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DnD Central / Re: Today's Good News
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Messages - ersi
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DnD Central / Re: The Worldwide Politics Thread
Otherwise, like elsewhere in the West lately, extreme right wing is flapping.
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DnD Central / Re: A blast from the past… :)
Quote from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/25/sir-john-franklin-1845-expedition-sailor-identified
Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions set out in search of Franklin’s lost ships, but all ended in failure. It wasn’t until researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and the Terror in the past decade.
The site where Fitzjames and at least a dozen others perished was located by searchers in the 1860s, who heard Inuit stories that the survivors resorted to cannibalism – news that rocked Victorian England. That testimony was given some support in the late 1990s by the late anthropologist Anne Keenleyside, who found marks consistent with human-made cuts on nearly a quarter of the bones.
A molar from one mandible, etched with knife marks, proved a match with one of those 25 [DNA samples] and the team soon realized they were holding the remains of Captain James Fitzjames. The results were published on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
For the more complex cases you'd need something more dynamic and interactive, including switching between views, and particular your current needs.I hate apps.
For the more complex cases one can make a set of maps, instead of a single map. In Helsinki and Stockholm there are public transit network maps for the region/län, another for the city, another for city centre, and more for different suburbses (or whatever the plural for it is), and even more per transit mode (tram, bus, metro) and finally also maps and schedules per line. All schedules in one is a thick book, but one or few lines that you need is thinner.
When you are in Tokyo for the first time, you'd have to locate yourself on that crazy metro network map and figure out your itinerary before stepping on the train. But once in the (hopefully correct) train, all you need is to keep watching above the doors for the station to step off at.
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DnD Central / Re: Climate Change and You
Every aspect of recycling has improved greatly over the last 30 years, not to speak of the last 60 years. Ersi is griping for the sake of griping.Then why after acid rains and ozone depletion did we end up with global warming?
We are far better at life-cycle management, and designing for reuse and recycling.Ah, I get it. We are better at designing and planning and such. Sustainable production and reduction of pollution is always in the plans for the future, but will never become reality. We are getting better at environmentalist propaganda, not at actual environmentalism.
We hardly have a circular economy, but we're getting a few steps closer. Waste is turning into resources.
Edit: Actually, even the propaganda is not that good. It is good only at obfuscating as follows:
Today, households produce dramatically less trash than they used to. And while I consider waste sorting at source...Where I live, households never produced any significant trash. Most trash ends up at households only as un-reusable packages (nowadays often ironically labelled "reusable" and "recyclable") that come with stuff bought at supermarkets. Forty years ago, there was hardly any such trash. Now it is a never-ending stream of crap. It has massively increased, not the other way round.
Consequently, "waste sorting at source" should reasonably mean anywhere else except households. It should be the supermarkets or the manufacturers, but the current regulations put the burden on households. So, obfuscation, upside down, completely wrong and not even beginning to describe reality.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: Best about wristwatches
This is the watch I'm talking about https://gettrumpwatches.com/products/tourbillon-full-gold
Trump's campaign merch knows no limits and stops at nothing. Even the famous "little lady Secret Service Agent" is now a perpetual collateral damage of his grift.
1 Actually I understand: Which respectable movement maker would want itself associated with this disaster? It can only be "Swiss craftmanship" outsourced to China.↵
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DnD Central / Re: Climate Change and You
Edit: incidentally, I seemed to remember reading something about reusable cups being enforced now in certain contexts, which will likely expand: https://www.brusselstimes.com/1196524/record-number-of-reusable-cups-at-belgian-festivalsThis is clearly a planted promo article for a company called Ecocup. Let's take a look what the have on offer.
Nos verres réutilisables en polypropylène sont recyclables et garantis sans bisphénol A et sont une excellente alternative aux gobelets à usage unique.Conclusion: Everything under the modern "reusable" hype label is a lie. It's the same single-use crap, but you are encouraged to use it a few more times than once. And obviously it's plastic.
Seriously, anything wrong with real glass and metal cups? I know what the problem is. Glass and metal are *actually* reusable and that's the problem: Not enough turnover.
