tal

Looking at another article on this community, it sounds like China's way ahead of you on that.

https://lemmy.today/post/17388857

Chinese authorities demand schoolteachers and other public sector employees hand in their passports as President Xi Jinping tightens his grip on society

I like it.

Hmm. Doesn't the F-35 basically do this?

I don't know about this new version that will be released, but here's a link to a PDF of the current version:

https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30828.pdf

You can feed it into Google Translate.

Forgotten Weapons talking about its history, including why it's still around:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmLnwiJRr78

Well, the receiver got an update, but if you're gonna count that as a replacement, the B-52 has had a lot of updates too.

No, that's from some "disboard.org" service that I linked to. I just used Kagi to find that page.

Oh, that's a good point -- missed that in the article. They did say that it started in 2015.

I don't know anything about the specifics here, but here's a 5 year graph of futures for live cattle versus beef:

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/live-cattle

If there's collusion to engage in price-fixing by meat packers, I'd expect to see beef prices rising without a corresponding increase in cattle prices.

Beef prices did indeed recently start rising rapidly without a corresponding increase in live cattle prices.

But on the other hand, beef prices are also a lot lower relative to live cattle prices than they were during roughly COVID-19.

Two of the renewables are intermittent: solar and wind.

They only provide energy some of the time.

That means that you need to have something else to step in when they aren't providing energy.

We don't have the capacity to just store all that energy when they are outputting power to fill in those gaps. Batteries aren't even remotely-feasible. Pumped hydrostorage is our best option, but you can only do that in places with favorable geography.

What it generally means today, in practice, is that if someone is using solar or wind, they used to use coal and now use natural gas to fill in those gaps. If you use solar or wind, you're also tying yourself to natural gas.

For a number of places, if you're using natural gas, you cannot pipe it in. Like, take Guam. They're a little island out the middle of nowhere. They can't pipe in natural gas, need to have it converted to LNG so that it can be shipped in. Europe has some natural gas, but less than the US, and unfortunately two of the convenient neighboring places to get it that might pipe it in are Russia, which promptly started using said pipelines as leverage, and Africa, which has countries that would like to sell it to Europe but suffer from political instability.

If your natural gas pipeline gets too long, then LNG becomes more-efficient. LNG has something like an IIRC 30% overhead to liquify it, but once you do that, you're mostly done. With a pipeline, you have to keep pumping it to keep the gas moving. There's a break-even point where LNG becomes more-efficient if you have to move it further. I looked that up at one point, and IIRC, even security and practicality issues aside, it wouldn't be economically-viable to run a trans-Atlantic pipeline: LNG is more-energy efficient, because the distance is so far.

Hydroelectricity is renewable and doesn't have that problem (well, barring extreme, extended droughts, but it comes with a lot of flexibility in generation), but it's limited by geography; you can only put hydroelectric dams in some places. Also, there are some people who get upset about the ecological impact on rivers, since it changes whether fish can go up and down the river and when and how much water flows.

Geothermal power is renewable and also doesn't have that problem, but is also limited by geography.

With nuclear, you've got a raging anti-nuclear crowd.

EDIT: One point in LNG's favor -- I went reading about current LNG systems a while back. They're...presently not very efficient, and it'd be possible to do engineering work on them to improve efficiency. Basically, if you're liquifying LNG in the US and shipping it to Germany and then regassifying it, you're running what amounts to a gargantuan air conditioner compressor. You're making the gas very hot in the US, then producing very cold output decompressing LNG in Germany. Right now, the heat and coolness on each end are "thrown out", not used for other processes, which is why there's overhead. So, IIRC Germany is (or was during the crisis, dunno what's going on now) using floating LNG regassification plants, things that are basically converted LNG tankers. Those things deal with all the coolness they're generating by having their LNG regassified by dumping it into the water. So we're spending a lot of money and energy to heat up water or air or something in the US and then chill German port waters (in fact, I was reading some article a while back that people were a bit worried about the ecological impacts of the chilling). It'd be possible, if you were going to use LNG, to reuse some of that energy, which would avoid that waste.

