Oh you poor things, the lack of attention we give you is what allows you to thrive. I’d almost shed a tear if there was an inkling of truth in those ramblings.

People, observe the rhetorical devices of tankies. They do not engage in meaningful discourse. They answer with non-sequiturs framed as innocent questions. They present themselves as free speech defenders, yet they use this free speech to defend the most oppressive regimes in the world, though most often implicitly as their whole thesis becomes an obvious sophism were it to be explicitly stated:

America bad, therefore Russia/China/NK good.

It’s the exact same rhetorical devices that /r/The_Donald used during the '16 election, only with a different goal. It’s the methodology of people actively working against their own self-interest, shitting all over rational discourse because they found themselves in a self-reassuring echo-chamber of anticonformism.

The main display that shows your speed,etc. randomly shutting down

I know two people who had this exact issue with their new-gen Golf. First cause was the French language would crash the whole dash if you cycled the dashboard views (to my knowledge they never fixed the issue and the workaround is to set the car to English). Second cause was a malformed JPEG from a radio station would cause the dash to bootloop until you drove far enough from said radio station, which would allow the car to work long enough to disable that feature (IIRC).

So yeah, QA is down the fucking drain with VW on their latest gen. They had a new CEO, and now a new one again I think? But the reputational damage has been done. Too bad, I really liked my '18 Polo.

Hahahahhahahahaha

Go read literally any statement from EU officials on the subject. The Euro must legally be adopted by any country which has a good enough economy (exemptions aside such as the UK or Danemark IIRC).

Sweden benefits from a loophole where they legally have to switch to the Euro but haven’t started the process yet. However, there is not a chance in hell that the EU would give the same leniency to the UK, both for political (that’d make us look “weak”) and financial (the British economy is several times larger than Sweden’s) reasons.

The UK getting to keep the pound in a rejoin scenario is a delusion. Or at the very least the political hurdles must be made clear because it is anything BUT given (and should I remind you how the last 8 years of negotiations with the EU went?)

This is not a “will the UK try to rejoin one day” trend, this is a brexit regret trend.

The people responding “rejoin” to these polls probably imagine that EU accession will be done on the previous terms. If you did the same graph but made it clear to pollees that rejoining would entail a switch to the Euro and many more legislative constraints, it would almost certainly read overwhelmingly “Stay out”.

Anything to do with seawater needs to deal with corrosion (e.g. offshore wind/tide generation). Also intuition tells me the balloons would be waaay bigger than reasonable.

Compressed air I assume is possible, as are many many other things (gravity, heat, springs, etc.). The question is which is cheaper and grid-scale; a 1 GWh pressure vessel would certainly be a sight to behold.

I’m no hydro specialist but my understanding is that in the Alps/Pyrénées, the hydro capacity is essentially maxed out because any additional projects will be denied on environmental grounds (flooding valleys is, as it turns out, not amazing for the environment). Maybe there’s some pairs of existing artificial lakes that could act as batteries, IDK. But I wouldn’t expect this to magically solve every issue.

In Belgium we have one such installation thanks to a fortuitous topological quirk, but no plans for more. Still, 10 GWh is not nothing and already helping a lot to absorb renewable fluctuations.

I think that is the most controversial take I have read in my entire life.

What good has Microsoft done for Mojang/Minecraft? They kneecapped development by splitting the codebase and tying most features to their ability to run on mobile hardware, slowed development to an absolute crawl to increase long-term revenue (these motherfuckers openly develop three new features for minecon every year, then delete two of those for no reason other than “we can”), turned the console/mobile versions into garbage microtransaction boxes, started policing private speech in private servers hosted on private hardware, turned the mod-supporting version of the game into a second-class citizen, basically made for-profit private servers illegal, etc.

Minecraft was a great game that stood on its own merit when Microsoft bought it. Everything they did only brought it down, and the few good features the game has gained since then were long overdue and done despite Microsoft’s meddling.

A minority government is almost guaranteed to fail, and that’s theoretically bound to make them unpopular (as it has with every prime minister of Macron’s second mandate).

However, this could backfire if they have a majority. It could also backfire because voters are not necessarily that dumb and might just see through this charade. If anyone can handwave piss-poor performance away, it’s the RN.

LR already said they won’t make a coalition with LREM. They’d be at least as likely to ally with the RN. As for LFI/PC… LREM dislike them at least as much as they do the RN.

