Nope. Just so that you don’t starve in a crisis. Grass tastes gross. ;)

Humanitarian crisis for sure.

Tangent. If I was a mad genetic scientist with no ethics, there are a few things I’d do – engineering a virus to deliver a few “software patches” to our DNA. One of those things would be to engineer the production of cellulase as an enzyme in our digestive system – so we can get energy from grass and such in an emergency. Probably the Law of Unintended Consequences will make this worse for humanity somehow (Begun the Grass Wars have!). Mosquitos also get blood sucking removed, in an attempt to make them purely pollinating insects. Vote for Troy as mad scientist!

Won’t help the hungry in Sudan now, though. So I’m open to better ideas. Sadly, I largely have bad ideas. If I’m on the side of full external military intervention, it would be considered “colonial”. It’s hard to propose any solution that isn’t just “send aid” – and you don’t want to do that because it gets seized by the parties involved to support their conflict. Do we just watch it play out and accept refugees? That’s lame – how many millions will die in each of the above scenarios. Fuck.

Not after reading their comment history.

All people who think porn is bad are bad. They are projecting their own unhealthy suppressed sexualities onto others because of the shame they associate with their own sexuality

– DancingBear, 7 days ago

Thus I am concluding you are pro Russian and taking all opportunities to block all porn starring Ukranians. Which will be basically every site on the internet. A pity, since you seem to like it a lot.

NSFW, but the next obvious thing to do is…

https://www.xnxx.com/search/Josephine+Jackson

I spent an hour today trying to find a real source for this quote, often misattributed to Churchill. And failed. Found some sources saying it predates Churchill, but no direct references. Seems an adage that is quite old though.

Out of curiosity, how is this ratio relative to some place like North Korea?

We called it “Beetle Bump” but same thing.

After the release of the redesign, it sort of stopped. Only really made sense for the classic version.

Easier to infiltrate terrorist networks – networks are, well, networks. Most school shootings are independent actors, even if radicalized online.

Now, if you’re asking about why they haven’t implemented decent gun control laws…

Keep going, I’m almost there

I bet this is a falling out with Hasbro execs on royalties. BG3 royalties were a cash cow this year for Hasbro, pushing Wizards (as a division) to be quite profitable, while almost all other divisions in their company lost money.

So now the agreement is over, and Larian is like: we will own the IP on our next project instead of paying $90M to Hasbro… And fair enough – they’ve shown they can kick ass. Hasbro is probably gambling that it’s the IP that made the money, and not Larian being magic in a bottle as a developer. So they’ll kick tires on selling BG4 to another studio.

BG3 will go down in history as the legendary game before enshittification. Larian will make a few great games that don’t sell as well – before selling out to a whale that dumps money on the owner’s front lawn (see also BioWare). The devs who made BG3 will found indie studios and make cool shit for a decade or two. So the wheel turns.

And losses in the inverter.

Malicious Corporate Compliance

Not bells either ;)

Hopefully not too depressing of a take, but:

On the scale of the planet as a whole system (looking at the forest, and not the trees): humans are commodity – there are billions upon billions of humans. But there is only one planet, with one atmosphere. If we wait for every human life to have unlimited value in every jurisdiction on earth – we will wait forever. And then it will be too late and we’re all going to fry in our utopian hell on earth.

In whatever jurisdiction you’re in, you should be pushing for large scale planet-affecting changes to how the civilization behaves with regard to our stewardship of the planet.

And yes, you can do both at the same time.

(I’m a huge fan of Iain M Banks’s Culture series. There is a Utopian future that is possible, where everything is simultaneously carefully managed, but individual freedom and prosperity coexists.)

Fire control is going to be a major engineering challenge on a civilization scale in the upcoming centuries if we want to preserve our carbon sink forests. Should be an interesting challenge, politically, to direct money into it. It’s large scale geoengineering…

So – pure curiosity… Which countries could yet still potentially join NATO.

Switzerland doesn’t join anything ever, so it’s the dark horse. But since everything is done by referendum there, it could change on a dime if the public demanded it.

Austria literally has it in their constitution that they aren’t allowed – but in theory they could change their constitution (unlikely).

Moldova has the whole Transnistria incentive – but NATO would be shy about that one, because that could potentially immediately put them in hot conflict. However, suppose they backdoored their way in by creating a union with Romania (not impossible, but complicated).

Ireland has been neutral forever – but the public support for Ukraine is extremely high. So they might even be possible. Higher than Switzerland anyway ;)

Bosnia and Herzegovina is sort of a special case where they’re sort of partially engaged already.

Serbia is extremely unlikely while they continue to be extremely contemptuous of everyone. That’s fine. Although Kosovo is sort of under NATO protection.

In theory, Georgia or Armenia would be candidates, but Turkey would pooh-pooh Armenia right away, and Georgia has contested territory.

In order of odds, I wager: Ireland, Moldova (via Romania), Georgia+Ukraine (in that order chronologically).

Yeah, this is an interesting element. Historically, allowing all members a veto, while also having no way to expel a member, means that any such institution is liable to outside meddling. The classic example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto – in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, any noble could veto anything. So all it took was buying a few nobles and it shattered.

Removed by mod

KDE for years had a clock option called “fuzzy clock” where you could set the granularity of time, either in 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60 minute resolution. So it would just say “five to six” or whatever in words. It was designed to keep you from clock watching while working. Not sure if it exists anymore :)