In California, part of the California State Water Project involves pumping water up over the mountains to where it's needed. That costs energy. But it's set up to recover some of the expended energy by having the descending water drive hydroelectric power plants. Same kind of idea -- you can refine the process to eliminate overhead.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/russia-bans-discord/

Just seven days ago, Reuters reported that Russia had ordered approximately 1,000 items to be deleted from Discord and Google, including posts “containing...LGBT propaganda..:”

kagis

Servers tagged with:

LGBTQ+: 61597

Tags similar to LGBTQ+

• LGBT (48114)
• GAY (31652)
• TRANS (8568)
• FEMBOY (23724)
• LGBTQ (57310)

And that was only one category they objected to.

Yeah, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that that probably wasn't gonna be a winnable war for the Russian government.

“There is a long tradition of conservative circles fretting about international influences on the German languages,” said Stefanowitsch. “It used to be French, and now it’s mainly English”.

Heh.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

--James Nicoll

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

Hmm.

So how do they deal with the more-complex cases?

https://www.thesaurus.com/e/grammar/whats-the-rule-for-doing-a-possessive-after-the-word-s/

Singular nouns ending in S

Rule 1: In general, you form a possessive singular noun (both proper and common) by adding an apostrophe and the letter S to the end of the word.

• the flower’s petals

• Riley’s car

That’s simple enough. It’s when the car belongs to a person named Chris, or we’re talking about the petals of a crocus that the rules get blurry. Most experts and guides say you should add an apostrophe and an S to both proper and common nouns to make them possessive even when they end in S. So, using the examples above, it would be:

* Chris’s car

• the crocus’s petals 

Not everyone agrees with this method, however, and some, such as the Associated Press Stylebook, nod in favor of adding only an apostrophe to make a proper noun possessive, such as:

• Chris’ car

• Dickens’ novels

To add even more confusion, AP Style also has an exception if the word following the possessive starts with an S, stating that in those cases only the apostrophe should be added. So it would be:

• Texas’s people

Texas’ streams 

In 2019, the AP raised quite the ruckus when they tweeted that they were considering adding an S after the apostrophe for singular proper nouns, as in Mavis Staples’s album or Martha Reeves’s concert. To date, no changes have been made, but as you can see, it’s an ever-evolving, highly volatile topic. 

Plural nouns ending in S

Rule 2: Plural nouns, on the other hand, generally don’t get an extra S, just an apostrophe. Most experts suggest you form the plural form of the word first, then add the apostrophe.

For example: 

• the Joneses’ house 

• the classes’ rules

Most say possessive words should generally read as you would speak them. 

The one-syllable rule

When it comes to historical proper names or those found in the Bible, however, there is another rule many choose to follow.

Rule 3: According to some, those words with two or more syllables typically just get an apostrophe after the final S, while one-syllable words getting both an apostrophe and an S.

For example:

• Jesus’ teachings

• Zeus’s temper

Some people apply it to more recent names as well, such as Dr. Seuss’s writings or Kenny Rogers’ songs, while others believe they all should also get an additional S. 

Singular nouns in plural form

Rule 4: When it comes to singular nouns that are plural words, they typically just get the apostrophe.

For example, the Beatles is a singular noun, but it’s in the form of a plural word. So, it would be:

• The Beatles’ album

For the sake of …

Rule 5: Whether a noun ends in an S or not, if it’s followed by the word sake, most say it just gets an apostrophe.

For example:

• for goodness’ sake

• for conscience’ sake 

• for appearance’ sake

Others, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, say if the word before sake ends in an S, then it should just get an apostrophe. Others should get an apostrophe and an S. So, it would be:

• for goodness’ sake

• for conscience’s sake 

• for appearance’s sake

Like, there's a whole rabbit hole to go down there.