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deleted by creator

The right (or far right) will probably win the next Spanish elections, which might rekindle independentist sentiment (both left and right have traditionally fucked with Catalonia, but the right has worse excuses), but personally I think we lost our best opportunity when we didn’t follow up on the 2017 declaration of independence.

The far righ would straight try to genocide us, so there might be an opportunity there. We need to be uncomfortable enough to get off our fat arses and work for our freedom, like back in the 2010s.

Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all six volumes of it.

The reason we started making E85 was because there was concerns about not having enough gasoline production in the states.

Also, it can be made from all-American corn, the most American of crops.

You might not be able to run cars on corn syrup, but you can run them on this.

Are they at least adding green colouring…?

It’s supposed to be kind of sort of federal(ish) (federalish enough, in theory, to keep Catalonia and Euskadi happy enough that we won’t want to leave). “States” are called autonomías (autonomies) and have their own government, laws, and institutions, though they still have to obey the Spanish government and most of its laws. It isn’t really working.

The article is still wrong when it uses “feds”, though, because the cops doing this are the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan autonomic police, not the “federal(ish)” policía nacional (the Spanish police proper) or guardia civil (despite the name, the military Spanish police, a relic from Franco’s dictatorship, like most of the country and its institutions).

It’s supposed to be kind of sort of federal(ish) (federalish enough, in theory, to keep Catalonia and Euskadi happy enough that we won’t want to leave). “States” are called autonomías (autonomies) and have their own government, laws, and institutions, though they still have to obey the Spanish government and most of its laws. It isn’t really working.

The article is still wrong when it uses “feds”, though, because the cops doing this are the mossos d’esquadra, the Catalan autonomic police, not the “federal(ish)” policía nacional (the Spanish police proper) or guardia civil (despite the name, the military Spanish police, a relic from Franco’s dictatorship, like most of the country and its institutions).

One possible solution is government buying out flood prone areas

The proper solution is fining anyone stupid enough to ask to be removed from a flood map 300% of their gross earnings during the past decade, and submitting them to every possible inspection, since they’re surely trying to hide other criminal idiocies.

Bird skeletons (or simply plucked birds) are seriously disturbing.

It’s incredible how much work feathers do when it comes to bird appearance.

Owls are cute and fluffy. Plucked owls are horrific alien nightmares from the outer dimensions.

Makes one wonder.

if dinosaurs are similar in breathing to humans

Current living dinosaurs are much more efficient at extracting oxygen from air than practically anything else in the planet.

Birds’ve got a unidirectional respiratory system that ensures oxygenated air is constantly flowing through their lungs (unlike, for instance, us mammals, who must empty our lungs of spent air before we can fill them again), and a system of air sacs to keep the air constantly flowing.

While fossil records of the earliest dinosaurs show no evidence of air sacs, later ones do, suggesting that bird-like respiratory systems evolved multiple times in parallel in different branches.

Sauropods in particular might have had even more complex air sac systems than modern birds, which could explain how they managed to grow so large (i.e., they were full of air, and might have been even more efficient when it comes to breathing, though their long necks might have offset the balance in the opposite direction).

Dinosaurs would have been perfectly fine with current oxygen levels.

We’re not talking dogs here.

We’re taking something much closer to birds. I.e., utter evil bastards. Probably smart, too.

No one in their right mind keeps cassowaries as pets, with very good reason.

The thing about LLMs is that they “store” information about the shape of their training models, not about the information contained therein. That information is lost.

A LLM will produce text that looks like the texts it was trained with, but it only can only reproduce any information contained in them if it’s common enough in its training data to statistically affect their shape, and even then it has a chance to get it wrong, since it has no way to check its output for fact accuracy.

Add to that that most models are pre-prompted to sound confident, helpful, and subservient (the companies’ main goal not being to provide information, but to get their customers hooked on their product and coming back for more), and you get the perfect scammers and yes-men. Auto-complete mentalists that will give you as much confident sounding information shaped nonsense as you want, doing their best to agree with you and confirm any biases you might have, with complete disregard for accuracy, truth, or the effects your trust in their output might have (which makes them extremely dangerous and addictive for suggestible or intellectually or emotionally vulnerable users).

Are haemorrhoids considered a bad omen…?

programmers

They don’t program, therefore they’re not programmers (and they’ll probably never be again, since using LLMs has been proven to damage one’s ability to reason and learn, probably permanently).

Vibe coders, maybe.

Victims of the LLM scam, definitely.

According to the novel American Gods it’s a discreet way to dispose of the bodies.

No one expects them to be hidden in plain sight inside the klunker in the middle of the ice, no one’s going to risk walking there and possibly drowning, and once it drops no one’s going to dive to the bottom of the lake to find the skeletons in the old klunkers from previous years.

I still have a fondness for TARGA (.TGA) from back in the day…

I live close to the central area of an ~80,000 population city.

Looking at Google maps I’ve got about 10 general stores within 300 meters, probably thrice that within 500m, plus plenty of smaller specialised stores.

300 to 600m seems like a reasonable distance to walk to and back with four to six bags of groceries.

For smaller more specialised shopping trips one or two kilometres would be fine too.

Three might be a bit much, though I’ve often walked that to go to the cinema.

Atlanta!!!

Atlatl. Or simply spear-thrower.

It’s a bit like a fing-longer, but for your whole arm, and therefore more useful.

Same principle as the sling: they make your arm longer so the “hand” moves faster when you swing it, allowing you to throw stuff at higher and more lethal speeds, and farther.

We’re still quite lethal even without these tools though, just look at baseball pitchers.

Also our accuracy and reach when throwing stuff.

Especially when combined with our ability to make stuff sharp by banging it against other stuff and breaking it just the right way.