Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.

What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP’s actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone’s food security.

I’m sorry but I just can’t equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.

Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.

It’s not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that’s a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.

This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it’s an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.

If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.

It’s not a gas pricing issue, it’s a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.

Gardening and foraging won’t get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).

The good news is that food production is a “solved” issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.

Those who’ll get fucked by Trump’s war are not Americans or Europeans, it’ll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.

This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a “they live in a ‘shithole country’ and we won’t care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now” kind of way.

You seem to be assuming that continents are defined based on plate tectonics? Which they definitely aren’t since they predate our understanding of plate tectonics by centuries.

Yes it’s a flawed system. In particular it’s Europe-centric and kind of breaks down with Asia’s borders with Europe and Oceania being relatively arbitrary. But trying to retroactively make it fit some kind of “objective” definition is IMO the wrong approach. We don’t need the 5-ish continents to be “fixed” because their definition is unserious and of little consequence. As long as we’re cognizant we can just move on with our lives and use more precise descriptors (e.g. “The Middle East”) when needed.

As opposed to the traditional catholic values of murdering brown people, burning apostates, progroming Jews, policing every aspect of sexuality, and most importantly enforcing a rigid belief in social hierarchy and the divine rights of nobility?

This is not a humanitarian or ethics question. The rules of nuclear warfare aren’t governed by morality but by game theory. From Israel’s perspective nuclear weapons are a last resort for the reasons I outlined. Their leadership and military may be genocidal, but they still have a sense of self-preservation and act somewhat rationally – which you will notice is not at all the same thing as acting morally or honestly. Using nuclear weapons is simply not a tactically rational option for them even if when their explicit goal is genocidal imperialism.

What’s scary about Trump is that none of this applies to him. He is not a rational actor and he does not have everything to lose were he to launch a nuclear strike against Iran.

In every configuration, every lighting condition, every monitor, every color manipulation, I see that picture as white and gold. Not once have I managed to see the blue dress, except in separate pictures of the same dress.

I understand the actual dress is blue and I understand the color theory, but even with the picture very heavily tinted blue my brain still interprets the dress to be in shadow and therefore white.

So that’s making a very critical assumption: that Israel’s territory is being existentially threatened. Iran simply does not have the military capability to do that. And Hamas/Hezbollah is not an existential threat to Israel’s existence despite propaganda to the contrary. We’ve already seen the full extent of their military capabilities.

The Samson Option is a one time, last-resort deterrence option for when all other defensive and offensive mechanisms have failed. Israel’s small size and geopolitical situation basically requires such deterrence against a neighbor who might decide to blitzkrieg into Tel Aviv. Iran simply does not possess that capability.

If Netanyahu pops a nuke for any other reason, he fundamentally shifts his neighbors’ calculus in favor of uniting and attacking Israel because nukes are explicitly not a last resort anymore, therefore Israel becomes an immediate existential threat to all its neighbors that must be dealt with accordingly.

That’s the thing with nuclear deterrence: it works, but only if your enemies are clear on the lines they can’t cross. Otherwise you’re just a threat to be eliminated. And ultimately there’s only so much that propaganda can help with there. Israel may have convinced a majority of their citizens that genocide is good, but they can’t propagandize their enemies into believing that preemptive nuclear strikes are necessary. Netanyahu can whine about Iran’s nuclear program all he wants, none of his enemies seriously believe they are close to having nukes.

Using nuclear weapons as anything but a last resort is therefore an awful gamble that very significantly (if not entirely) weakens nuclear deterrence… All for relatively little military gain. There’s very little a nuke would do that Israel can’t do to Iran with conventional weapons. While there’s a whole lot that nukes don’t do to a prepared enemy with spread out military and command infrastructure.

Didn’t independent analysis show that they had awful LODs and such on release, causing massive performance loss? Maybe Unity was supposed to automagically take care of that, but if it didn’t work, doing the work manually was always an option. They just chose not to.

If your game’s broke, don’t release it. That’s like a carpenter blaming his tools for a slanted kitchen cabinet. I don’t care if your saw blade had a manufacturing defect, take it back and fix it!

It’d be a case study in what not to do if publishers didn’t make that same mistake over and over again. There is such a thing as unacceptably poor performance and fixing it cannot possibly be more expensive than lost sales revenue.

That’s the point, I can’t see how it would help Netanyahu with self-preservation. Going nuclear would be unpopular and ineffective as Israelis understand that their arsenal is more effective in a “will they won’t they” deterrence capacity. He wants constant war and doesn’t need nukes to get it.

Now what he might do is convince Trump to send nukes and pretend he had nothing to do with it. It’s not like Trump is hard to manipulate and Miller probably loves the idea to begin with.

