What kind of fucked up country is this were the police didn’t immediatly came to this altercation and detained the guy.

I mean, he’s not only being violent, he’s even making death threats.

Coming from a country - Portugal - which was very Catholic not that long ago, I would say that the children of Catholic parents went through a great process of “self-reflection and criticism” and dropped Catholicism.

The religion itself is pretty much as backwards as ever.

What happened is that the number of actual practicing Catholics (you know, people who actually go to church and spend time thinking about that stuff) has fallen steeply, even if there are still many who just because they got baptized (which is something one has no choice on), get counted as religious.

Even with the Christian sects dominant in places like the US and Brazil trying to get a foothold over here, there’s nowhere the level of dominance of religion in public life there seems to be in the US. It’s funny that a country which maybe 50 or 60 years ago was, IMHO, very socially backwards compared to the US, is now more socially evolved than it.

Dutch people pay so much tax because dutch companies pay so little tax, so pretty much the entire burden of paying the costs of the State comes from the wallets of individuals (whilst companies too are owned by individuals, those rich enough have many ways of avoiding paying tax on that and a lot of the biggest owners of the companies making profits in The Netherlands - whilst paying little tax on said profits - aren’t even resident in The Netherlands).

In countries were the tax take is more evenly balanced between people and businesses, people pay less taxes for more services (The Netherlands doesn’t even have a National Health Service, only a mixed Health Insurance system).

I lived in The Netherlands over a decade ago and already back then the country already had Northern European levels of taxation with nowhere near the levels of Public Services that countries with similar individual taxation - such as the Scandinavians - had and I doubt a decade of right-wing neoliberals in government has made things any better.

Notice how one of the underlying messages of the cartoon is that it’s Zionist Karen that is the real antisemite: by deeming that those demonstrating against the killing of children are antisemite (literally: against Jews), she is implying that killing children is a Jewish thing to do.

This is very much the kind of racism displayed by those who equate anti-Israel with antisemitic: they’re implying that Israel and its actions are all core Jewsih chracteristics, de facto slandering all Jews including those who disagree with Israel and/or its actio s, so they’re the ones who by definition are antisemite.

That is good to hear (except the part about them firing you in the end).

That was more the 90s - the time of things like Geocities - than the 2000s.

By the 2000s there had already been one Internet Boom & Bust and things on the Internet were way more comercialized than is earlier times of handmade sites, pre-CSS webpages and ActiveX components.

Well, having been on the other side, sometimes the Dev is also trying to fight the good fight whilst having to use some crap 3rd party system/library that’s imposed from above because somebody at the C-suite level after suitably dinned and wined (and who knows what more, including implied or even explicit promises for the future of their career) signed a massive agreement with one of the big corporate software providers so now those of us at the coalface have to justify to money spent on that contract by using every POS from said big corporate software provider.

I mean, I might be exagerating the overtly corrupt nature of the deal (in my experience its more a mix of CTO incompetence - or being pretty much powerless at the C-Suite level because his is not the core business, hence overriden - and the high-level management trading favours using company money and more for personal rather than corporate reasons) but even competent devs that know their thing can’t really do much when they have to use a bug-riddled POS massive framework from some vendor that doesn’t even have proper support, for “corporate reasons”.

Lawful Evil is still evil.

Yeah, I was just addressing the previous post.

In all fairness I only checked what’s going on with fusion once in a while as my background is Physics (as in, I started a degree in it and then ended up going to EE because in my home country there really only are jobs for theoretical physicists, not the more hands-on kind) and hence only know it at a superficial level (of somebody with the background to understand Particle Physics but not a domain expert).

Yeah, I do know about the embrittlement of the container walls due to neutron emission from the fusion reaction (no idea how bad or not that is compared to the rest), but last I checked plasma containment was still a bit of a problem as was the plasma cooling through photon emission (mind you, that might not be as much of a problem for the kind of temperature of the plasma the previous poster was mentioning, which - I assume - are less that what’s need to induce fusion).

That said, all in all it just sounds strange to use fission to generate a plasma - I mean, bloody fire generates a plasma (the flame is a plasma) - so I don’t quite see the point of generating plasma with the whole overhead of a nuclear reaction rather than, say, high powered lasers, high-voltage currents (yeah, lighting is plasma) or just plain old chemical reactions.

That whole thing sounded a bit too much like “fancy sciency words thrown around to deceive the ignorant” so common in scams.

