I have not read your whole comment yet, but I apologize for my heated reaction. Your post came off as oil and gas promotion to me, but that’s clearly not the case. Thank you for your thoughtful response. I will read it more fully later.

Edit: thank you to people upvoting this comment, but I do regret it. The only good I now see in it is that it spurned further discussion and clarity. If you upvote this post, do read and upvote the parent comment and reply comment from anon6789, there are good insights there, at the very least.

Then any carbon removed from the atmosphere gets released when the pellet fuel is burned. Add in the carbon from making the pellets and all the shipping and cutting down the trees and replanting, and we’re worse off than when we started. The net pollution they say is greater than coal or natural gas.

This makes no sense.

The net pollution they say is greater than coal or natural gas.

If “they” are oil and gas corporations, I’d say that too, if I were them. Any move against our bottom line, or competition to our subsidies is fair game for attack.

any carbon removed from the atmosphere gets released when the pellet fuel is burned

How is that wood’s problem exactly? How did that carbon get into the atmosphere in the first place to be turned into wood? If there had been no coal, gas, or oil, that atmospheric carbon would have been from burning wood in the first place, making it a net cycle of wood. It grows in short order regardless of what we do with it; it’s renewable.

There’s a competitor to fossil fuels, returning carbon to the atmosphere, it’s been burned literally forever, and oooh suddenly it’s the one to be concerned about, not the other carbon emitters that can only emit, never absorb? Come on.

carbon from [harvest, manufacturing, packaging, shipping] … we’re worse off than when we started

As if the extraction, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping for fossil fuels doesn’t emit vast amounts of carbon? If wood was harvested, manufactured, packaged and shipped with renewable energy, what’s the problem? Why couldn’t it be? If fossil fuels were harvested, manufactured, packaged and shipped with renewable energy, I’d say “cut out the middle man” and just use the renewables directly for energy. Is that your beef?

In that case, let’s harvest that wood anyway, turn it into charcoal, and sink it to the bottom of the ocean to get carbon back out of our atmosphere permanently. If you think that’s a ridiculous undertaking, it’s even crazier to think about the absurd amounts of carbon we are digging up and plain dumping into the atmosphere every day, and that wasn’t complained about first, before complaining about wood of all things. We don’t just need to stop emitting new carbon, we need to get it back out of the atmosphere forever, and that’s not even on the radar? Hmm.

What do you suggest we do? All I’m seeing is rhetoric is that trees are a grift, while suspiciously overlooking the fossil fuel subsidy grift.

Evolution doesn’t demand anything, it’s literally about adaptation. The expectation of infinite growth inside an obviously finite system is the death cult.

“I’m a cat, I kill for fun.”

This will not be popular but oh well.

The cause of inflation is: getting something for nothing. One can see how this notion would be unpopular, because, well, literally anyone would like to get something without working for it/for free. And some people are better than others at doing that, with varying definitions for “better”, “people”, “something”, and “nothing”.

The classic example of inflation is the one everyone knows: a store that raises prices because of theft. A skateboard maker builds skateboards, a skateboard gets stolen, the price goes up to cover the loss of the things that went into the skateboard (materials, labor, etc) so the builder can still eat. The price of skateboards has inflated because of theft; the thief got something for nothing. Fact of life.

Inflation in currency is caused by fractional reserve banking; the ability to lend more currency on paper than actually exists physically. You actually have to print more money in order to keep the system from grinding to a halt. The inflation would eventually resolve, but when interest is applied to the lent money it does not. Why manipulating the interest rate is related to combatting inflation lays in here. Find a decently long YouTube video about how fractional reserve banking works to find out more. I’d provide a link but I can’t find the good one right now. Suffice to say, inflation went up, because the banking system got money for having money. Fact of life.

Prices way over the cost of the good due to corporate greed is another one, pretty similar to the classic theft example, just modified. The price of something goes up, not to cover a loss, but “just because” someone wants more money, when it comes down to it. You can quarrel all day about the fine details on that. Suffice to say inflation went up because they got more money for something by essentially doing nothing more. Fact of life.

The interesting thing about that last one is that the problem is compounded by (what could be considered the “excess”) money going back into the fractional reserve banking system, especially without there having been any real work done to justify the added cost. You can kind of get a glimpse of how the interest rate is tied to inflation, and why raising it also doesn’t fix everything; cheaper money means people don’t care about the needlessly higher price of things as much, so if you raise the cost of money people have to be concerned again. But by raising the rate, the banking system is getting more money for no “real” reason, so…

So I suppose, knowing what we know now, it might be better to say, rather than “something for nothing”: receiving something for less than it is genuinely worth, or the flip side, selling something for more than it is genuinely worth, or maybe just simply, getting value without working for it.

If this all sounds insane to you, and you are thinking of replying, before you do, you really should learn about how fractional reserve banking works. It is the thing that underpins everything in modern life, and is the literal foundation of our world economy. Not knowing how it works is like not knowing why you get sick from drinking still water on the ground. You can still get along without knowing it, but if you know, it sure helps you to navigate the world better. Do watch the most detailed video or something you can find.

Dude, you are the greatest of all time. Thank you for posting this.

Edit: do/have you ever used sausage anywhere in there?

making a carbon copy

Is making it difficult?

Might be this dude; it is not free, just very affordable in their market. It turns out making it affordable also brings in a lot of revenue.

https://youtu.be/44Do5x5abRY

O.C.: Have you consulted about this “tables” approach with other Lua developers?

I.T.: After that, I went back to Dmitry and asked him if my understanding of “everything is a table” was correct and, if so, why Lua was designed this way. Dmitry told me that Lua was created at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and that it was acceptable for Pontifical Catholic Universities to design programming languages this way.

Lol what? Is there some kind of inside joke about Catholics and tables?

