Right now, definitely politically Central European. Culturally, they’ve played an important role in de-stigmatising Eastern Europe by not being monumental assholes for most of their time in the EU, while retaining their Eastern European culture.

Full disclaimer: I have yet to meet a Pole I think is anything less than a decent, nice person.

THANK YOU for sharing this that was an awesome read

The point was more that a community can enforce that “if they don’t get it, no one will”, which I think would put a lot of companies off from buying.

It wouldn’t help the first few people get their home back, but after a couple rounds, the big corps will see that they end up losing money when the buy properties that are sacked a short time later. If there’s one thing that will make a company change its behaviour, it’s making them lose money through that behaviour.

I thought the same thing at first. However after reading another comment here I realised that a community can essentially sack the property if a huge corp buys it. Not much you can do if everyone around wants you gone so bad they’ll commit arson rather than let you stay.

That was my initial thought as well, but after reading the other comment about how a community essentially sacked a house after the “wrong person” bought it…

The only thing that intimidates soulless corps is the threat of losing money. If it becomes clear to them that whatever they buy at auction will be burned to the ground, they probably won’t be very eager to keep buying.

Chinese government: Blatantly lies about any and everything.

Everyone else: …

Absolutely everyone: …

Chinese government: THESE ARE BASELESS ACCUSATIONS AND UNFRIENDLY PROPAGANDA!

I can never help but be put off by the trivial “as my 30 year life cycle comes to an end…” when I read this comic. I wonder if we’ll ever be at a stage where we produce/program biological “robots” that are capable of having this kind of relationship to their own existence.

Exactly, we used to call this “digital noise filtering”, and we had it pretty damn well figured out.

You want to filter sound? Do some simple Fourier transforms and you’re all set. No need for a black-box “AI” model that is likely trained on data generated by a much more simple and efficient Fourier filter.

The fundamental difference to me, which makes me not see “a website with extensive docs and a download button” as marketing, is whether you need to seek it out or not.

If I need to seek it out myself, it’s not marketing, it’s simply “providing solid information” and “making your product accessible”, which is a whole different ballgame from “shoving your shit into peoples face in the hope that they’ll give you money”.

I think there’s a substantial difference between “supplying information about a product without shoving it in people’s face”, and what most people associate with “marketing”.

If a company putting up neutral, verifiable information about their product on their own webpage where I can find it by searching for something I’m looking for after reflexively scrolling past the ads counts as marketing, then yes, I “fall for marketing” all the time. However, what I typically associate with “marketing” involves me somehow being fed information about a product without seeking it out. Usually when that happens, I’ll actively look somewhere else.

Recalling the videos of a single male lion pretty much ripping apart a pack of hyenas… Tigers are even bigger and stronger than lions, and wolves don’t have anywhere near the bite force of a hyena. I think you’d need a lot more than three.

“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.

Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.

Because osmotic power has enormous potential in the sense that millions of cubic meters of fresh water is running into oceans all over the world every minute. If we’re able to get even a low-efficiency method of using the salinity gradient to generate power working then every place a river meets the sea is essentially an unlimited (albeit low-yield) power source.

This is tech that doesn’t rely on elevation (like hydropower) or weather conditions (like wind/solar) it’s stable and in principle possible to set up at pretty much any river outlet, which is great!

I do too, but I’ve started missing way too many of the notifications that I actually want to register receiving. Recently I’ve taken a round of actually enable/disable notifications on things so that I’ll be better at filtering out and catching the stuff I want to pay attention to.

I’ll add to this that Europe has about 1.6 times the population of the US. This means that Europe has roughly one school shooting for every 12 incidents in the US when corrected for population.

If Europe had school shootings at a rate similar to the US, there would have been on average 40 incidents per year. That is: about one school shooting every week of school since year 2000. I can’t even imagine going to school knowing that and wondering if my school is the one that’s going to be shot up this week.

Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.

Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.

I’m not saying they “should have” done anything specific. I’m pointing out that pretty much the only explanation for why they went as quietly as they did was that they didn’t know what was coming. People that are knowingly faced with the imminent murder of their family will not typically stand idly and watch.

I never said the kicking and screaming would have been successful. I’m just trying to explain why I think so many people went quietly, and pointing out that most people, when faced with the prospect that their entire family, all their friends, and they themselves face imminent death if they do nothing will tend to do something, regardless of whether it’s likely to succeed.

Of course, historically people “could have imagined”. I’m talking about seeing this through the eyes of a civilian that is brought off a train wagon and told they are being put in a labour camp. In that situation, I think very few people have it in them to imagine that their captors are organising the largest and most industrialised mass murder in history, and that they won’t even make it out of the “showers” alive.

I don’t expect them to launch a revolt, but with prisoners outnumbering guards 100:1, I don’t think so many would have walked to their execution in orderly files. I think there would have been a lot more kicking and screaming involved if they knew what was coming. Remember that these weren’t strangers either: We’re talking about whole families and all their friends sitting calmly together on the train and walking willingly into the gas chambers. That only happens if people are lured into thinking this is something other than it is.