Nuclear weapons are great at leveling cities, but not so great at destroying military infrastructure. On a per-dollar basis they actually kind of suck as weapons of war. From a purely rational strategic perspective, they’re most useful as a deterrent (which is how Israel has been using them). Netanyahu is an imperialist genocidal maniac but he’s not dumb.

Whereas if and when Trump does get his wish to pop a nuke, it won’t be for strategic gain but because he just couldn’t be restrained anymore. This absolute moron wanted to nuke a fucking hurricane FFS. It’s only a matter of time before he gets his wish since the US military has lost all ability to tell him no.

Thinning hair is fine and mocking someone for it is mean and unhelpful, and body positivity is being cool if someone decides to stick with it. However it’s not contradictory to say “given your situation you would look better bald tho”.

A white lie is good when it’s about something one can’t (easily) change or when criticism is uncalled for. This is the opposite situation where the criticism is called for and the straightforward advice to go for it is cheap&easy to implement.

In fact if someone is actively seeking advice, I would argue that unconditionally saying “you look great don’t change anything” is a form of toxic positivity.

It’s way worse. They don’t ban you and they don’t delete your content. TikTok ads don’t pay enough that demonetization is a concern either.

The algorithm just silently (!) deranks your content. They don’t have guidelines, they don’t have feedback, they will never communicate on what is and is not okay to post about. You’ll just say “Fuck ICE” in a video once and notice it is doing suspiciously worse than the rest, but then again, you’re never quite sure why some of your videos “make it” and some don’t. So maybe you’re being paranoid? You can’t tell.

So on top of the very real algorithmic censorship from these platforms, you’ve got very frequent bouts of mass psychosis where everyone self-censors for no other reason that other people are doing it and they don’t want to risk it. Is the word “dead” de-ranked? Quite likely not even, but who’s to say, and it doesn’t cost anything to farm a little engagement in the comments by self-censoring…

Isn’t the future bright?

Every EV can just hook up with a (mostly) passive adapter to any outlet and get a charge. It won’t be fast (especially if you are cursed with a 110V outlet), but even in the boonies an overnight trickle charge will get you to the nearest fast charger. Just get the relevant adapters for your car.

This is basically what your generator would do except you want to lug it around instead of leveraging the cables that we pulled within driving distance of everywhere but the most remote trails? The whole point of electricity is its versatility and ubiquity!

FYI using a wall plug to charge an EV is a perfectly normal thing to do. For a small(ish) commute, regular 220V@10A is way more than enough to get back to full overnight. It won’t give you 500 km of range, but only freaks and truckers drive 500 km every day.

Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

They’ve got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is “why hasn’t the competition eaten their lunch already”.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

If an organization rewards empty bluster and ChatGPT-driven corporate drivel, then that it is because those things are the organization’s purpose.

Corporate lingo is a social filter for humanoid shitweasels to identify their peers and control eventual threats.
Nothing is more menacing to an incompetent manager than an underling speaking the truth. Thankfully corporate lingo allows underlings to be dismissed out of hand because either:

• they didn’t use the correct lingo (“Steve fired the only guy who knew how that machine worked and ain’t nobody got time to figure it out because every other machine is falling apart as we speak” -> you get muted on teams and a meeting is booked with HR)
• they did use the the correct lingo which is - entirely by design! - devoid of negative turns of phrase (“our rightsizing efforts mean that other team members will have to step up and synergize” -> sounds fine, deal with it, next topic).

It can definitely have side effects. Psychological (eating disorders, debilitating feeling of hunger) and physical (unbalanced diet, or fatigue because the body gets in the “oh fuck must conserve energy” mode).

There is no one size fits all solution. A random 50 year old IT worker with a sedentary lifestyle and a Big Mac diet does not need the same help as a physically active 25 year old with severe hormonal imbalances. Using Ozempic is bad in the former case, but so is shaming the latter person for relying on it.

Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.

It’s not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it’s about not interrupting the flow.

Literally none of the institutions which start at a fixed time (6-9 am) will offset their schedule by one hour. These things are literally written in stone. They don’t give a single fuck where the sun is, school starts at 08:30 and work starts at 09:00, from now until the end of western civilization, because doing otherwise would be a logistical inconvenience and sleep disorders are not their problem.

Permanent ST = 1 hour less sunlight after school/work. It’s unavoidable unless you have the luxury of making your own schedule, at which point timezone does not matter to you so why are you crusading for the working man to be forever cursed to only see the sun from a cubicle? (I could live with permanent DST but that doesn’t seem like the road we’ll be going down)