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.

If I remember my history correctly, a major point of the gas chambers was that the prisoners were convinced that they had been sent to a labour camp, and were sent into the chambers to shower. By convincing people that they weren’t in immediate life threatening danger, it was much easier to control them.

Of course, nobody could even imagine the absolute horror of the Holocaust. If you told me that someone would take hundreds of thousands (millions) of fit, working age people and simply wipe them out, I would have a much easier time believing the other guy that said “no, you’re being sent to take a shower before being placed in a labour camp. Life will be hard, but obviously we wouldn’t waste resources just killing everyone on the spot.”

The great thing is, it’s not just for flights! My travel insurance gives me coverage as long as I’m travelling outside my home. It literally covers damage to my bike if I’m visiting my parents for the weekend, or road assistance if my car breaks down on my way to a hike.

That’s essentially why I have it: Pretty much everything I bring with me on any trip that’s not to-from work is covered.

Travel insurance? Regulation? Out of any insurance worth paying for, I think travel insurance is like top of the line. Anything goes wrong while travelling (stolen stuff, lost/delayed baggage/damaged rental car/cancelled flights/etc.) gives me a decent payback. I pay like 120 USD/yr.

Regarding regulations: At least in the EU/EEA we have some decent regulations requiring airlines to reimburse you if they lose or delay your baggage.

I thought part of the premise is that this technology is so far beyond our comprehension that we couldn’t even begin to contemplate replicating it.

Imagine gifting a modern jet aircraft to the Roman Empire, a nuclear reactor to the Egyptian empire, or a modern computer to a caveman: How much do you think that would speed up the development of said technology? My guess is: Not a lot, if at all. The tech is so far beyond what they had in the era, and there are so many intertwined developments in science and engineering needed to replicate it, that it might as well be magic to them.

Even for the Romans to replicate a jet, they would first need to make around 2000 years of progress is fuel refining and metallurgy. Not to mention that they would need to understand fluid dynamics and thermodynamics that weren’t developed until the 1800’s. This again relies on mathematics that weren’t developed until the 1600’s-1700’s.

Now imagine this “perpetual 1 W source” relies on stuff we won’t develop for the next 20 000 years. We wouldn’t even know where to start if we were to replicate it.

What order should they be read then? I started with “The magician’s nephew” and though that made sense back then (probably when I was like 13).

The fantastic gift of a perpetual 1 W energy source 😍

“Beaches that allow X” sounds like some dystopian shit, where people are regulating and controlling what you can and cannot bring into some semi-obscure public place.

Any beach I go to is literally a spot by the water you walk to if you want to hang out and cool down. I can understand regulations if we’re talking about some inner-city “beach”, but luckily most beaches is the world are places you can be pretty alone.

No. I definitely do not want to fuck all that nasty shit.

As a side note, I prefer not to fuck feet either.