I use Firefox in any graphical environment. It’s considerably more customizable than Chrome is, thanks to about:config.

I use Kagi for most searching, though there are a lot of other useful search tools out there for specialized searches, like Tineye for reverse image search.

Only a fifth of Canadians younger than 50 plan on having kids

That’s sustainable as long as those 1 in 5 Canadians who do have a kid each have on average at least 10 kids.

The poll found 51% say it is “not their responsibility” to fund other people’s childcare, with the most likely group to say this are those who have raised children to the age of 18 or older, where the proportion rises to 59%.

While I’ve got sympathy for that position, the flip side of that is that it’s taxes from those kids who will be paying for pension, medical care, and so forth of people who don’t have kids.

So if you don’t want to pay for someone else’s kids, it does seem a bit unfair that their kids should pay for your old age. I mean, it required a lot of time and work and money on the part of people who did have kids to raise that kid.

The social welfare model in most countries, as things stand, is rather loaded against people who have kids.

Well, I mean, it’s not like the field is there to provide ornamentation to people driving down the road, and it’s not like the people complaining own the field. The person could build whatever they wanted there. A row of pink barns, I dunno. That’s not specific to solar farms. Maybe there’s someone who doesn’t like the aesthetic of a field of soy or something.

I don’t personally find solar farms particularly beautiful or ugly.

Not solar, but I’ll concede a point to the people who don’t like wind turbines on ridgelines, because then when the sun sets behind them, they create enormous flashing shadows as they rotate that are really hard to ignore if you’re in the path of the shadow. Most of the time they don’t do it, of course, but when they do, it’s a pain.

• Just set up your browser to delete cookies on exit. If you want, just have it delete them from specifically that site. The entire debate over whether-or-not a site sets a cookie seems to me to be pretty pointless. If a site can set cookies, then some bad actor will. The dialogs that sites put up talking about it are pointless. No solution other than having your browser not retain them regardless of what a site wants to do is going to be a reliable solution. Not policies, not laws.

  I have my browser delete all cookies on exit. I have a very short whitelist of sites that I permit to keep cookies and track me. Every one of those is one that I need to log in to use anyway – so I could be tracked with or without a cookie – and the only thing the cookie does is buys me not needing to log in every time, doesn’t have privacy implications.

• Paying doesn’t buy you anything unless they offer a no-log, no-data-mining policy. If you log in to use the site, then they can track you anyway via the credentials you use.

• They’re not imposing it on you. They’re offering you a service that costs them money. They give you news, you give them money or data. If you don’t want to do that deal, there’s a whole Internet out there. Don’t go to that particular site. There are lots of websites out there, many of which offer the same deal. Getting upset that somewhere on the Internet, someone is offering a deal that you don’t want seems pointless.

  If you want to have some kind of tax-funded news site, go advocate for that. Yelling at them isn’t going to get you there.

  If you want to just view news done by volunteers, something like WikiNews, then go visit those sites instead. Maybe contribute work as well. I don’t think that volunteer news is going to realistically compete with commercial news, but hey, there was also a point when people thought the same thing about volunteer-run encyclopedias, so maybe it’ll get there.

I’ll also add that I’m going to be generous to the EU and assume that the goal of their “cookie warning” law, which is why many European websites show these, was to raise awareness of cookies and privacy implications by having warnings plastered all over, so that it starts people thinking about privacy. Because if the goal was actually to let people avoid cookies, then it is costly, disruptive and wildly ineffectual compared to just setting a setting in the browser, makes actually having the browser delete cookies more-annoying, and duplicates a browser-side standard, P3P, that already accomplished something similar, and was just all around a really bad law.

How would it hurt anyone?

I don’t know about the situation there, but in some places in Spain, there are agricultural workers who are upset about the conversion of plant farms to solar farms, because the solar farms require less labor, so they’re unhappy about job losses. From what I’ve read, it’s been something of a political hot topic there.

Looking at another article on this community, it sounds like China’s way ahead of you on that.

https://lemmy.today/post/17388857

Chinese authorities demand schoolteachers and other public sector employees hand in their passports as President Xi Jinping tightens his grip on society

I like it.

I don’t know about this new version that will be released, but:

Here’s a link to a PDF of the current version:

https://rib.msb.se/filer/pdf/30828.pdf

You can feed it into Google Translate.

