xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words

The tourist-y parts of it are pretty much all newly rebuilt anyway; there’s not much of the original wall left at Mutianyu or Simatai or wherever.

I love how everybody is so busy about mining your behavior for ad tracking data and then like 2/3 of the ads I actually see are utterly irrelevant gut doctor / toenail fungus / 17 Most Embarrassing Topless Celebrity Moments crap.

(I think the reality is that they’re mining that data to identify a small number of people susceptible to high-value scams - like getting addicted to an F2P mobile game and spending $1000s on it - and the rest of us just get generic infill)

The good news is that Iceland won’t have to go around apologizing for its name anymore.

Can I get a ‘fuck spez’

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

“Hammerskins” sounds like a bunch of guys who hang around smashing each other’s genitals with hammers

I don’t work for anybody, and I don’t know what list of talking points you think I’m repeating other than the specific assertion that Germany shouldn’t have shut down its nuclear plants.

I could just as well accuse you of astroturfing for the coal power lobby.

But since you’re accusing me of being a shill anyway: yes, nuclear power is clean and safe and our refusal to embrace it has cost us decades of progress in reducing carbon emissions + is continuing to do so now. The anti-nuclear lobby has a tremendous amount of blood on its hands and I’m not the least bit ashamed to be on the opposing side to them.

So we’re currently at the ‘apology that actually makes things worse’ phase, which means just a few more days until ‘unconditional surrender but even so nobody will ever trust you again’

Sure, but nevertheless they’re burning a lot more coal than they would be if they hadn’t pointlessly shut down their nuclear plants.

“We were able to grow enough soybeans to replace half of the whale meat we were eating, but we can’t replace the other half yet because even though we have plenty of lentils, we hate lentils and don’t want to eat them anymore”

Nuclear output 12.2021: 5599.8 GWh
Brown coal output 8.2023: 5422.0 GWh
Black coal output 8.2023: 2049.2 GWh

So if you, y’know, hadn’t shut down those nuclear plants, you’d be burning 1/4 as much coal as you actually are.

Germany of course is the country that recently shut down a bunch of nuclear plants + temporarily (we hope) replaced them with coal.

Mr Musk had initially rushed to embrace the news when Jenna, formally known as Xavier, transitioned at age 16.

To me this suggests that he first thought it would seem hip and contrarian to support his trans daughter, then he realized that actually the people he considers hip and contrarian are all about hating on trans kids now, and so swiftly pivoted to doing that. (I don’t imagine he had any strong feelings about his daughter as a person either way - it’s not like he was around for her childhood changing diapers or whatever)

This whole Zombie Tory business has me feeling good about the US’ biennial Congressional elections - a party that’s lost its mandate shouldn’t get to carry on running things for years and years.

So then Windows is one of the random genocidal Soong cousins?

I mean it’s not like you’d catch a US government official carrying around a Huawei phone either - fair is fair.

a, i, it

You leave Snooki out of this

Apple’s managed to become a credible player in the TV space in a few short years by, essentially, hiring some competent veteran executives to run the thing and throwing buckets of money at it; I think any sufficiently motivated big tech company could do the same thing with games.

“I’d like to order 17 pounds of Old Bay, please, and with rush delivery - it’s an emergency”