$100 crude target
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that that probably wasn’t a number resulting from a bunch of economists and computers spending a long time crunching numbers to try to produce an optimal target for Saudi Arabia anyway.
I don’t know about that. It seemed to have a pretty rapid impact on the phone in that video, and it’s not like those are exactly open. And they weren’t pressurizing it.
Hydrogen
This says that hydrogen isn’t just a problem, just helium:
It seems that MEMS is very sensitive to helium, but only helium. This Link stated that hydrogen does not affect MEMS, which surprised me.
Hmm.
That seems like it’d open a lot of potential abuses.
I wonder what the failure mode of various electronic locks is when they’re exposed to helium?
I’d be fine with hissy fits if they were about something real.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Stop_Oil
In April 2022, it was reported that Just Stop Oil’s primary source of funding was donations from the US-based Climate Emergency Fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Getty
Aileen Getty is an American heiress and activist. She is a member of the Getty family, the granddaughter of J. Paul Getty. She co-founded the Climate Emergency Fund in 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Paul_Getty
Jean Paul Getty Sr. (/ˈɡɛti/; December 15, 1892 – June 6, 1976) was an American-born British petroleum industrialist who founded the Getty Oil Company in 1942 and was the patriarch of the Getty family.[1] A native of Minneapolis, he was the son of pioneer oilman George Getty. In 1957, Fortune magazine named him the wealthiest living American,[2] while the 1966 Guinness Book of Records declared him the world’s wealthiest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.6 billion in 2023).[3] At the time of his death, he was worth more than $6 billion (approximately $25 billion in 2023).[4] A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th wealthiest American who ever lived (based on his wealth as a percentage of the concurrent gross national product).[5]
So she assuages her guilt for having a huge oil inheritance by donating some of it to encourage other people overseas to go to jail protesting other people doing what her grandfather made his money doing. Great.
He fought to keep his job on First Amendment grounds.
looks dubious
One of the exceptions to “the government cannot restrict your right to speech” is the government acting in a “government-as-employer” role. There, they can act like any other employer, and don’t have special constraints just because they’re the government. Employers can normally let people go because they think that they’re bad for their image, and that’s what the article said happened here.
…university leaders said he sullied the school’s reputation and had to go.
https://www.nyclu.org/resources/know-your-rights/speaking-out-public-employee
Different rules apply if you are making these comments in your personal time as a private individual. Generally, your statements about topics that are of general interest to the public, including current events, are protected by the First Amendment. However, a public employer in New York may discipline you if your comments either disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job.
Now, I suppose you can ask whether the professor publicly releasing porn videos of himself is actually damaging to public perception of the university, but the rationale they used is a legit rationale.
?
Plastic recycling isn’t fake. It’s often not been economical, so it often doesn’t make any sense to do it. But you can recycle plastics.
They are worried about social decline, war, or not being able to find a home. The result is noteworthy because the job prospects for young people in Germany have not been this good in years due to the baby boomers reaching retirement age.
I don’t think that there’s any country that doesn’t have media trying to run doom-and-gloom appeals aimed at the young, and I don’t think that that’s a new phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a song written by American musician Billy Joel. The song was released as a single on September 18, 1989, and later released as part of Joel’s album Storm Front on October 17, 1989. A list song, its fast-paced lyrics include brief references to 119[3] significant political, cultural, scientific, and sporting events between 1949 (the year of Joel’s birth) and 1989, in mainly chronological order.
Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]
And making an argument that Germany needs more economic strength is hardly in line with also targeting less immigration:
With provocative messages such as “Germany is going bankrupt,” or proclamations that the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz “hates you,” they play on fears that many young people have. And then they immediately offer a solution: the AfD.
Plus, is this sending my data to HP to be processed remotely as a cloud service, or is this AI stuff being run locally? I don’t especially want to have the contents of my print jobs being sent to HP.
