tabris

Yep, like how people who drink a lot of diet soda have higher rates of heart issues, which gets interpreted as "diet soda leads to heart issues" instead of "weight issues lead to heart issues, people who have weight issues drink more diet soda."

They never change. I used to repair laptops for a well known laptop brand, this was around the release of Windows Vista, 2006 or so.

We were getting a lot of warranty repairs where the issue was "laptop slow" or words to that effect. The only issue with them was that they didn't have enough ram to run Vista smoothly enough. The whole system chugged. But as there was nothing wrong with the laptops, we'd send them back to the customer largely untouched saying "buy more ram."

At some point, a couple of suits from the company came to look around the warehouse and meet the team. I was primary diagnostic at this point, so I would inspect most of the laptops and confirm their issues. I was getting around 15 laptops a day at this point that were just low ram for Vista, so I asked the suits "why do we sell laptops with Vista that can't run it properly as they don't have enough ram?"

His response was that "Microsoft sets the specs of the laptops. Nothing we can do."

Make buses free to use for all, ban all car journeys under 20 minutes (largely unenforceable, but it needs to be done), reduce subsidies on fuel and instead subsidise bicycles, micro mobility and accessible mobility, build bike lanes and safe pavements, allow zoning of more retail inside residential areas so cars are needed less day to day, encourage late hours retail, turn parking spaces into green spaces.

These policies would lead to cleaner air, hit our environment goals, less dependence on foreign fuel supplies, greener spaces, healthier population, therefore taking the strain off the NHS. It'll create jobs as there will be more evening retail jobs, building infrastructure always improves the job market, and none of this is difficult to implement, none of it is costly, and all of it benefits the entire population of the country, not just London or the wealthy.

I'll say it again, because I think the idea is a practical solution to the issue: electricity and water usage should be charged at reverse volume, the more you use, the more expensive it becomes.

This would actually incentivise companies to reduce their usage, to question if they actually need that new AI data centre that will eat up all the gains in renewable electricity production and require fossil fuel plants to continue running, it'll reduce the crypto miners as well, and encourage everyone to try to reduce their usage.

The knock on effect of this is that electricity actually becomes cheaper for everyone.

Such a great series, Toby Jones is so wonderful in this.

Twice. Once at the end of Final Fantasy IX, realising who was monologuing the ending at what that meant.

Second one was at the end of What Remains of Edith Finch, pretty much for exactly the same reasons.

I've used "I know something you don't know" far too many times, along with "I don't think that means what you think it means." They're far too useful in conversation.

It's not stupid if you're an oil company trying to increase profits, then it makes perfect sense to make your oil guzzling death machine as big, bulky and inefficient as possible.

I just made two Italians cry by showing them this.

That's an occlupanid, a fairly common specimen, but still worthy of respect.

2005 was a bad year for cancelled sci-fi series that were good, actually. Surface, Threshold and Invasion, all excellent, all cancelled after one season. I'm still upset.

Let's go!