Isn’t that what tapes are for.

I’m not sure how they’re doing it but in Germany all those PET bottles go into a centrally-managed recycling stream (because 25ct deposit) and I bet they have some technical norms around that kind of stuff. The bottles are all crushed to save space, incl. the caps, which at least in the case of the water bottle next to me is HDPE. Judging by the haptics the label is PET, a flimsy banderole glued (fused?) on at the seam.

Either they’re doing it chemically by breaking up the PET and then fishing out the rest from the soup (is that possible?) or what would also work I guess is shredding and mechanical sorting – the label is flimsy, the bottle always transparent, the cap never transparent. Such stuff.

bamboo or metal straws

Silicone. Silicone is the perfect straw material. Bamboo I guess works for disposable ones but I’ve never used one. Definitely too short for 1.5l bottles though.

There was no infrastructure to find these kinds of opportunities unless you knew a guy who knew a guy. The likes of airbnb were what enabled the spread of couchsurfing in places you did not have a prior connection to in the first place. Then bread and breakfasts and smaller hotels started getting onto the platform as it was a way for them to get customers, not having the name recognition and own infrastructure that big hotel chains have. Then, years later, came the fucks buying up multiple apartments to turn them into short-term rentals.

I’ll readily blame airbnb for not nipping that behaviour in the bud themselves but also that’s just not how VC investment works, they had no chance at that point. I’m generally not a fan of how Silicon Valley companies act regarding regulations but unlike e.g. uber airbnb hasn’t been trying to skirt them and find loopholes left and right, only thing they’ve been whinging about, particularly in Berlin, is that the administration doesn’t have its IT shit together and is generally slow, and pointed to Hamburg of all places as something to imitate. Very smart of them: “You’re worse than Hamburg” is one of the few viable ways to motivate Berliners to do anything. The other is to dangle VIP tickets to Berghain in front of their noses.

I think that’s mostly UK and France. As in: I have an Opinel lying around here, perfectly legal to carry in any situation as long as it’s not a protest or such, it’s a French knife, lots of tradition behind it… and it’s illegal in France.

Rules in Germany are quite simple: If the blade is longer than IIRC 14cm (palm of your hand), or it is a locking blade that’s designed to be opened with one hand, you need a good reason to carry it. Like, walking on the street towards the forest with an axe over your shoulder is fine because you have a proper reason, into a mall, not so much. Butterflies and some other one-handed opening mechanisms popular with notorious people are outlawed. Fixed blades with certain features, say, guards or more than one edge, are rightly classed as bladed weapons which you generally need to keep at home. Everything else is a tool you can EDC, and the only thing you need to buy a sword is your ID to show that you’re 18.

The whole thing is about bottle caps found on beaches. I assume people just lose track of them, you might put it down on your beach towel and then something moves and a second later it’s in the sand getting buried.

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And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the (rust) code.

https://github.com/servo/servo

I really wish they would publish flatpaks because I can’t be arsed to either build the thing or get a non-standard precompiled binary to run on nixos.

Over here in Germany, they ran against a brick wall:

• Taxi apps already existed. Pioneers were taxi.eu, where a consortium of local dispatchers plain and simply introduced another way to access their services, and what’s now called Free Now, circumventing the old dispatchers, directly connecting clients and individual, licensed, taxi drivers. Both predate uber’s founding, and definitely uber’s introduction into the market here.
• Regulations exist. Taxis are classed as public transport, prices are regulated, no congestion pricing, no not taking on a passenger to the outskirts because you wouldn’t get a return fare, no nothing. On the flipside you need a license so that there’s few enough taxis around for every driver to still be able to make a living. Uber didn’t care a bit about that kind of stuff, bringing us to
• Regulations are enforced. Drivers taking uber fares without both taxi and passenger transport license were looking at court orders giving slaps on the wrist, but also threatening 1000 Euro fines for every subsequent passenger transported without proper licensing.

Oh:

• Public transport is a thing. Most trips are covered by buses, metros, etc, more rural areas by collect taxis. Needing to hail an individual one is very rare, I think most of their fares are from people with too much money on hand. Also if you need to hail that taxi chances are your health insurance is going to cover the cost they prefer you hauling your broken leg to the doctor with a taxi, transport ambulances are more expensive and it’s not like you need medical supervision on the trip, or the thing would need to accommodate a wheelchair or such.

what even is ONE positive out of Airbnb?

It enables random Joes with an extra room or even couch or away for a while to actually find someone to take up their offer. Airbnb was one of the many couchsurfing platforms back in the days, one that managed to have global appeal and thus rushed ahead, and back in the days the offers were indeed of the bed and breakfast type at most. More commonly, “yeah we have a convertible couch and yep there’s some cheerios if you want”. Or even “hey we have a farm and there’s hay in the barn to sleep on there’s going to be potatoes, onions, eggs and ham for breakfast”. That’s good allocation of resources, and the likes of airbnb help using those resources more efficiently.

