In the past three days, Russian troops, backed by fighter jets, artillery and lethal drones, have poured across Ukraine’s northeastern border and seized at least nine villages and settlements, and more territory per day than at almost any other point in the war, save the very beginning.
I’m pretty tired of the high proportion of politics in news too. And election years are worse.
However, it’s also not very common that you have a candidate and ex-leader being in court.
And, well, end of the day, what we see on here is what we submit. This is a link-aggregation service. If you don’t want political news, submit other stuff. If you really want, it’d be possible to create a community that does only non-political news, or other specific subsets. I remember that Reddit had some subreddit devoted to positive news, to address the disproportionate coverage of negative events.
EDIT: This community is actually an example specifically of such a subset already, as it excludes US-only news: “Not United States Internal News”. I imagine that someone in Slovakia or wherever doesn’t want to be inundated in a deluge of stuff that only people in the US care about.
“Eurovision is first and foremost a celebration of European spirit, of our European diversity and talent. The EU flag is a symbol of this,” Schinas said on X on Saturday evening.
“Less than a month to the European elections, there should be no obstacles, big or small, to celebrating what unites all Europeans.”
Not all participants are in the EU. Strictly-speaking, you can maybe argue that the identical flag also applies to most non-EU members as the Flag of Europe, given that pretty much everyone is in the Council of Europe, but it probably still won’t cover Australia.
That being said, I mean, I don’t really see the problem of someone holding the EU flag if they can hold their national flag. I mean, a flag doesn’t have to apply to everyone.
Besides, the thing is “Eurovision” already, not “Euroaustraliovision”. If you want the venue to be some sort of generic thing decoupled from Europe, you’ve already done the branding wrong in rather more-significant ways.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but if it’s the UK, you’ve got the Flag of Europe-also-represents-the-Council-of-Europe case, and the UK is in that.
I guess Belarus isn’t in the Council of Europe. And Russia is either out or suspended or something. I don’t know what the situation is with them, but apparently they both also got kicked out of Eurovision, so kind of an academic question.
EDIT: Yeah, Russia is out of the Council of Europe.
Ah, fair enough. And speaking of Moroccan Oil, looking at Wikipedia, Morocco has apparently also competed, and also isn’t in the Council of Europe or European Union:
Israel’s first win in 1978 proved controversial for Arab states broadcasting the contest which would typically cut to advertisements when Israel performed due to a lack of recognition of the country, and when it became apparent Israel would win many of these broadcasters cut the feed before the end of the voting.[316][317][318] Arab states which are eligible to compete have declined to participate due to Israel’s presence, with Morocco the only Arab state to have entered Eurovision, competing for the first, and as of 2023 the only time, in 1980 when Israel was absent.[319][320]
Then there’s the issue of how that water gets used. Switzerland, which has decided to phase out nuclear power, is miffed about guaranteeing water supply so France can cool its expanding nuclear fleet.
It’s possible to drastically reduce how much cooling water a nuclear power plant requires by taking a little water out and fully evaporating it, rather than running a lot of water in and heating up the whole river a little bit. My understanding is that French power plants use the second approach, which is older.
The Rhône’s waters are vital to the Bugey nuclear plant, which sits just across the Swiss border — much to the dismay of Hodgers, a Green Party politician fiercely opposed to atomic power.
Well, if he just doesn’t like nuclear power generation at all, there’s not much that can be done.
Some places use the waste heat for district heating, in which case the waste heat isn’t really a waste any more. I don’t know if France does that, though. The Soviet Union was super-big on district heating. That won’t consume all of the heat, and it really just gets you cheap heating for the city – like, a large power plant will generate more heat than you actually need to heat a city.
In the US, we historically had some very limited district heating, though that was driven off waste heat from fossil fuel power plants, where you can do the same thing.
If you can make use of the heat output directly, it’s an area where thermal options (fossil fuels, nuclear, geothermal, solar thermal) compare particularly favorably to non-thermal options (solar panels, wind, hydroelectric), because there the thermal options don’t need to see the efficiency reduction from conversion to electricity and back.
googles
Sounds like they aren’t currently using the heat for district heating (or at least some aren’t), so they could probably use at least some of the heat some of the time for that.