I haven’t been following this or US politics much, but looking at other stories, it looks like “manhunt” may be a bit over the top. It sounds like this relates to serving a subpoena:
https://www.newsweek.com/fani-willis-nathan-wade-missing-1959447
“The committee issued the subpoena on Friday, attempted to serve the subpoena to Nathan Wade’s lawyer, who declined, and subsequently the committee tried to serve the subpoena via email through Nathan Wade himself, never heard back. As a result the committee had to use the assistance of the U.S. Marshals, who have also not been able to find Nathan Wade,” Dye told Newsweek via phone Wednesday evening.
The committee spokesperson also told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the Republican-led committee has “served over 100 subpoenas this Congress. We have done so, for the most part, without controversy or the need to use the U.S. Marshals.” He added that “Nathan Wade’s evasion of service is extremely unusual and will require the Committee to spend U.S. tax dollars to locate him.”
Newsweek reached out to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for comment via email on Wednesday afternoon.
Andrew Evans, Wade’s attorney, and Dye have differing views on what transpired over the past few months as the committee has tried to get Wade to testify. Evans told Newsweek in a phone interview on Wednesday that his client previously “voluntarily agreed to go up to Washington, D.C., and the Republicans canceled it.”
Like, I don’t think that normally having a process server involved is described as a “manhunt”.
If you remember, Rudy Giuliani had been very openly dodging process servers for while until a few months ago, and I don’t think that anyone called it a “manhunt”:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/18/giuliani-birthday-indictment-papers-00158783
Rudy Giuliani received a different kind of surprise at the end of his 80th birthday bash Friday night when he was served with a notice of indictment in Arizona’s 2020 election subversion case after weeks of successfully evading the state’s prosecution.
Arizona prosecutors had been attempting to locate the former Trump attorney since his indictment at the end of April, along with 17 other Trump allies, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. The indictment, which also names former President Donald Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator, includes felony counts of conspiracy, fraud and forgery.
In a since-deleted post to X in the middle of the celebration, Giuliani taunted: “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning: 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes.”
But around 11 p.m. as the festivities wound down for the night, agents from the AG’s office arrived and served Giuliani with indictment papers outside the house, causing several of the guests to express outrage.
Exhume and ship Beethoven’s corpse back to Belgium! Austrian soil is for Austrian blood alone!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrow
Merrow (from Irish murúch, Middle Irish murdúchann or murdúchu) is a mermaid or merman in Irish folklore. The term is anglicised from the Irish word murúch.
There are some open-source systems for media PCs.
Kodi seems to me to be popular, though I don’t use a media PC myself.
You’ll need to have the technical knowledge to install it yourself.
I’m not really gung-ho about mandatory approaches either, like with licensing, but for an optional approach:
I have to be able to assess a device and its drawbacks with a reasonable amount of knowledge and time spent researching it.
There has to be at least one option on the market that does what I want.
For cars, at least, we’re really getting to the point where it’s not practical to get a new car without a cell data link that phones home.
And trying to stay atop of the privacy issues for all classes of device out there can’t be a full-time job, or it’s not reasonable to expect people to make informed purchasing decisions. Like, I should just be able to say that I don’t want a device that broadcasts any persistent unique IDs in plaintext over a radio, not have to research whether the current crop of smart automobile tire pressure valves has a protocol that exposes that information or not…
I’d like to avoid Europe’s prescription-heavy regulatory route, but the way things are now in the US isn’t my ideal either.
It’s also harder to find them in larger sizes any more, even for the few for which sell them at all, so if you want a larger one, you may not have much by way of options.
https://assetbasedlife.com/dumb-tvs-are-a-dying-breed/
This lists Insignia, which is a Best Buy store brand.
This has a couple, at least as of last year:
https://www.tomsguide.com/features/dumb-tvs-heres-why-you-cant-find-them-anymore
Your best bet of grabbing one is to head over to Best Buy and look out for the Insignia brand of TVs. There you can find a 43-inch dumb TV for around $169 or a 32-inch model for $69 . (Links to Best Buy.)
On Amazon, you can simply search for dumb TV and you should be able to find a few options from manufacturers like Westinghouse, RCA or Sceptre. (Links to Amazon.)
