Gunboat diplomacy in the 21st century. Since Xi Jinping came to power, it’s been an endless stream of criminal behaviour by the Chinese state. I miss the time of Hu Jintao.

I sometimes go into the sea with a cotton t-shirt as protection against the sun, and I have no such annoyances afterwards. It’s definitely full of sand and not recommended to bring inside anywhere, but apart from that I have no complaints.

It probably has to be pedophilic instead of pedophile to be correct.

BBC1 and BBC2 will each have several times more viewers than BBC News. The statistic in the op + the channels that GB News is comparing themselves too, are cherry picked by GB News.

If they are in the business of spreading misinformation and misrepresentation, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they also do that when they are patting themselves on the back.

USA republicans have foreseen this and are targeting birth control in their project 2025 plan. In 2025 it’s not going to be a complete ban (yet), but more subtle dissuasion.

Incredibly advanced ai actually, since it also time travelled back to 2007 to publish this image in the daily mail of that time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111001021742/https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-458218/Dont-dare-sneer-wifes-cooking-marriage-tips-1913.html

Not crazy at all imo. I’ve only read the first book and I don’t plan on reading the rest. I found it interesting for the mainland Chinese societal influences that were sometimes explicit, but often just peeking through. It’s obvious that the writer is from a different background as scifi authors that grew up in a western country. But the character writing and scifi aspects, were only kinda meh imo.

I had also read someone recommending the books as hard scifi and I can’t agree with that either. The three body star system is a very interesting premise, but the godlike single proton that can envelop a planet is pure fantasy. Too much deus ex machina for good world building.

When calling that number, the caller will need somekind of proof that they are in control of the car that they are trying to opt out of ads. Afaik, the easiest way to accomplish that when requiring a phonecall, would be pairing phone and car. But obviously Stellantis is not going for easy with this setup, so this is purely speculation on my part.

? Where did I say it was about cost? I don’t live in the usa. The 3 hospitals that I could potentially pick from are public hospitals and their cost for the same procedures would be exactly the same, since they have to stick to a government price list. But between those 3, I still have a preference.

Some people will already have a preference and not need to look up anything. I would have if the accident happened near where I live. Imo it’s not a bad question at all.

Apart from how insane it is to put obtrusive ads on a car dashboard, having to link your phone to your car and then call a phone number to opt out of touchscreen display ads is 🤯

There is going to be a reason that they’ve set it up like that.

Nah, the knowledge that I could be locked out of unique items is what caused anxiety, not what I was actually locked out off (though I do think it’s a really good item for a ring). I played act 1 as a blundering fool, at the end of act 1 I checked an item list to see what I missed, so I could backtrack for what I could use. And then I destroyed my fun in act 2 by checking guides before starting an area.

I have to force myself to not fall into the trap of trying to play a “perfect” game and instead to just let happen, what happens. Blundering through content and accepting temporary setbacks is more fun than following guides or save scumming.

But it also depends on game design:
With bg3 I missed a one of a kind item in act 1, a staple dnd item (ring of protection) that I was locked out off because I did quests in the “wrong” order. that gave me some anxiety, after which I started checking the wiki page before starting a new zone, which eventually sucked the fun out of the game, after which I abandoned my first playthrough.

And then I found a mod that randomizes all loot, so I can just let happen again what happens, without that anxiety of losing access to unique loot because of game design.

You could still send an email or fill in their contact form. It’s quickly done and the worst that could happen, is nothing.

The cookie without chocolate is a classic, the variant with chocolate is only a 3 or 4 years old and likely always has been like this. So not shrinkflation or enshittification, just the way this product has always been.

Imo buy it without chocolate and eat it together with coffee or tea for the best result.

Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.

A hydro reservoir has much higher evaporation than if there was no reservoir. That’s usually a big part of the discussion when a downstream nation objects against another nation building a dam upstream from them.

Depending on the source, nuclear uses a bit more/a bit less water than coal. But they are in the same order of magnitude.

Source: https://visualizingenergy.org/what-methods-of-electricity-generation-use-the-most-water/

Ps: biomass power generation is a crime against nature.

Generating power with coal/nuclear/hydro uses water, and since the LLM data centers use power that would otherwise not have been generated, this is one of the ways that they use up water.

For cooling many (most?) data centers use evaporative cooling. That evaporated water could be captured again with a heat pump (reducing the wasted water + recuperating heat for other uses), but it’s Texas, so it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if the data centers have no intensive to be less wasteful. So the evaporated water gets released into the atmosphere and it’s gone.

Edit: about your question where the water is coming from: there is no simple answer, it’s coming from many sources and it’s being used for many things. But irregardless of the source, there’s only so much available and using more than is available is not possible. When the math is done, it turns out that Texas is running out of water. At that point choices have to be made, and apparently Texas is chosing to increase/maintain the supply to data centers and to reduce the supply to people.

It appears that in the future, Itch will allow creators to opt out of payment providers, meaning that it’s probably on a per game basis, not per platform. That Itch and Steam are not making a per game solution now, is most likely because their current software doesn’t allow it and they need time to rework it. Itch has promised various changes already, Steam has been mum afaik.

Source for Itch: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”. https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content

I only use Steam myself, so I hadn’t checked Itch Io’s communication yet. I don’t know the platform myself so it’s quite possible that I’m misinterpreting this, but to me it appears that Itch Io will allow creators to delist payment options that they are not compliant with: “For NSFW pages, this will include a new step where creators must confirm that their content is allowable under the policies of the respective payment processors linked to their account.”.

Source: https://itch.io/updates/update-on-nsfw-content