While being source of low carbon electricity, French nuclear plants also produce excess heat currently rejected to the surrounding environment. This heat represents approximately two thirds of the total energy generated (Safa, 2012). The whole French nuclear fleet and most nuclear reactors operating today in the world (277 out of 438) and tomorrow (59 out of 70 under construction; IAEA, 2015) are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR). Similarly to cogeneration plants based on fossil fuels or biomass, PWR can be designed to produce both electricity and heat without affecting the reactor’s safety (STUK, 2009: p. 6). Doing so would involve reducing the amount of heat which is converted to electricity (Carnot efficiency). For the temperatures useful to conventional 3rd generation DH networks (80–120 °C), the thermal energy recovered is six times higher than the electricity losses (Safa, 2012). Production of heat for DH application has been experienced with at least 51 nuclear combined heat and power plant (NCHP; Leurent et al., 2017), hence providing valuable feedbacks for optimizing such energy systems.
That being said, the time when anyone cares about water flows and river temperatures is presumably the summer, and that’s also going to be when there’s less demand for heat. So it’s more a way to get heating more-efficiently than an alternative to dumping heat somewhere.
Unless you’re gonna create some absolutely colossal thermal energy store that could span seasons, like, put a cover on a lake, heat it up in the summer, and then use that heat in the winter.
These guys say that there hasn’t been a much research on microclimate effects since the 1970s, though they did look at it, and found that it slightly increases crop yields in the area in the US by increasing precipitation a bit.
The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent. Considering the low elasticity of demand for these crops, the yield increases translate to annual net benefits of $229 million (2020 US dollars) – $317 million in losses to farmers and $546 million in benefits to consumers.
I think for the US, the structure of the city is also a factor.
This is painting with a broad brush, but:
American cities tend to have a very high-density core that has offices and stores and such, and are surrounded by a lot of low-density housing.
European cities tend to have a medium-density, about four stories, across the city.
That’s a function of the fact that a lot of the US was constructed after the invention of the elevator (which allows for taller building heights to be practical; historically, top floors were undesirable) and the automobile (which allows for lower-density housing to be practical). There are few skyscrapers in Europe; Turkey actually has the most, by a huge margin, and like the US, Turkey saw a lot of population growth in the 20th century, so a lot of Turkey is gonna be new-build.
I spent a while looking at the few US district heating systems that existed in the past (and a few, now). They don’t do the suburbs – they provided heating to that high-density city core. There, they don’t have to run pipes a long distance to transport heat; electricity is cheaper to transport than heat.
There are exceptions that do provide district heating to residences, like Manhattan, but Manhattan is also a (partial) exception to the “high-density core, low-density suburbs” structure; New York City, though the largest American city, doesn’t look much like a typical American city:
New York’s first steam system was installed in 1881 in response to a need for an underground system immune to the elements. Now, New York has over 105 miles of steam piping serving nearly 2,000 buildings — it’s the largest steam system in the world, by a massive margin.
But for the general case, I expect that it’s gonna make less economic sense to do district heating of housing in the US than in Europe.
If you file a lawsuit, that means that some entity isn’t acting according to the law. So maybe there’s some kind of EP-passed law that imposes a mandate on the EPPO? But then why woudn’t the EP be taking up the issue, rather than the EPPO?
reads through article
Oh, and it’s just like 5 million euros a year in IT funds. Huh.
reads
Ah. At the end it says that the EPPO started investigating how von der Leyen’s office had been handling funds associated with COVID-19 vaccine deals.
Well, the EU chose LCK to head the EPPO when she had a reputation for fighting even her bosses if she thought that they were involved in corruption – she got in plenty of hot water with the Romanian government over that – and I suppose that she’s pretty much sticking to character.
I am very sure that there are British special forces in Ukraine.