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DnD Central / Re: Climate Change and You
The same paper minus plastic is less, not more.Any more elaborately manufactured "paper", such as paper cups or dishes, include plastic. Glanzpapier is probably mostly plastic. A paper newspaper has no plastic, but look up the list of chemicals used in the washing process to get the paper to be as white as we want it...
...it's how we previously solved the acid rain and ozone layer crises.I'm of two minds about this. First, nice of us to have solved those crises. This shows that man-made environmental problems can be cleared up. Climate denialists are stupid.
However, having solved the acid rain and ozone layer crises, how the hell did we end up with the current "global warming/climate change" thingie? Didn't we learn anything from the earlier crises? Because all along, it's the same wider problem: Industrial pollution. We haven't solved it after all...
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DnD Central / Re: Climate Change and You
Have you not seen exactly that happen in Estonia? There's significantly less packaging now than a decade ago. Where there used to be paper with a plastic wrapper now there's only paper.May I point out that the process of producing paper is no less poisonous and polluting than producing plastic. Particularly when we are talking about utensils we eat from, i.e. in terms of what ends up directly inside us. Ever felt the smell of a pulp mill?
Producing more paper does not equal less pollution. It's more pollution. It's like producing electric cars. We need less cars, not more. We need less pollution, not more. E.g. Cuba never produced a single car, so people drive their American cars that they have maintained since 1950s. That's the way: Stop producing cars!
I do not believe for a second that there is less production of single-use crap now compared to ten years ago. This much is up for my belief, because I have not looked any deeper into it. But I know for an absolute fact that there is far more production of single-use crap right now than there was thirty years ago. And forty and more years ago, when Soviet Union was still alive and well, single-use crap, such as fast food utensils, was not a thing at all (in Soviet Union). Forty years ago it was only beginning to become a concept in medicine with single-use syringes and such.
In Rotterdam trash separation is done at the trash processing plants, not put upon citizens. This meets the same targets as that which is done in some other places by pre-separation. Both systems, plural, have similar end results. The minimum targets are the same but how to go about it is up to each individual country and municipality. Many go further than the minimum, many do not.Good for Rotterdam. I will believe it when I see it. What you are also silently saying is that this is not the case in Brussels, nor is it the case anywhere else in Europe. And nobody except me is suggesting the policy of making recycling the requirement and responsibility on industries instead of on consumers. Whenever I say it, it's treated as a novel idea.
Surely you have seen propaganda that we consumers should consume responsibly, even though the reality is that we are forced to consume stuff that is available in supermarkets and shopping centres. We cannot buy "green" stuff that is not there. We can only buy stuff that is there. So, if we should only buy "green" stuff, then first manufacturers must be forced to produce only green stuff. This is obviously the way it should go, but nobody besides me is suggesting it. The propaganda is that consumers must become responsible instead.
To be clear: Crap labelled "green" is still crap. It's crap because "green" is just a tiny corner in the supermarket, i.e. it's not a serious alternative. It's crap because "green" is just a label that makes stuff more expensive, while there is no certainty that it was produced any differently than non-green crap. It's crap because it represents the same single-use throwaway principle, no maintainability on the end-user side.
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DnD Central / Re: Climate Change and You
I saw widespread pollution first-hand in the Soviet Union's former satellite states in the mid-'90s. It was cleaned up by West Germany and the EU. So I would be inclined to think of this recycling prowess as a sign of poverty first and foremost, assuming it's not mere propaganda.Propaganda about recycling did not exist in Soviet Union. The word "recycling" did not exist. The Soviet government did not do anything, either in terms of propaganda, institutional oppression or outright persecution, to force people to recycle. There was certainly no propaganda in terms of "the West is lousy at recycling while we Soviet people are the best the world has ever seen!". That the West is lousy at recycling is my own private observation based on experience.
There was so-called "return" in Soviet Union. You could return your old newspapers and books to recycle paper. You could, if you wanted to. You did not have to. There was no punishment if you did not do it. You could also return rusty metal stuff.