Investment sharks swooping in has been regrettable, but the only reason they were able to was because cities etc. had insufficient regulations. They didn’t bother to before because the micro-hotel business was negligible and didn’t have any noticeable market impact, now it does and thus they need to regulate.

And at least the Berlin regulations are furnished precisely to bring these kinds of platforms back to their original purpose: You can either yourself live in the apartment while the guest is there, or you can restrict your rental to a couple of weeks per year, if you don’t, you need a hotel license. And there’s no hotel licenses to be had for apartments in a residential zone in a housing crisis. If you’re trying to skirt those regulations you’ll soon find out that finance ministries in Germany have their own police forces. Especially in Berlin you have literally the whole population to deal with, a population which carried a referendum to socialise landlords owning more than 1000 apartments, they are going to rat you out.

The issue here isn’t the idea of micro rentals, those have existed since time immemorial, the issue is capital capturing politics to avoid having proper regulation put into place so that they can exploit market failure.

Wait since when is mithril a thing in DF. Adamantine would certainly be a bad idea because crutches are bound to be blunt damage and adamantine (inspired by mithril) has about the density of cork. For blunt weapons you want gold or platinum, but you’d need to edit the game files or farm moods. Silver is the next best thing that can be done without cheesing. Adamantine is for armor and edge weapons.

The unreasonable effectiveness of crutches might be due to the same factor as the unreasonable effectiveness of pickaxes: Those use the mining skill for damage bonuses, crutches might use crutch-walker you’d have to test that. In any case wielding an axe one-handed is probably not a good idea, there’s even dorfs that aren’t tall enough to even wield them one-handed and the ones large enough to do so will still be way better at it with two hands.

Germany: just do what the rest of the west (and China) does and bribe the Canadian government to hand over raw resources to you.

Exactly what we’re doing. Also Namibia, besides having (as Canada) excellent conditions for renewable energy, being (as Canada) a proper democracy, they’re also an ex-colony so we’re using the opportunity to help bootstrap their local energy infrastructure to industrialised levels (it’s currently hit and miss), also, they’ll have absolute energy independence. Also stuff like Africa’s first hydrogen-based steel furnance. Which would make Namibia a more developed economy than Australia who somehow are still exporting raw ore.

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal.

For all that talk of dependency preciously little happened when Russia closed the valves. There’s press reports about BASF going into gas saving mode but that’s a bit misleading – actual gas saving mode would be to change their processes on a fundamental level (they have plans and infrastructure for that), what they did do is to use the flexibility in their standard processes to not rely on gas as precursor where there’s more readily available options – as they’ve been doing for literal decades, depending on market prices they’re using more of this, or more of that. They pulled a lever over to one side, they didn’t build a whole new set of levers to pull.

Germany ended up having more gas reserves at the end of the winter than usual because people were quite mindful when heating their homes, mindful as in “it doesn’t need to be t-shirt temperature in here, 20C suffices”, not as in “let’s heat our homes like English pensioners”. Gas prices actually sunk, presumably due to lower demand companies invested in things like waste heat recycling.

The whole concept of Wandel durch Handel relied on the assumption that economical entanglement makes war ruinous, and thus states are heavily disincentivised to be belligerent. You can now interpret that in two ways: a) It didn’t stop Russia, therefore, it failed or b) it succeeded in ruining Russia’s economy because all their what ball bearing companies went belly-up during entanglement, German ball bearings being cheaper (not necessarily unit price, you also have to take lifetime, service costs etc. into account) and now they have severe shortages (that’s simplifying quite a bit but that’s the net effect).

In the end there’s only one thing to take away: Policy can’t influence non-rational actors. All you can ensure is that if an actor becomes irrational they’re shooting themselves in the foot.

About 8% in 2022, under 30yold 12.6%, under 20yold 17.9%, over 60yold 2%.

There doesn’t seem to be an official quota, at least I couldn’t find anything concrete. Should be state law and that’s generally easy to find. OTOH there’s a literal fuckton of organisations involved running Kindergarten, many are independent associations, others are run by churches or municipalities, all of those may have their official or unofficial guidelines.

(For the Americans: Kindergarten is not part of the school system over here y’all are misusing the term. Kindergarten is where you develop motor skills (and other things) through play, school is where you then learn to write. Definitely no home-work. Generally not mandatory though some states have introduced mandatory developmental tests so that kids who lag behind in some areas can get that fixed by professionals (minimum 3 years education) before school starts so they don’t start their school career at a disadvantage)

The push seems to come largely from academia and professional organisations. Here’s a nice, long interview in a professional publication from 2013, I recommend reading the whole thing but this strikes me:

In our representative study […] 40% of parents, 43% of daycare centre managers and 48% of intendants stated that they - more or less intensively - had thought about the risk of abuse by an educator.
Remarkably, however, these survey groups also showed a very high level of approval towards men in daycare centres. In our study, around 90% of parents, daycare centre managers and intendants consider it important that children are cared for by male professionals.