After one of his visits to Ukraine, Michael Kofman was being interviewed about the possibility of soldiers going in and partway through started laughing and said “if anyone has people there, I’m sure the British do”. The interviewer asked him why he thought that and he laughed even harder and said “let’s just call it one analyst’s guess”.
My guess is that they’re present and that it’s an open secret that they’re there, but that the British government chooses not to officially announce the fact.
Later, they had that German military discussion that leaked and IIRC they said that the British had about 50 people in Ukraine, more than anyone else…IIRC we in the US had 17. The Brits were doing things like helping target British weapons (and French weapons, as IIRC the French didn’t have anyone present). The Germans were talking about having the British target their weapons too if they decided to send Taurus missiles, so that they could avoid putting anyone in-country.
The University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, Trinity College Cambridge, has decided to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal....
Activist investing is kind of pointless in that an efficient market reallocates funds around it. Like, if an investor chooses not to invest in X for some sort of reason other than the expected value of X, it reduces the value of X, sure – but also creates an incentive for others to invest in X. The actions of other investors are not independent of the actions of the activist investor.
I once heard it described as trying to “bail a hole in a lake.” New water goes right back into the spot where it was taken from.
Reading is a recent development for me in the grand scheme of things, dyslexia meant I was hindered till I was about 18, picking up my first actual book 1984 at the age of 24....
Books have kind of an emphasis on a linear format, and hypertext can be convenient, especially for reference use, and you can’t do that in a book. Searchability is nice.
On the other hand, the ownership model of books is handy – buy it and keep it. Ebooks are the closest equivalent and I wouldn’t bet on an eBook being usable 30 years down the line.
There’s some content that I can only get in physical books (or at most, ebooks), though.
I still do buy physical books. I’m currently going through a book on the history of military submarines, and last week bought a book on a particular period in US war planning. But the proportion of text I read in pixels is way up, and the proportion that I read on the Web is way up.
It deals with the “‘buy’ it and keep it” issue, but they only deal with out-of-copyright works, which are usually quite old. Nearly all of what I read will be newer than that.
I’ve read things there. IIRC, the second reading of Journey to the West, one of the “canonical” Chinese novels, was off Project Gutenberg.
There are few things more heartwarming than videos of children with deafness gaining the ability to hear, showing them happily turning their heads at the sound of their parents’ voices and joyfully bobbing to newly discovered music. Thanks to recent advances in gene therapy, more kids are getting those sweet and triumphant...
I mean, I assume that when someone’s an adult, they can be re-deafened if they want if their parents restored their hearing (at least in medical terms. I don’t know if it’s legal for someone to have a doctor make them deaf).
putting pressure on water companies to stop dumping sewage in them.
I mean, it’s a result of using older combined sewers. The sewer and drains go to the same place, so when there’s enough rain, the system gets overwhelmed and dumps some amount without treating it.
I’m sure that if people are willing to pay what it’d cost to upgrade the sewer system, that upgrading it isn’t a problem, but it’s not free, and one has to weigh the cost against that benefit.
I’ve got one relative living in a city in the US that’s in the process of doing that shift away from a combined sewer system, and the total cost of the rebuild is around $5,000 per resident (not household, but resident). That’s a fair bit of money to ask the population to pay.
In their case, it wasn’t driven purely by a desire to convert from a combined sewer system, but because the existing system needed to be fixed, and if you’re going to have to do major repairs anyway, then it’s time to bite the bullet and pay for dealing with the combined sewer. I’m thinking that it may be that British cities might do something like that – kick the can down the road until the system really has to be replaced anyway, and then pay what it costs to move away from the combined sewer.
But you can’t use emails starting with mail@, admin@, support@, info@, main@, etc.
If it’s exactly stuff like “mail@”, many mail systems will redirect stuff with a plus suffix to your main mailbox, like “mail+changeorg@”. That might be okay.
“Bomb Iran” (or “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran”) is the name of several parodies of the Regents’ 1961 song “Barbara Ann”, originally written by Fred Fassert and popularized in a “party” cover version by the Beach Boys in 1965. The most popular of the parodies was recorded by Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1980. “Bomb Iran” gained a resurgence in notoriety in 2007 during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.
