azertyfun

Those are special cases, but the majority of Trump voters voted out of fear, not hate.

[citation needed]

Here's one: As of April 30th 14 % of Americans think Trump hasn't gone far enough with the unconstitutional deportation and rendition of immigrants to El Salvador's concentration camps. Another 33 % of Americans think it's "been about right". 52 % oppose it.
I do not see how it is possible to interpret that any other way than Americans are voting and supporting this administration out of hate. This isn't about the price of eggs. This isn't about voting "out of habit". When asked, specifically, about the horrific and hateful practices that are most emblematic of Trump's discourse of wanton hatred, half of American people actively support it.

Think whatever the hell you want about how to deal with that, but I draw the line at giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, and they would not do the same for you.

What?

The house I'm sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American "just wrap it all in vinyl" approach that aren't necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn't air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won't rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that's easily avoided by decent house building.

How far do things have to go before "humble empathy" towards those actively supporting the US regime becomes inappropriate? Gas chambers? War against Canada? Nuclear war?

The stakes have never been higher, and personally I'm not willing to humbly give the benefit of the doubt to someone who literally voted for Hitler. They are either dumb as a fucking brick or more likely (according to Trump's polling) they are actively seeking harm against their own neighbors and relishing on the fact that the regime is gleefully committing as many human rights violations as it can get away with.

We've done the "just forget about it and move on" strategy, and it led to Trump being reelected even harder. Maybe when this is over (whenever that is) we go back to the tried-and-true strategy of fucking shaving everyone of these wastes of breath down to the bone to expose their crimes.

Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can't metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It's fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.

If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there's nothing that Engie can do but wait.

That's routine as well. Plenty of Russian oligarchs are personally sanctioned in that way. Not that I'm saying ICC prosecutor and Russian oligarch are remotely comparable targets, but the method isn't new. The shocking thing is who the US is now targeting.

TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).

What's fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn't done because the government said "no for real though super pinky promise we're not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it's the law".

So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won't come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.

I mean, that's hardly a confirmation. The US has always used its power like this with its enemies, just ask Iran Cuba or Russia how they're doing on international trade.

The new development is that all of Europe is now classified as an enemy, yet we're fully incapable of not sucking on Amazon and MSFT's teat.

Poor sound balance is 95 % bad downmixing.

Going from 5.1 channels to 2 the media player should first bump up the center channel (the one for dialogue) a fair bit. But they don't because they use the coefficients from some manual from the fucking 1990s or whatever calibrated for expensive-ass headphones. Some players (e.g. Kodi) do have an option to amplify the center channel.

The second issue is overly large dynamic range which is inappropriate in noisy environments or when someone may be sleeping nearby. That's easily solved with an audio compressor. My receiver has a "night mode" that does exactly that.

Every streaming service should have both of those as easily toggleable options on their media players, but for some reason they don't. IDK if it's stupidity on their part or if their licensing contracts disallow "tampering" with the media or what it is but it would solve 95 % of audio balance complaints.

I work in the industry (not MSFT) on cloud reliability so I have insight.

• The cloud itself is not as stable as some people may think. Standard is 99.9 % uptime. Which sounds great, but if your DB is 99.9 % and your compute is 99.9% and your storage is 99.9 % and your network and so on and any one of those going out breaks your application, then you don't have 99.9 % but (99.9 %)^n which is a lot less impressive. You can make things fault-tolerant through redundancy but that comes with great complexity which can cause outages of its own.
• Apps like teams, like most B2B bullshit, provide added value by bundling together as much shit as possible. Chat, calls, calendar, spreadsheets, you name it. So now any one of those features going out individually can impact the whole app.
• Every one of those features in the bundle is managed by a different team, possibly in a different country and coming from a different company acquisition. So now you have to glue unrelated tech stacks together which is super expensive.
• The way you bundle things together in a SPA in a corporate environment with finite resources is by basically bundling together a bunch of iframes. Ever notice that the calendar tab on teams sometimes tells you to refresh your page to get new credentials? That's why, this fucking thing bundles its own authentication lib and barely talks to MS Teams so it can't properly refresh its tokens! If you like having one product's technical debt, now think about having 20 products' technical debt all conveniently forced to interact together in one web page!

Honestly I'm impressed by how well teams works with the very severe constraints they clearly have. Shit's got more moving parts than Ryanair's entire fleet and it only breaks once in a while.

It's because the ~*~tech~*~ sector fundamentally relies on different economics than most engineering companies, and that has investors absolutely bricked up.

What investors being sold by "tech" companies is infinite ROI. Sure, [YouTube/Twitter/Uber/whoever] has never been profitable more than a few quarters in a row (if that), but think! They have virtually no fixed costs! That means if we just inject a few more millions in R&D we will finally reach the threshold where we can scale deployments to hundreds of millions of users who will be paying us MRR! Hosting costs are virtually nothing and at that scale R&D is basically free as well! And if push comes to shove, we can reduce costs to nearly zero by firing all the engineers! The economies of scale are practically infinite, they say.

It's the rare instance where capitalists actually care about long-terms gain a bit too much. The tech industry tends to be single-mindedly chasing monthly user counts first and revenue second or third. Then at some point reality catches up, the accountants start getting their way, the product starts getting enshittified, and the users leave for something else. Did the product actually turn a net profit over its lifetime? Who knows, who cares. Everyone who made those early business decisions has long since cashed out.

Where the markets are unbelievably irrational is that this frenzy has spilled over into industries where the the sales pitch for infinite economies of scale doesn't even make theoretical sense. Tesla sells physical products, so why are they worth more than every other automotive company combined? OpenAI operates at an enormous loss because LLMs are just expensive to train and run by nature, so they cannot be profitable under the current business model at any scale. Yet here we are. Just because it's labeled as "tech", investors are throwing our retirement funds into it. And any time the markets are being irrational, there's a risk that investors wise up to the bad fundamentals and the whole thing comes crashing down.

In Europe we've been spared some of the worst of the craziness. Although venture capitalism is alive and well in the software sector, I would wager that European companies tend to have stronger fundamentals on average (but that's just a gut feeling, I'm not an economist).

Vanishingly little of the hordes of little hands who immediately crumbled to Trump actually answer to him. And those that do are still supposed to uphold the constitution first and foremost.

Resistance has always been an option, Americans are just almost unanimously choosing not to exercise it.