I share what I find interesting from my RSS feed.

Thank you for doing that. Human-curated links shared here is exactly what we need.

To the complainer: People upvoting and downvoting posts will be the arbiter, not someone whining like a 14yo.

So an increase in unwanted advances, positively correlates to an increase in ugly people?

“Do you have any bovine lactations?”

So you’ve got me thinking about a potential dark browser pattern relating to this that I think was introduced by Google in Chrome.

Wayyyy back in the day, you might have a page full of animated gifs all doing their thing, and what you could do once the page was loaded was to hit the stop button (or hit the stop button twice if the page was still loading), and all of the gifs would stop animating. Today you couldn’t do that, because the stop button has been intertwined with the refresh button; once the page loads, the stop button turns into the refresh button.

I bring this up, because there used to be a simple universal mechanism to indicate that you wanted to stop things from moving/animating, and it would do so, but now there isn’t. Funny how that mechanism has been subtly removed from an advertiser’s browser, where it is in their best interest to keep the ads blinking and changing to draw your attention to them.

It’s too bad that there is no longer a mechanism that is as simple and universal that can stop movement. Now every site has to devise its own way to handle stopping movement, and there will be competing standards and methods, and it will no doubt end up being a pain intentionally, just like cookie popups.

Maybe browsers should bring back universal stop for animated gifs, SVG, video, and (some) CSS, with an event to notify the page script.

Does this apply to spinners and other wait animations used to indicate to the visitor that something is happening or giving comfort that their request is indeed still being actively processed?

Brother, if you are having sleep issues and haven’t cut out caffeine yet, you owe it to yourself to start weaning off of it asap and see how that works for you. I can’t have any caffeine after noon, for instance, or else my sleep is fucked.

Other folks on here have already made the Xanax-anxiety connection for you, so I think it’s relevant to point out that in some people, caffeine is an anxiogenic, just saying.

I hope you find better sleep even if this is a dead end.

I can’t help you with your animal fear, but I’ll give you a higher priority reason to avoid a cat for now.

I’ll give what will probably be an unpopular opinion; cats (and pets in general for that matter) are a luxury… item. I have 3 of them, and I would never recommend one to a person who is struggling financially and/or has lost their job. Their food and vet bills are not cheap, and even a cat that seems perfectly fine can suddenly have an issue that requires an expensive vet visit. As they age, they will inevitably have health issues, which not only adds more expense, but increases the rate at which expenses accumulate. They can also damage things and ruin things, which adds further expense.

All of this is fine, if you can afford it. However I don’t think very many people actually sit down and work out the numbers. On top of food, litter, and equipment costs, IMO people should be saving ~$70/a month for the first 5 years, then maybe half that after that if you didn’t have to use any of it, to be prepared for big vet events. It sucks not being able to afford the care your pet needs.

Further, I have found that having multiple cats does not decrease the amount of expense per cat due to expected efficiencies from overlap. There are subtle things that accumulate like cleaning expenses and drain on your time and greater resources. I wish I only had one cat, honestly.

People say you can’t put a price on them because of their cuteness and company and what have you. But believe me, you can if your cat(s) turn out to be absolute dicks, but nobody talks about that either, IMO because of some kind of Stockholm syndrome, sunk cost combo. People generally gloss over the shitty parts of pet ownership.

Don’t do it. Be well-off first. Your GF’s sister is probably finding this out.

against your bias and narrative

If being a regular person who just wants to enjoy the things they pay for in peace is bias, and being fed up with this crap is narrative, what does that make you?

Stop trying to normalize exploitation by greed, and stop normalizing the acceptance of it.

Just because Sony can manufacture a bait and switch with some boilerplate doesn’t mean they should. Regular people should not be blamed for being exploited when purchasing in good faith. The developers made a game that works, clearly, and Steam delivered it, so they are culpable, but if Sony can stop their horseshit, and this all goes away, it is clear who really is to blame.

Did the CEO of Sony write this? A bait and switch scam is fine apparently, as long as there’s some legalese to protect the company in there.

It seems Steam should have some limitation in place on their end, and the Dev picks sales on Steam, not the publisher.

Then what is the job of the publisher? To perpetrate scams it seems, because seemingly the devs published the game just fine all by themselves to Steam. If they didn’t do that right, the publisher suddenly has no responsibility to make sure that was distributed correctly? Whose job is it to ensure the product is published in line with their inevitable goals, we wonder.

so why would they list it for sale in those countries?

Because they botched the bait and switch. And now Valve is cleaning up Sony’s mess. Too bad they couldn’t clean up Sony’s mess of leaked customer data. I guess they can’t fix it but prevent the next one by making publishers agree up front that they can’t require data from players, in order to publish a game, but I digress.

no one seems to want to accept personal responsibility

No one should have to expect to be subject to a bait and switch scam in the first place. Which is what this clearly is, because if they were truly up front, they would have required the account on day one and had the appropriate region filters in place, so consumers could never be in this position.

Stop blaming the victims of corporate greed and scams; people should be able to reasonably enjoy things they paid for without being molested and exploited. Personal responsibility my ass when there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing in the first place.

Interesting. I wonder how that compares to a similar Li-ion cell. Also it’s a shame there wasn’t a close-up on the markings of the battery in that video to know what it is exactly. I don’t imagine all cells are equal.

The battery packs from the article, for instance, are not constructed from cylindrical cells, but from large thin and flat square cells. The cathode material appears to be unique as well, as far as I can tell; who knows what’s in those blue cylindrical cells.

explosive hazard

Can you elaborate on that? I was just reading the data sheet for these batteries, and these are tested with a ballistic penetration test, resulting in no fire.

I’m presuming this concern is from watching videos of elemental sodium reacting with water, which stands to reason, but I’ve not heard of exploding batteries