So if I understand the concern, it’s that someone can look at someone who is friends with you but doesn’t have a private profile and find your Steam username.
While I can see an argument that the default should be not to expose a friend list publicly (hell, I think that the default should be for profiles to be private entirely), you can also just not use the friend functionality in Steam. I don’t play multiplayer games, but are there any fundamental limitations on playing games multiplayer with people you haven’t friended in Steam?
Kofman criticized him for a number of things, including going on offensives at times when held have benefitted from being on defense.
He’s not being replaced by someone with military expertise, though, so I’m not sure that that’s the driving factor here.
And his own background was in disaster response. I don’t know how much of the actions taken under him were, in fact, from him. Kofman had to be guessing, to a certain extent.
Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/cu yd)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area. This is because the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting primarily of suspended “fingernail-sized or smaller”—often microscopic—particles in the upper water column known as microplastics.[4] Researchers from The Ocean Cleanup project claimed that the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres (620,000 square miles)[5] consisting of 45,000–129,000 metric tons (50,000–142,000 short tons) of plastic as of 2018.
NOAA stated:
While “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name “Pacific Garbage Patch” has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter – akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.
Russian forces push deeper into northern Ukraine (www.bangkokpost.com)
In the past three days, Russian troops, backed by fighter jets, artillery and lethal drones, have poured across Ukraine’s northeastern border and seized at least nine villages and settlements, and more territory per day than at almost any other point in the war, save the very beginning.
Furious Brussels wants answers over ban on EU flags at Eurovision (www.euronews.com)
The European Commission has expressed anger over a ban on EU flags at the Eurovision Song Contest and demands explanations....
When the water runs dry: Why France is freaking out over a tiny Swiss dam (www.politico.eu)
Water-rich Switzerland controls Western Europe’s taps — and wants it to stay that way. Its drought-ridden neighbors are getting nervous....
EU prosecutors threaten to sue Commission in spending spat (www.politico.eu)
European Public Prosecutor’s Office says budget move means it may no longer be able to focus on its investigative operations....
US commander appeared to suggest UK special forces were operating in Ukraine (www.businessinsider.com)
A US commander appeared to suggest UK special forces were operating in Ukraine....
Exclusive: Cambridge's wealthiest college to divest from arms companies (www.middleeasteye.net)
The University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, Trinity College Cambridge, has decided to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal....
Reading books can be world changing
Reading is a recent development for me in the grand scheme of things, dyslexia meant I was hindered till I was about 18, picking up my first actual book 1984 at the age of 24....
More children gain hearing as gene therapy for profound deafness advances | Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
There are few things more heartwarming than videos of children with deafness gaining the ability to hear, showing them happily turning their heads at the sound of their parents’ voices and joyfully bobbing to newly discovered music. Thanks to recent advances in gene therapy, more kids are getting those sweet and triumphant...
Is the Internet bad for you? Huge study reveals surprise effect on well-being (www.nature.com)
A survey of more than 2.4 million people finds that being online can have a positive effect on welfare.
England gets 27 new bathing sites – but no guarantee they’ll be safe for swimming (www.theguardian.com)
For security reasons (lemmy.world)
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/cd29e707-8f43-4511-afc6-0a778fe36a61.jpeg...
Sen. Lindsey Graham Suggests Nuking Gaza, Calls Hiroshima ‘the Right Decision’ (www.thedailybeast.com)
PSA: A website called SteamHistory enables stalkers through Steam mass data harvesting. Here's how stalkers found me despite creating a new, private, anonymous account.
cross-posted from: lemmy.cafe/post/4800845...
Vladimir Putin set to transfer Sergei Shoigu from Russian defence ministry (www.bbc.com)
Never forget what we're fighting for (lemm.ee)
Stack Overflow Users Are Revolting Against an OpenAI Deal | WIRED (www.wired.com)
Members of the software developer community have reported deleting or altering their posts to prevent them from being used by OpenAI.
Euro bottles are so much better now (toobnix.org)
I know they’re supposed to be good for the environment but… God I hate those caps.