That almost seems like a wilful misinterpretation of what I wrote, since I never claimed anything of the sort.

What makes you completely wrong is that you’re using the fact that petroleum companies are filthy rich and bribe politicians to hell and back as an explanation for why we’re still reliant of fossil fuels. The basic answer to why is that “fossil fuels and combustion engines are pretty damn hard to beat” to the point where we still haven’t found a viable alternative for some applications.

I get why you would say this, but it’s an oversimplification to the point of being completely wrong.

Fossil fuels have an absurd energy density. They’re just really hard to beat. Modern batteries and liquid hydrogen don’t even come close. Pair that with the fact that we’ve spent a couple hundred years optimising the steam- and internal combustion engines, compared to some decades (in practice) for electric-based stuff, and you start seeing why fossil fuels are so hard to push of the top of the hill.

Until very recently all alternatives were pretty much worse under every conceivable performance metric. There’s a reason electric planes are still in the prototype phase. It’s just technically really really hard to even get close to jet fuel and combustion engines.

That was really a fantastic 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.

Of course, I’ll speak English in meetings and other settings where we’re talking about work and need to minimise the language barrier for practical purposes. I’ll also speak English in a lot of social settings, because these are nice people that I enjoy talking to.

What I’m talking about is the silent expectation that a group of Norwegians talking at the lunch table should switch to English if one or more non-Norwegian speakers enter the room. I don’t like that silent expectation, and really appreciate the colleagues that learn Norwegian well enough that I can just keep the conversation going without feeling like I’m excluding them or feeling that I need to swap to English and fill them in on what we’re talking about.

I don’t think it really makes a difference, as long as you’re staying somewhere for any significant amount of time (i.e. months) it makes sense to start learning the language.

I mean, it’s common courtesy to try to learn enough of the local language to buy stuff and ask for directions when your just on vacation.

I was in Germany for half a year during my studies. To me it was obvious that I needed to learn the language from day one, because I had no intent of going around and expecting everyone else to adjust to me not knowing the language. I have a very hard time understanding how someone could move to a country for years, and still not learn the language because “it’s not permanent”.

I also work in a very international community, with a small minority Norwegians (in Norway). While we often communicate in English, I have to admit that I find it a bit strange that people choose to move to Norway and work in Norway, but don’t learn the language well enough to participate in a conversation at the lunch table.

Sure, often we’ll swap to English if a non-Norwegian speaker comes in, but sometimes I’m just tired and don’t want to bother with the extra effort. I massively appreciate the colleagues that bother to learn Norwegian.

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.

My thought wasn’t to alias rm, but rather to make a function like rmv <file> that would move the file to a trash directory.

But of course this already exists- thanks for pointing me to the resource:)

Honestly, after re-reading my own comment, I’m considering just putting some stupid-simple wrapper around mv that moves files to a dedicated trash bin. I’ll just delete the trash bin every now and then…

-Proceeds to collect 300 GB of build files and scrapped virtual environments over the coming month-

I usually don’t think about it at all, but every now and then I’m struck by how terrifyingly destructive rm -r can be.

I’ll use it to delete some build files or whatever, then I’ll suddenly have a streak of paranoia and need to triple check that I’m actually deleting the right thing. It would be nice to have a “safe” option that made recovery trivial, then I could just toggle “safe” to be on by default.

Exactly this (except I prefer macOS over Linux out of habit). If you’re a power user that’s comfortable working from a terminal, macOS is really just a polished UNIX system. There are no guard rails that sudo !! won’t get you past.

“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.