People quite eagerly returned glass bottles to supermarkets (or whatever name one would put on the Soviet equivalent of supermarket). Many bottles cost more than their contents, so the activity of returning bottles provided significant gains, very different from our current times where there is no significant gain, unless you're a professional, either picking up bottles full time or you're in the relevant business as a manager of a supermarket or recycling trucking so there is enough scale in returning bottles.
Moreover, in Soviet times returning of the bottles was not a machine procedure, but human interaction. You did not go to a stinking machine. You went to a human who did not stink too different from yourself.
As to returning paper or metal, people did little of it. Why? Because people had multiple use for those things privately. They thoroughly recycled paper and metal in their personal households out of their own initiative. There was no propaganda that people should behave this way. They just did. It was a way of life. And supermarkets did not sell stuff that consisted of mostly packaging. They sold things very thinly packaged, if packaged at all.
Compare this to current way of life: It is impossible to not buy unusable trash, mostly packaging, from supermarkets. Then you need to get rid of the packages. You have to sort them correctly. As a very simple example, say you get a milk shake at McDonalds. The straw is paper nowadays, but the lid is still plastic, so if you want to be correct, you need to sort the straw and the cup in one bin, the lid in another. It should be obvious that this is an insane and stupid requirement that turns everybody against the very idea of sorting and recycling. Compare to Soviet times: Any and all drinks are provided in real glasses that you return. You do not throw the glasses away!
What should be done right now with recycling is to orient all requirements against the industrial producers. Make it law of the land that industries must stop producing crap. Everything that they produce must be useful and usable. Stop producing plastic. Also, the industries should do their own sorting of the crap. They produce the crap, so they should sort and recycle it. The people should not have to.
Additionally I don't believe there is such a thing as an EU system of recycling. Perhaps that's what you mean by a sad joke, but whatever Finland does or doesn't do has little bearing on you or me.Yet every EU country that does recycling does it the same way. Exact copy-paste systems of bottle return. Exact copy-paste imposition of sorting on people with punishments attached without any reward, while the industry gets away with something like paper straws instead of plastic straws while being free to still produce plastic lids on paper cups. Why would that be? One little googling and three EU directives come up:
EU targets for waste management are key drivers of increasing recycling rates. For example, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive sets targets for the separate collection and recycling of electrical and electronic waste; the Waste Framework Directive includes targets for the recycling and preparing for reuse of municipal waste; and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive defines targets for recycling packaging waste. In total, EU waste legislation includes more than 30 binding targets for the period 2015-2030.Note *binding targets* in the last sentence. So there absolutely exists an EU system of recycling.
Edit: You buy something from the supermarket. Whatever you buy, most of what you get is packaging. There is no second purpose to the packaging, so you throw it away, but you have to throw it in the correct bin.
Unfortunately, often enough the packaging is made of multiple elements, so it needs to be sorted into several different bins. This is work. You need to know what goes where and you need to manually pick stuff apart to place different parts in correct bins.
This is work that should be appreciated and remunerated, but instead you have to pay for the garbage truck visiting your house. Paying for the garbage truck to visit your house comes in addition to what you already paid when you bought the garbage. You pay for garbage when you buy it (even though you don't want or need it) and you pay for it again when the garbage truck collects it.
Logically, when I give something away (as in giving away my garbage to the garbage truck), I should get paid. But in the topsy-turvy modern world, at this point I have to pay even though it's somebody else who is getting all the profits of the transaction (both the garbage and the money) and I already paid for the garbage once when I bought it in the first place!
This is why garbage sorting is absolute idiocy. If garbage professionals want to get paid for it, they should do the sorting.
The real reduction of waste in the economy can come not through recycling and punishing ordinary people for failing to recycle, but through punishing waste producers. Just don't produce the crap in the first place, idiots!
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DnD Central / Recycling is stupid
The supermarket gets remunerated for recycling based on the accounting in the machine, not based on the amount of bottles and cans. The supermarket figured out that the amount of bottles and cans goes unchecked, so they ran the bottles and cans through the machine multiple times.
According to more Finnish news the recyclability of pre-2012 bottles will end at the end of this year, so if you want to recycle them in the recycling machines, better hurry up. Next year those bottles will not be recognised by the machines anymore.