It’s also possible to buy a used TV, but obviously, as with getting used cars to avoid monitoring stuff in newer cars, the pool of those will only be around for so long, and you can’t take advantage of any technological advances subsequent to them.
As in other spots in Florida, mandatory evacuations were ordered for Taylor County, but Padgett estimated that as much as half of his population is choosing to stay put.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/09/26/evacuations-hurricane-helene-florida/
ST. MARKS, Fla. — Hurricane Helene is expected to bring a wall of water nearly as high as many of the buildings in this small coastal town, but Philip Tooke had no plans to heed the warnings from emergency management officials and evacuate.
He’d weathered plenty of strong storms before. And he worried about Susan D, Jenny Lee and La Victoria — his three boats. Stone crab season starts in nine days, and Tooke said he didn’t want to fall behind on business.
“There isn’t a storm I haven’t been here taking care of my babies,” he said as a light rain began to drizzle Thursday. “This is my livelihood.”
Tooke is precisely the type of resident giving emergency managers fits as Helene approaches Florida as a potentially catastrophic storm.
If your boats go down, I seriously doubt that your presence is going to do much aside from having you go with them.
It’s not intentional. They screwed up the ship and nobody wants a damaged ship full of enormous amounts of explosive material in their port.
The ship has been seeking a port for it to dock in as it is in need of repairs, having cracked its hull after previously running aground.
Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a defence analyst at Nordic Defense Analysis and a former naval officer, questioned why the ship had not been ordered to return to Russia.
He said that its condition and cargo posed an environmental and health risk.
“One can question whether it is at all justifiable for the ship to be allowed to sail. There are several reasons for this,” he told Danish media. “It has cracks in the hull. It has rudder problems. It can no longer sail by itself, but must be towed.”
He added: “This is a ship that nobody wants, but that nobody can get rid of.”
That ship in Beiruit had similar issues – it wasn’t seaworthy, so wasn’t allowed to leave, because it wasn’t seaworthy, and the owners just abandoned it in port, where (a) all the ammonium nitrate was offloaded and the port authority in Beiruit had to deal with it and (b) the sunken hull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Rhosus
MV Rhosus was a general cargo ship that was abandoned in Beirut, Lebanon, after the ship was declared unseaworthy and the charterers lost interest in the cargo. The 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate which the ship was carrying was confiscated and brought to shore in 2014, and later contributed to the catastrophic 2020 Beirut explosion. The vessel’s owner at the time of abandonment was Cyprus-based Russian businessman Igor Grechushkin. The ship sank in the Port of Beirut in 2018.
The ship is still blocking Beirut port space.
I think that a likely better concern is less that the thing is going to just blow up after reaching port – though I did read an earlier article pointing out that if repairs require welding, that it’s a risk – and more that it might wind up abandoned in port like the other ship.
Define “have”. Know about? In our own solar system?
And under what conditions? Like, walking around on the surface? Living in some kind of underground chamber?
There’s nothing in our solar system where you can just hop out and roam around on the surface like you would on Earth and survive. The atmosphere alone doesn’t make it doable.
But there are attempts to find planets outside the solar system that might be habitable:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets
Problem is that interstellar travel takes a lot of doing. The furthest a human has gone as of 2024 is just beyond the Moon. We haven’t even gone to another planet in our solar system. And traveling to even the closest star system is a lot further away.
The Moon is about 1.3 light seconds away.
We get within about 3 light-minutes of Mars at its closest approach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars
Alpha Centauri, our closest neighboring star system, is about 4.2 light-years away.
So traveling to planets in other solar systems isn’t something that’s probably going to happen in the immediate future. Even if one of these possibilities ultimately does turn out to be habitable, it’s not within our near-term reach. We can see, but we cannot easily touch.
We can create a habitable base on the Moon or Mars. But it’d only be habitable conditions inside the base itself.
Terraforming Mars or Venus might be possible.
https://viewer.weather.noaa.gov/water#layers=42904+40090+42133+41707+41708+41709+41631&x=-92.96832&y=40.68848&z=8.4&panel=legend
Has kind of a nice visualization of the flooding and related information.