No, that’s from some “disboard.org” service that I linked to. I just used Kagi to find that page.

Oh, that’s a good point – missed that in the article. They did say that it started in 2015.

I don’t know anything about the specifics here, but here’s a 5 year graph of futures for live cattle versus beef:

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/live-cattle

If there’s collusion to engage in price-fixing by meat packers, I’d expect to see beef prices rising without a corresponding increase in cattle prices.

Beef prices did indeed recently start rising rapidly without a corresponding increase in live cattle prices.

But on the other hand, beef prices are also a lot lower relative to live cattle prices than they were during roughly COVID-19.

Two of the renewables are intermittent: solar and wind.

They only provide energy some of the time.

That means that you need to have something else to step in when they aren’t providing energy.

We don’t have the capacity to just store all that energy when they are outputting power to fill in those gaps. Batteries aren’t even remotely-feasible. Pumped hydrostorage is our best option, but you can only do that in places with favorable geography.

What it generally means today, in practice, is that if someone is using solar or wind, they used to use coal and now use natural gas to fill in those gaps. If you use solar or wind, you’re also tying yourself to natural gas.

For a number of places, if you’re using natural gas, you cannot pipe it in. Like, take Guam. They’re a little island out the middle of nowhere. They can’t pipe in natural gas, need to have it converted to LNG so that it can be shipped in. Europe has some natural gas, but less than the US, and unfortunately two of the convenient neighboring places to get it that might pipe it in are Russia, which promptly started using said pipelines as leverage, and Africa, which has countries that would like to sell it to Europe but suffer from political instability.

If your natural gas pipeline gets too long, then LNG becomes more-efficient. LNG has something like an IIRC 30% overhead to liquify it, but once you do that, you’re mostly done. With a pipeline, you have to keep pumping it to keep the gas moving. There’s a break-even point where LNG becomes more-efficient if you have to move it further. I looked that up at one point, and IIRC, even security and practicality issues aside, it wouldn’t be economically-viable to run a trans-Atlantic pipeline: LNG is more-energy efficient, because the distance is so far.

Hydroelectricity is renewable and doesn’t have that problem (well, barring extreme, extended droughts, but it comes with a lot of flexibility in generation), but it’s limited by geography; you can only put hydroelectric dams in some places. Also, there are some people who get upset about the ecological impact on rivers, since it changes whether fish can go up and down the river and when and how much water flows.

Geothermal power is renewable and also doesn’t have that problem, but is also limited by geography.

With nuclear, you’ve got a raging anti-nuclear crowd.

EDIT: One point in LNG’s favor – I went reading about current LNG systems a while back. They’re…presently not very efficient, and it’d be possible to do engineering work on them to improve efficiency. Basically, if you’re liquifying LNG in the US and shipping it to Germany and then regassifying it, you’re running what amounts to a gargantuan air conditioner compressor. You’re making the gas very hot in the US, then producing very cold output decompressing LNG in Germany. Right now, the heat and coolness on each end are “thrown out”, not used for other processes, which is why there’s overhead. So, IIRC Germany is (or was during the crisis, dunno what’s going on now) using floating LNG regassification plants, things that are basically converted LNG tankers. Those things deal with all the coolness they’re generating by having their LNG regassified by dumping it into the water. So we’re spending a lot of money and energy to heat up water or air or something in the US and then chill German port waters (in fact, I was reading some article a while back that people were a bit worried about the ecological impacts of the chilling). It’d be possible, if you were going to use LNG, to reuse some of that energy, which would avoid that waste.

In California, part of the California State Water Project involves pumping water up over the mountains to where it’s needed. That costs energy. But it’s set up to recover some of the expended energy by having the descending water drive hydroelectric power plants. Same kind of idea – you can refine the process to eliminate overhead.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/russia-bans-discord/

Just seven days ago, Reuters reported that Russia had ordered approximately 1,000 items to be deleted from Discord and Google, including posts “containing…LGBT propaganda…:”

kagis

Servers tagged with:

LGBTQ+: 61597

Tags similar to LGBTQ+

• LGBT (48114)
• GAY (31652)
• TRANS (8568)
• FEMBOY (23724)
• LGBTQ (57310)

And that was only one category they objected to.

Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that that probably wasn’t gonna be a winnable war for the Russian government.

