ChatGPT is useful for casual discussion facts. As seen as anything remotely important leans on it, it shouldn’t be trusted any more than a guy down the pub.

Enlightened self interest. Climate change will fuck china over. Slowing it is definitely in their interests. They are already maxing out on installing renewables in china.

They likely did the maths and concluded it was cheaper to help the west decarbonise than try and replace their coal power plants.

I personally disagree with a lot of aspects of China’s governing, but they are very good at long term planning. It’s a lot easier when you expect to be in charge in 20 years, to plan for 20 year time spans.

I never said they were idealistic about it. If it’s cheaper to flood out solar panels, but build coal, they will do. They are likely maxing out on renewable deployment, but still need more power.

It’s akin to a meat eater not going vegetarian, but persuading a dozen friends to cut back on meat, with got vegetarian food. If it’s a net gain, call it a win.

I’ve got an unsubstantiated theory. China got fed up with the rest of the world bickering about how to combat climate change. Instead they asked where they could get most bang for their buck independently?

Flooding the world with cheap solar panels and cheap electric cars looks like a highly cost efficient method.

In the UK, they’ve taken some tills out. About 4 tills become 16 self checkouts. They still have plenty of tills for normal checkout.

It definitely lets less staff get more people through, in less time. So far, it’s not been excessively abused over here. It’s also made my life significantly less annoying.

To be fair, that’s a fairly universal problem. In the UK it’s a basket Vs trolley split. They do have trolley self checkouts, but it’s separate, and mainly intended for scan as you shop.

On a side note, what’s with American supermarkets not having baskets at all. Did I just have really weird luck?

I went to the US for a few days. Their self checkouts seem to be universally awful, compared to the UK or German equivalent.

While the hardware is far less reliable, and more convoluted, it’s the users that seem the main issue. Self checkout is generally intended (over here) to shift the fast, small shops out of the main queues. 1 big line and a dozen or more tills. In the states they treat it as just another till. Built for trollies, and 1 queue per till. Combined with a slow user and it becomes hell rapidly.

I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.

As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.

I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.

I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.

The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.

Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).

In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.

There needs to be room to escalate. Ultimately he’s just a small fry patsie. By keeping it light, it sends a message, but makes it easy for police to keep it low priority.

There’s also the fact that we don’t even know if it’s related to his role. He might just have mouthed off at a couple of teenagers, and gotten “educated”.

It’s the one in Barcelona. I’ll edit for clarity. 👍

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Cathedral

I still love that the basilica cathedral, in Barcelona, was designed upside down.

Stone only works under compression. If any area ends up under tension, it will just fall apart. String only works under tension, if it is under compression, it crumples. Critically, if you invert the model, the forces invert. The basilica was designed as a string model upside down. This made mismatched forces obvious, and is easy to correct.

Historical designers had a lot of tricks, that we have mostly forgotten, to make things work.

Agreed

https://cuberule.com/

The extreme masochists begin to back slowly away in alarm.

Most don’t blame women, it’s mostly the loudmouths online that do that. There are a huge number of men suffering in silence. They often know it’s them, but don’t know how to start fixing it.

I help out with a charity focused on men’s mental health. It’s both depressing how many men suffer, and great to watch them “find their tribe” and start resolving it.

That would make sense. Unfortunately, first class is at the front, and that boards first. It sort of flows from there.

I’ve also seen enough people abusing the overhead lockers to completely break back to front boarding. They get on and just stick their bag in the first available space, before heading back. Now, when the people at the front board, their bag space is taken up already. They now have to fight to the back, on landing to get their bags.

The fuse is in the plug itself. It goes with the cable. That’s the point of it! 🤣 It lets you down rate your cables from the breaker rating.

The fuses aren’t to protect the circuit, they protect the end and intermediate devices. The breakers protect the actual circuit.

E.g. you’ve got a thin flex for a low power lamp. You don’t have to worry about a short allowing 40A to flow down a 2A cable.

Fuses mean protection is localised. If the socket is good for 13A, but the cable is only safe to 5A, you can fuse at 3A or 5A, and know it’s safe.

This is partially useful for extension leads. We don’t have to worry about overloading a multiway extension. If we do, it will pop a 10p fuse, rather than cause a house fire.