90% is rather significant, I’d be interested in numbers from other countries. It’s more than enough so that you don’t need advocacy to get things started because practically everyone already acknowledges that it’s an issue that needs solving, all that was apparently necessary is for someone to sit down and develop ready-made strategies regarding getting men into the profession, allaying fears, making sure that organisational structures make it harder, not easier, for abusers, etc. That seems to be mostly “have them be democratic and not hierarchical”, which is of course a good idea in general.

Why is basic arithmetic so sacred that it must not be besmirched?

It isn’t. It’s convenient. Toss it if you don’t want to use it. What’s not an option though is to use it incorrectly, and that would be insisting that 0.999… /= 1, because that doesn’t make any sense.

A notational system doesn’t get to say “well I like to do numbers this way, let’s break all the axioms or arithmetic”. If you say that 0.333… = 1/3, then it necessarily follows that 0.999… = 1. Forget about “but how do I calculate that” think about “does multiplying the same number by the same number yield the same result”.

catches people because using arithmetic properly leads to an incorrect understanding of repeating decimals.

Repeating decimals aren’t apart from decimal arithmetic. They’re a necessary part of it. If you didn’t learn 0.999… = 1, you did not learn decimal arithmetic. And with “necessary” I mean necessary: Any positional system that supports expressing rational numbers will have repeating digits. It’s the trade-off you make, by fixing the divisor (10 in our case), to make numbers easily comparable by size, because no number can divide any number cleanly because there’s an infinite number of primes. Quick, which is the bigger number: 38/127 or 39/131.

Any notational system has its awkward spots. You will not get around awkward spots. Decimal notation has quite few of them, certainly fewer than Roman numerals where being able to do long division earned you a Ph.D. If you can come up with something better be my guest, I already linked you to a starting point.

They might use standard imagemagick or such on the backend meaning they can ingest pretty much any image format ever invented, and have a limited set of extensions allowed on the frontend side so people don’t upload .txts.

This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.

IANAL but what they’re saying here seems to be “if you download our code and modify it and, with that modification, touch some other patent of ours we can still have your ass”. That is, the license they’re giving out only cover the code that they release. Which shouldn’t be too controversial, I think.

The issue with codecs in general is that there’s plenty of trolls around and coming up with any audio or video codec is probably going to hit one of their patents, so the best that FLOSS codecs can do is “we don’t have any patents on this” or “we do have patents on this but license them freely, also, if someone else goes after you we’re going to detonate a patent minefield under their ass”. Patent portfolios have essentially reached the level of MAD.

Personally, IDGAF: Software patents aren’t a thing over here. You only have to worry about that stuff if you’re developing silicon.

0.999… has no smallest digit, thus the carry operation fails to roll it over to 1.

That’s where limits get involved, snatching the carry from the brink of infinity. You could, OTOH, also ignore that and simply accept that it has to be the case because 0.333… * 3. And let me emphasise this doubly and triply: That is a correct mathematical understanding. You don’t need to get limits involved. It doesn’t make it any more correct, or detailed, or anything. Glancing at Occam’s razor, it’s even the preferable explanation: There’s a gazillion overcomplicated and egg-headed ways to write 1 + 1 = 2 (just have a look at the Principia Mathematica), that doesn’t mean that a kindergarten student doesn’t understand the concept correctly. Begone, superfluous sophistication!

(I just noticed that sophistication actually shares a root with sophistry. What a coincidence)

Someone using only basic arithmetic on decimal notation will conclude that 0.999… is not 1.

Doesn’t pass scrutiny, because then either 0.333… /= 1/3 or 3 /= 3 (or both). It simply cannot be the case when looking at the whole system, as opposed to only the single question 0.999… ?= 1 and trying to glean something from that. Context matters: Any answer to that question has to be consistent with all the rest you know about the natural numbers. And only 0.999… = 1 fulfils that.

Why are you making this so complicated?

They’ve definitely done that before, dunno if it was deliberately. They must have somewhat of an idea how long it takes for nocebo to kick in with the local village idiots, if it’s short enough it could actually be a rather good idea to make waiting a bit a general policy. Tank some mild capital and opportunity cost to prevent having to battle in court and the town newspaper? Sounds like a win to me.

Not really, they’d need to triple their numbers.

Numbers on the far left are misleading as Die Linke is bleeding members to the BSW but the BSW is taking their sweet time handing out membership cards, double-checking every single applicant. Reportedly they have a backlog of at least 8000 applicants or such and at least 20k people generally interested. Wagenknecht is at least 70% tankie so it doesn’t surprise that they’re doing a vanguard thing.