Can be monitored with NUT over USB or Ethernet

NUT has a hardware compatibility list.

https://networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html

If you really want to do so, you can go set up your own well and water purification system. Some people have to do so, because they’re off in the sticks somewhere that can’t get water service.

My expectation is that you’ll find that it’s not cost-effective to do so.

Looks like China’s got a pretty large lead, even relative to London.

https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/

The 10 most surveilled cities in the world – cameras per person

Based on the number of cameras per 1,000 people, these cities are the top 10 most surveilled in the world:

1. Cities of China* — 626m cameras to 1.43bn people = 439.07 cameras per 1,000 people

2. Hyderabad, India — 900,000 cameras for 10,801,163 people = 83.32 cameras per 1,000 people

3. Indore, India – 200,000 cameras per 3,302,077 people = 60.57 cameras per 1,000 people

4. Delhi, India — 449,934 cameras for 22,547,000 people = 19.96 cameras per 1,000 people

5. Singapore, Singapore — 109,072 cameras for 6,080,859 people = 17.94 cameras per 1,000 people

6. Moscow, Russia — 214,000 cameras for 12,680,389 people = 16.88 cameras per 1,000 people

7. Baghdad, Iraq — 120,000 cameras for 7,711,305 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people

8. Seoul, South Korea — 144,513 cameras for 9,988,049 people = 14.47 cameras per 1,000 people

9. St. Petersburg, Russia — 75,000 cameras for 5,561,294 people = 13.49 cameras per 1,000 people

10. London, England (UK) — 127,423 cameras for 9,648,110 people = 13.21 cameras per 1,000 people

To put it another way, when I first joined, it was to kbin.social. Kbin has a feature to help people discover new communities where it will suggest random comments. This leads to…rather dramatic cross-pollination. So, for example, I remember looking at a technology community on pawb.social. Some other random kbin.social user also showed up there, I’m sure via random comment, and was complaining that everyone in the forum was a furry. I mean…yeah, you just hopped right into the middle of their den. Same thing with yiffit.net and probably a number of other instances. Does that mean that the Threadiverse is all furries? Well, no. I’d say that it’s disproportionately so compared to Reddit, but it’s more that it’s got special-interest instances.

Or transexual users on lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Or porn enthusiasts on lemmynsfw.com.

Or underage anime porn fans on burggit.moe.

Or science enthusiasts on mander.xyz.

Or Star Trek fans on startrek.website.

Hop onto any of those or communities on those, and you’re likely to find a lot of content of the sort that the instance focuses on. But if your instance doesn’t federate with them, you may not see that material at all, nor the users on those instances.

I’ve seen multiple videos of barn owls “dancing” to music.

I have no idea what’s going on in their heads, but it’s something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUIx_cmqM4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKU_PRt9rpg

I see a lot of handwringing in society over kids not being able to handle themselves online.

I’d be more worried about senior citizens.

I don’t think anyone has polls. There is a much higher far-left proportion than on Reddit, as things stand.

Note that Reddit is one unified world, albeit with division by subreddit.

The Threadiverse is not. Some instances have very different communities – some only permit certain types of users. And not all instances federate with each other, and if your instance doesn’t federate with another, you won’t see content from those instances.

So, for example, lemmygrad.ml and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml has a bunch of people – including the lead Lemmy dev – who are enthusiastic about Stalin and the Soviet Union, pro-authoritarian-left. Hexbear.net is kinda out there too.

Then you’ve got exploding-heads.com, which I believe is far-right.

Lemmy.world is more-mainstream, but I’d certainly place it left of Reddit on average. It doesn’t federate with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net or exploding-heads.com.

Beehaw.org is what I’d call far-left, but less in the authoritarian camp, but they’ve defederated from lemmy.world.

You can see defederations on an instance under “Blocked instances” at /instances. So for example:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Most instances also say something about their policies in the right-hand sidebar.

I think that some of it is also that some people are very vocal about their political views, and I think that some of those are disproportionately in the far-left camp. Like, if someone wants to vent that they think that society would be better off as an anarchy or that private ownership of industry or money or whatever shouldn’t exist, I think that those people are gonna be more likely to have strong feelings about and repeatedly post about their point of disagreement than someone saying “I think that things are going pretty well, but I’d like Tweak X and Y”.