would blush.
Oh man, don’t stop
You got it! Here’s some other consumer protections the administration has introduced recently:
Hungry for more? Check this out:
White House Statement on Junk Fees
That’s from October, so some of it overlaps, but among other stuff there’s still a “Click to Cancel” rule working its way through the FTC.
Sadly Biden has been spending a bunch of time on lame crap like climate change, human rights, health care, infrastructure, election integrity, etc., so it might take a bit longer for him to single-handedly usher in consumer utopia.
This seems entirely opposite to my observation. I’d say Biden and his administration are unusually focused on unfair or annoying business practices. In just the past two weeks the Biden administration:
There are over 2 million animal species on Earth, and one species is responsible for 99.9% of all lethal attacks. Ban Humans (from existing)!
The complete rules are here: https://www.transportation.gov/airconsumer/refundsfinalruleapril2024
The meat of it is the table on pages 9-14 and mostly comprehensible.
Worth noting:
Funny running across this article after reading https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Spoiler: the author does not have a high opinion of Raghavan.
I don’t think it’s fair to call Slay the Spire (StS) a clone. While Card Quest introduced a lot of the key elements years earlier, StS adds enough innovation that it feels like a totally different game. Definitely would be more fair to say StS popularized a lot of the mechanics rather than invented/pioneered them though.
Also a video at this link. The man moves to stay in front of the tank and even climbs on top of it. Eventually some folks on foot come and guide/force him out of the way.
So to most effectively address climate change we need individuals to change their behavior. So we can just tell everyone to do that, and we are all set, right? Clearly not. We need to:
Taxing “carbon” (really all GHG emissions) creates incentives for individuals and companies to use less, making trade-offs and choosing less carbon-intensive products. It moves the threshold for switching over to cleaner and more efficient technologies. People who refuse to acknowledge climate change will still change their behavior for personal benefit. People who want to make the world better will have more options and less reliance on company marketing/greenwashing.
Read what 28 Nobel Laureates and thousands of other economists have to say: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
As mentioned on that page, the best use of this tax is to give it back to everyone equally. Those who pollute less than average come out ahead. Those who pollute more pay for it in (indirect) taxes.
This is wrong on top of wrong. First off, it’s 57 entities (including “Former Soviet Union”) producing 80% of the emissions tracked by the database – which covers “88% of total fossil fuel and cement emissions,” and totals 251G tonnes of CO2 equivalent gasses (CO2e) from 2016 through 2012 [1]. So with that we have 200Gt making up 70% of the global total over that 7 year period.
But fossil fuels and cement emissions are not the only source of greenhouse gasses. Human-caused global emissions are roughly 53GtCO2e annually during that time [2], for a total of 370Gt across all sources. So 200Gt is about 54% of that.
Most importantly though, this is a ridiculous measure in the first place. Who cares how many people are responsible for digging up the fuels that people are directly burning themselves in their homes and cars? If every oil well had its own company, how would that improve emissions? Nearly half of emissions are from individuals, and much of the rest is directly driven by consumer demand (e.g. power companies burning coal and gas).
Sources
This is known as the Chino’s Paradox
The description of the fork incident is pretty misleading. Maccani stormed up to the officers undeterred by multiple bean-bag rounds, holding the fork reversed so that it looked like a knife. Take 20 seconds and see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwXjrS9bPQ4
A better trained / equipped group may have been able to de-escalate / disarm him, but – unlike many other cases – they didn’t just wander up and shoot him for existing.
I think transforming “it’s possible to think without language” into “language is not a tool for thought” is an overreach. Definitely a lot of our internal voice is post-thought, but crystalizing those thoughts into words can provide footholds for further thought. Some would argue it’s not possible to think through a complex issue without writing: