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Cake day: Jun 13, 2023

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US, mid thirties, and I not only drive a manual transmission, I go out of my way to insist upon it. For example, I own a truck and an SUV made in the '90s because it’s difficult to find newer ones without an automatic.





The majority of the gameplay is committing war crimes in the name of galactic peace, but the players know the real endgame is space Barbie.

(It’s probably not my favorite game of all time, but it’s the MMO I play most often.)




Or, specifically, should be required to be opt-in only.

Yes, in the same way that folks should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery.

Oh wait.

(In other words, some things are so inherently exploitative they should be prohibited even with “consent.”)


Alabama white sauce is hardly “mustard based.” One teaspoon per cup of mayo is nothing; you’d barely taste it. It’s Carolina-style sauce you have an irrational hatred for, not Alabama-style.


Yeah, but for all we know you went to college thousands of years in the future, Time Lord.





Everything you wrote is basically the same as how it works in the US, except for that last sentence about never calling four-year programs “college.”


Apparently French works the same way (“university” = tertiary, “college” = high school), at least if Duolingo is to be believed.

The kind of place that the US calls “community college” would be called a “polytech” here.

I’m not necessarily doubting you, but I would’ve guessed “polytech” would be more like a “trade school” (where you go to learn skills for blue-collar jobs, like welding, plumbing, auto repair, etc.) than a “community college” (where you go for two years to earn an associates’ degree in stuff like liberal arts or business or nursing, possibly before transferring somewhere else to continue towards your bachelors’).

(That’s despite the fact that “polytech” around here can also refer to four-year engineering schools, although ones that are lower-tier than research universities. For example, the former “Southern Polytechnic State University” (“Southern Poly”) vs. “Georgia Institute of Technology” (“Georgia Tech”) here in GA. Ironically, the latter is self-deprecatingly nicknamed “North Avenue Trade School,” LOL!)


The most sustainable option would also always be the cheapest option, if regulations were properly designed to correct for externalized costs. We should strive for that.


All hardware is “disposable” in the sense that it becomes obsolete after a few years, and the electricity to keep using it costs more than replacing it with new hardware with better performance per watt.

Maybe once Moore’s law is finally dead and buried that’ll stop being the case, but it hasn’t happened quite yet.

This certainly isn’t “green” in terms of disposal, but I’m not sure it’s any worse than the status quo alternative of a landfill, either.


At the limit, it could depend on the extent to which adding heat to the ocean has different/worse effects than adding it to the atmosphere. E.g. maybe ocean heat is worse for wildlife or disrupts currents or doesn’t radiate away into space as fast, or something like that.

Definitely not a problem to worry about in the short-term, of course. But then again, the same was said about lots of other problems back in the day that we do have to worry about now, so…


I doubt they’d be able to stop it from becoming one, especially if they don’t want to spend the server downtime to haul it out for repainting.


Considered in and of themselves, permissive licenses are “fine.” They confer all four of the freedoms the FSF lists here, so there’s nothing wrong with them from the perspective of the person receiving the code as an end-user.

The problem is that, unlike copyleft, they fail to bind that recipient to the same conditions and guarantee those freedoms will be maintained for all downstream users who receive the code in the future. They are thus exploitable by those who would take without giving back in return. This makes permissively-licensed code popular with the exploiters, but is bad for the users in the long run.

See, for example, MacOS and iOS: in theory, they’re just BSDs with fancy proprietary UIs, but in practice they can be made so locked-down and user-hostile there’s an entire movement devoted to creating new laws to force Apple to stop bricking people’s property because they needed to replace a bad hardware component. Those four freedoms I referenced earlier are definitely no longer being upheld by Apple, even though Apple itself benefited from them to make the software in the first place.

There’s a reason why copyleft-licensed Linux is so much more popular than permissively-licensed BSD, and resistance to selfish bad actors (even as flawed as it is, what with the “tivoization” exploit of the GPLv2 and all) fragmenting the community with proprietary features is undoubtedly part of it.