Only strategic move I see is let the RN govern until 2027 in the hope they flaceplant hard enough with no plan or coalition to hand an easy win back in the next presidential/legislative elections, which makes twisted sense given that everyone knew they were going to win in '27. Except the risk of that plan backfiring is stratospherically high, especially if the RN lands a majority (which is not unlikely as people were pissed off voting this morning, and will be even more pissed off after a dissolution).

• Greenfield (new) nuclear’s LCOE is higher than renewables. This does not account for the additional GHG emissions from the fossil fuels that supplement renewables’ intermittency issues, and if we put a carbon tax on those then the maths would surely change (whether it justifies greenfield nuclear over things like energy storage or just paying the carbon tax I do not know, I haven’t seen a study on that).
• Existing nuclear is cost-competitive with renewables. Yes, as with any 50 year-old infrastructure it will require maintenance. Refurbishing is still cheaper than shutting everything down and replacing that capacity with gas+renewables. The decision to shut down existing NPPs was political; so political in fact that the government had to put the nuclear shutdown into law (otherwise the energy operator would have done the economically sensible thing and refurbished the NPPs for an additional 10-30 years.
  Since the energy crisis we are planning to refurbish the NPPs that were shut down anyways. Of course the cost analysis is much murkier now that we have years of delayed maintenance to catch up on since the operator expected a complete phaseout in 2022.

The debate over new nuclear is one thing. It’s not happening in Belgium anyways as literally no political party supports that. But shutting down existing nuclear is a moronic strategy that was only undertaken due to intense lobbying from anti-nuclear (and therefore pro-oil, whether they realize it or not) activists that cannot even remotely pretend that in the early '00s they correctly predicted that existing-nuclear-vs-new-renewables would reach a rough economic equilibrium twenty years later. They were killing the planet and they knew it, and didn’t care because it meant less nuclear (whatever relative intrinsic benefits that supposedly entails from an environmental perspective).

The fact that they had 10+ years to revert the decision and didn’t is that much more damning.

I would know, my country (Belgium) did the same. I will forever hold a grudge against those reality-denying environmentalists who recklessly misrepresented the drawbacks of nuclear to the public and killed any dream of energy independence well before I was old enough to vote.

You were the chosen ones, Greens. You were supposed to fight the oil lobby, not join them.

Huh, TIL, I thought these were the same characters.

It just occurred to me a reason TF3 can’t happen in a satisfying way.

You couldn’t make TF3 with a different cast of “heroes”, right? It would just be unsettling and disrespectful. TF’s DNA is their lovable characters.

Not a single TF playable character is a woman. That was on-par for the 2000s, but definitely not acceptable in the 2020s when your competitors are OW and Valorant which both have a diverse cast with (AFAIK) gender parity. Keeping the cast but adding 9 women and 2 enbies would feel extremely performative and like the new PCs are inferior “tack-on” characters.

TF3 would either be problematic or desacralized. IMO making new IP is the right call.

I learned the term Information Kessler Syndrome recently.

Now you have too. Together we bear witness to it.

I would be very surprised if it wasn’t voluntary, as far as I know each Wiki is maintained independently with very little oversight.

I remember when “new” Wikipedia came out with big press I was confused because it had already been in use on the French wiki for months.

My guess is as the biggest wiki, the English wiki is naturally more conservative on the rollout of new features.

That might depend country-to-country, and anecdotally I’ve noticed techy people use aliexpress but non-techy people use wish/temu.

It also sounds like this is (mostly) about counterfeit luxury items, and if my first theory is right then Temu is going to be overrepresented in seized counterfeit imports.

Another long term goal of the EU is to promote peace and democracy across Europe.

Allowing Orbàn to further democratic backsliding at home and undermining of the EU’s democratic processes and missions goes contrary to that goal, and the usual withholding of EU funding isn’t a sentence at all to a quasi-dictator who revels in the fact that reduced funding means more social misery means easy elections for a populist who blames every problem on the EU.

Kicking out Hungary is a solution of last resort and we aren’t there yet, but in a system where Member States could turn totalitarian (and as Sovereign states we have no legal means to force out a dictator), exclusion must be on the table if we are to uphold our democratic values.

You don’t need a data plan to call emergency services. Any protocol-compatible device can dial 911/112/etc. for free.

This is why in remote areas your phone may say “Emergency Calls Only”. Your carrier isn’t available, but someone else’s is and they are legally obligated to route emergency calls.

Of course if your car has a modem and a computer, adding a data plan isn’t a huge leap. But it’s a recurring expense and plenty of cars sold today do not have internet connectivity, at least on the cheaper side.