azertyfun

A key feature of authoritarianism. Whether it's Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or Louis XIV, keeping the court close like this is an absolutely essential part of holding on to power. For one they're too busy with the king to have time to get bored and start scheming against him. For two the courtesans are around each other and competing for attention so they scheme against each other instead. We know that Trump listens to his advisors very haphazardly; it keeps them on their toes, constantly begging for attention (even if the end result is unbelievable political flip-flopping, that's irrelevant to Trump himself).

People have this image of the Third Reich as super organized, but in reality the top command was a complete mess as everybody was trying to backstab each other and to please Hitler who didn't necessarily even have a clue what was going on. The utter incompetence of Nazi leadership was always going to cost them the war, but it did keep Hitler in power until the very end even though the outcome of the war was long considered inevitable by his own generals.

Putin does the same. Remember the feud between Wagner guy and Shoigu? Putin intentionally encourages internal squabbles because it means in an environment where everyone mostly hates everyone, the only consistent loyalty is to him.

Anyway, there's plenty of reason to be concerned about Mr. biggest-nuclear-arsenal-on-the-planet going at a Hitler speedrun, but the only saving grace right now is that the whole thing is an inefficient mess and a large chunk (but not all) of them are too dumb to be truly dangerous. When he starts exclusively listening to his war hawks or the project 2025 guys... We're fucked.

At the end of the day these are commodity items. It's reasonable for consumers to buy whatever's cheapest from a reputable physical store and expect at least decent reliability.

The solution can't come from a manufacturer making a better product, because of the information asymmetry; the average consumer just can't be expected to spend hours researching every commodity item.

The solution has to be targeted legislative action with a clear goal of measurably improving the overall reliability of those commodities. Unfortunately lobbyists hate that because more reliability = less margin and fewer sales, and consumers don't often love it either because this kind of legislation directly translates to inflated prices (at least in the short term). There are still people bitching that you can't buy incandescent lightbulbs anymore... So regulators would rather play dead and hope nobody notices they are doing fuck-all.

Relevant for England but not Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.

A good metaphor for Brexit I guess.

Unfortunately Americans cannot stand being told they don't live in the greatest country on earth. It's a wonder that fascism took this long to win in the US, because it's fundamentally hyper-compatible with American Exceptionalism which every American besides a tiny fraction of far-leftists believe to be inherently and unshakably true.

Where do you go from there when most of your population wouldn't accept a trade alliance that doesn't massively favor the US? Because even if Trump is impeached tomorrow that's what Fox News will be running all day every day to successfully torpedo anyone attempting to rebuild the country.

Anecdotally I haven't seen a plug in Belgium that didn't have them that also wasn't ancient. Dunno if the RGIE requires it, I can't be arsed to find out, but the risk/reward for manufacturers considering lawsuits probably tips it in favor of safety given how inexpensive the mechanism is.

Also it is worth noting that the plug hole is much smaller on EU outlets than NEMA, and recessed. Even with exposed conductors it would take a determined toddler to find something small enough to reach inside (basically a needle or small screwdriver which they should not be playing with to begin with).

EU plugs designed in the past 50 years also have half-exposed pins and EU sockets from the past 30 years also have little rubber flaps that only open if they're pressed both at the same time (I've tried it, it works really well, I couldn't get a singular multimeter prong in my outlet until I used the second prong). There are no exposed live conductors anywhere in my house.

Nowadays the main practical difference between EU and UK plugs is the "lack" of a fuse, except any semi-modern appliance that could make use of a fuse should include one internally. In every other situation circuit breakers work fine, UK plugs have fuses because they historically couldn't rely on the circuit breaker existing.

Nowadays the regulatory focus is not on plugs, which are fine, but on GFCI. Gotta put one 30 mA differential per electrical circuit in kitchens/bathrooms and a whole house 300 mA differential. That's a much safer way to detect electrocution than wait until several amps have been going through the plug because all you're getting by the time the fuse trips is a fried person sandwich.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I've yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don't have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

It can do both, lossiness is toggleable.

If you've seen a picture on Lemmy, you've almost certainly seen a WebP. A fair bit of software – most egregiously from Microsoft – refuses to decode them still, but every major browser has supported WebP for years and since superior data efficiency compared to JPG/PNG means is already very widely used on the web. Bandwidth is not that cheap.

Yeah it's Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can't easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it's apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

My computer desktop follows the same principle. I'll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it's much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.

I feel like it's often bad game design from developers who think they need to put in consumables without understanding their gameplay value.

In too many games using up all your consumables is just A Thing That Happens. So the game is balanced to allow you to survive anyway. But then the corollary is that if it works for a bit then you can finish the game without using any of the consumables. The consumables are just a way to make already achievable portions of the game easier, which is just sloppy game design IMO. Bethesda games for instance are very guilty of that.

People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

For me it's a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

• I have to context-switch into "cleaning up" mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
• Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it's a virtual reminder I've not yet done the thing.
• Yes, I've got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don't serve a purpose, I'll get around to cleaning up... eventually.

Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I'd switch jobs. I'm working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.