I can go on and on how the current EU system of recycling is a sad joke compared to the Soviet recycling system, the worst of it being its ultra-narrow scope. The amount of things you can recycle is nowhere near of what can and should be recycled right now, and also nowhere near the scope and amounts of what was recycled in Soviet Union. Clearly there is no attempt to ever get anywhere near that.
And the little that you can recycle is made both supertortuous and expensive for end consumers. The consumers need to put stuff in the correct bin when it's never clear what the correct bin is. At the same time, the producers of crap that we are forced to consume can continue producing harmful and unrecycleable crap unchecked. As to bottles, the remuneration for the effort to take them to the machine is simply not worth it, which is why many people leave this task to the "professionals".
Update: According to even more Finnish news people now have the wonderful opportunity to comfily slip their empty bottles in a tube-shaped bottle container where the "professionals" I referred to above can equally comfily pick them up to take the bottles to the actual recycling machine. Clearly this is not an example of recycling. It is an example of that recycling is a frustrating burden and a sad joke.
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DnD Central / Re: Everything Trump…
I'd say it's not that difficult really. Trump is a fascist dictator wannabe. He is a fascist, but inept.
And here's a little reminder of worst things about Trump as president.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdstZDCCgAc
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DnD Central / Re: Money dumped in vast amounts for space?
For Challenge 1, NASA is seeking an orienteering aid that will help the astronauts navigate on traverses away from the lunar lander and return back. While there were similar devices available to the Apollo astronauts, NASA is looking for new and unique solutions. Among other considerations, devices must be accurate, easy to use, able to be used on the moon’s surface by an astronaut wearing pressurized gloves. If your solution is one of the best, you could be eligible for a share of the $15,000 prize purse.
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DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
There is a clear evolution towards schematicity between the 1930 and 1939 samples. This is notable because in most respects the maps are the same, representing only the river, metro lines, station names, and city limits, but the 1939 map has more strictly straight lines and a distinctive logo. It seems evident that the latter was influenced by the newer London underground map design.
The basic building blocks of map design are said to be dot, line, and area. This sounds highly schematic, but I'd also add symbol, which can be a pictograph or a written name, as another usually required element. Once upon a time in last millennium when I was a boy and wrote a newspaper for the gang of boys of my village, I experientially discovered all the manners to design a map.[1] You literally have to select what to show and what not to show. Some of the village roads had bushes alongside, then fields or houses behind bushes, while other roads had houses or fences immediately at the road without any bushes. To draw the bushes or not? To draw the fences or not? Omit them all the way or selectively? To draw the roads as simple lines or to show somehow how wide each road is? I had to highlight some strategically important trees in otherwise plain areas, show some important clearings in otherwise forested areas. Such maps ended up being a network of roads/paths with mostly symbols around them. The best maps had a true representation of crossings of roads/paths, everything else — much of it in symbols — being relative to the road network without trying too hard to get the scale right.
For fun, here is a supposed map from stone age https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bronze-age-slab-oldest-known-map-europe-180977439/
It is designed only with dots and lines only, no symbols. It is not certain however whether it is indeed a map.
And here's a drawing titled "scenes of Tokaido" depicting locations on Tokaido, the most important road in early modern Japan https://ja.ukiyo-e.org/image/mfa/sc200306#&gid=1&pid=1
No dots or lines there, symbols and names all the way. And I'm fairly positive it can serve as a wayfinding tool, i.e. a map, as long as you don't err too far from Tokaido.
1 We were in a game war with the boys of the neighbouring village and the war naturally needed documenting and reporting all the way with hand-drawn photos and maps. Later in school we had a lesson to plot an actual chart to scale. And still later I briefly worked as a land surveyor too.↵
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DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Quote from: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/sep/21/harry-beck-tube-map-london-transport-archive-sale
Curators at The Map House in Kensington will mount the largest ever display of Beck’s manuscripts and draft designs, including a rare early proof of his first pocket map of the tube system. The drawing is annotated with his own edits and suggestions, including the tricky matter of whether or not to use the name Willesden Green (New Station), or the simplified Willesden Junction.
“Beck’s design totally changed the way people thought about making maps,” said Charles Roberts, curator of the show, Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023, which opens on 25 October. “Others had similar ideas, but he was the one who did it. The tube map really is something that deserves to be called iconic: it is even an international icon really, because so many people have used it as the basis of their own network designs.”
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DnD Central / Re: Putin the Magnificent: Series 2 - Putin's Russia
“On September 17, 1939, the Red Army launched a military operation in Poland’s eastern regions, preventing the genocide of the population of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine,” Russia’s foreign ministry wrote on X.Debates over WWII are not over. Westerners should not think that they have it sorted out or that it can/should be forgotten because it was a very long time ago. As I have explained the mid-European point of view (i.e. the point of view of most countries between Germany and Russia), the Yalta Conference and the Potsdam Conference updated the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact for the worse, not for the better, and this fact is still going unrecognised in the West.
Germany’s foreign ministry replied to Russia’s post Thursday with a single word: “Seriously?”
It [Germany] also posted a map of Poland, signed by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, showing how the country would be divided between them, with the hashtags “#MolotovRibbentropPact” and “#HitlerStalinPact.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f7N09kLFD4
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DnD Central / What's Going on in Moldova
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40e2KBj4pS8
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DnD Central / Re: Tripe about Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7H0hxe_SbY
What stands in the way of doing all that's needed? One big thing is US elections. An incapacitating problem with US elections is that they are eternal, never-stopping. It's always elections season. And literally anybody can become president, as Trump has proven. You can be totally incompetent criminally convicted immoral lying bastard from outside the political establishment, you can hijack a major party, arrange a coup while in office, throw a wrench in the judicial system, and after all that you can still run again openly promising dictatorship. Amazing.
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DnD Central / Re: Doesn't matter who wins the USA Elections the hypocrisy will continue
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
While this scenario is quite real (because corporations are infinitely stupid), it cannot serve as a business model for a new/alternative webbrowser to have a compatibility layer for this. Webscraping has far more use cases and versatile potential.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Instead of multiple rendering engines showing the same styles, colours and font sizes, I prefer one rendering engine that helps me navigate webpages more conveniently. In old Opera there were keybinds to navigate to next HTML heading and to next HTML element and I could switch to outline view (i.e. see only headings for a moment). Currently I know only Edbrowse that makes headings supernavigable, while all console/text browsers make at least links easy to find and navigate, but they should do it with all HTML elements.
It may be time for a new webbrowsing concept. Data analysts scrape the web and they sort and filter and list the results in various ways. Webscraping should become a more common way of browsing the web, something built on curl perhaps. I can see how the eyecandy aspect of the web matters when you think of yourself as a visual publisher on the web, but the reader who primarily seeks information cares more about the ability to have own control over all aspects of formatting.
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DnD Central / Re: Is this interesting enough?
Quote from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx6xvvn25xo
Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson had her purse stolen from the hotel where she gave a speech at a conference for senior police officers on Tuesday.
Thieves struck while Dame Diana was giving a speech blaming the Conservatives for an “epidemic of antisocial behaviour, theft and shoplifting,” at the annual Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) conference at a hotel in Kenilworth.
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
It was a lie to say, "Consumers will initially notice better site compatibilty..." Instead, consumers would initially notice that they have, unwarned, started up Chrome instead of Opera and everything that defined Opera is irrecoverably lost.
I held on to old Opera as long as my main email addresses in it worked. When that email service was closed a few years ago, I finally gave up old Opera and I no longer install it on my machines.
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DnD Central / Re: Money dumped in vast amounts for space?
Quote from: https://apnews.com/article/spacex-spacewalk-private-polaris-dawn-87d4c78853f0249baf29631bedfac749
Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring feat also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.Okay, it's tested now. Next stop is Mars, right?
This spacewalk was simple and quick — the hatch was open barely a half hour...
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Browsers & Technology / Re: What's going on with Vivaldi Technologies?
Bruce Lawson is the public face of letting old Opera down by lying that Chropera would be just some changes under the hood that nobody would really notice. He was definitely lying because it's impossible that he is less tech-savvy than me. The fact that pretty much everybody caught on to the lie does not excuse the lie. Nor is it excusable by the fact that he got paid to lie.