Nah, it’s just a steep learning curve and then you’ll be naturally using a few patterns - stuff like immutable classes, have yours function take the entire context of their operation as a variable and returning in changed in the output or check-condition, process, commit-if-still valid operation - to make your life easier.

It’s only hard if you keep trying to design your program using the usual design patterns.

(Also how easy or hard it is to use does depend on the programming language).

What’s really unforgiving is when your processing is spread over multiple machines with comm overheads in the order of milliseconds where a seemingly fine design decision can totally tank your performance.

Nah, due to Negative Externalities and things like Tragedy Of The Commons it’s quite common for companies to be making massive profits whilst destroying the very environment they need to thrive.

I mean, look at Polution, look at Global Warming, look at Overfishing, look at the 2008 Crash - without an external entity (i.e. the State) to force them to change their ways or rescue them, most economic entities in the pursuit of profitability will act in ways that systemically will eventually destroy the very things they need to be profitable.

Stuff like Negative Externalities is pretty basic Economics.

That naive idea of your of how economics works probably came from stuff you heard from politicians, not from reading books…

That sounds like “pie in the sky”:

The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.

If that was solved we would be better off doing fusion with plasma rather than fission, since even deuterium (a heavier form of hydrogen atoms because it has 1 neutron in the nucleous) can simply be extracted from the water and the H+H fusion reaction releases more energy than any fission reactions (and, funilly enough, would produce the much rarer helium, that’s needed for those reactors of yours).

That is correct.

What The Guardian is, is a neoliberal mouthpiece which mostly reflects the viewpoint of a certain english high-middle class who grew up in priviledge, went to expensive private schools (curiously called “public schools” in the UK) and who are amongst the “winners” of the last 4 decades of Neoliberalism and who, of course, care mostly that the gravy train keeps chugging along.

Absolutelly, they’re as worried about global warming as all other highly educated types in the West (which in most other countries include way more people from working class origins than in the UK), it’s just that they’re even more worried about the performance of their investments (being amongst the top 10% wealthwise in Britain), keeping their priviledge and passing their priviledge on to their children, which is why for example they’re totally unable to suggest that something like building nuclear power stations is done by the public sector and will always defend massive private projects instead and do so with no analysis as if it’s self-evidently the only reasonable option.

You’re not going to get unbiased hard-nosed analysis from these types and since the English upper classes - from where they hail - are culturally particularly hypocrite in European terms, you’re not even going to get straight talking honesty.

The difference in between having or not something in the training set of a Neural Network is going to be different values for non-integer factors all over the neural network and, worse, it is just as like that they’re tiny differences as it is that they’re massive differences.

Or to give you a decent metaphor for it, “it would be like trying to remove a specific egg from a bowl of scrambled eggs”.

Well, before it was totally unimportant but now that a British Newspaper (i.e. from the nation in Europe with the most “opinion forming” - aka propagandistic - press) published an article were a “young danish climate activist” said it, it’s suddenly important. /s

Mind you, I’m not attacking nuclear or saying that it shouldn’t be part of the future energy mix in Europe, I’m just a little fed up with the overuse of this kind of theatrical spin in opinion articles by newspapers which are very open about their objective being to “form opinion”.

I actually think this relentless use of the slease-sale rather than actual well argumented logical analyses that looks at pros & cons plus risks & opportunities is actually damaging the cause of nuclear, or in fact any cause these types take up, as the slease-sale is often associated with them having some kind profit interest for somebody: The Guardian is a center-right neoliberal mouthpiece that only seems “left” in the UK context because British politics has an overtoon window moved so far to the right that the government is very openly ultra-nationalist and anti-immigrant, and almost all of The Guardian’s writers and editors hail from the British Middle-Class.

The UK has quite the history of doing the wrong kind of nuclear power plants with massive delays and cost overruns, and those white elefant projects are always outsourced to the private, so demands for nuclear from British high-middle-class “opinion makers” as sadly manipulative “selling the book” and hypocrisy is pretty standard in the upper classes over there.

Not everybody knows how to use a Pi+Plex or has a friendly familiy member who knows that and is willing to share.

So it makes sense that most people just kept hanging on until they got booted, rather than preemptivelly dusting off their old wooden leg and eye patch and once again hoisting the Jolly-Roger…

Like in the Ancient Greek system slaves and women did not have the vote.

Well, the first form is a pretty common variant for human basic needs if you want to make it sound desperate in a funny way (for example, “ik moet voed” rather than “ik moet eten”) but the second whilst making sense is not common and was probably chosen for literally reasons (whilst not 100% sure, I think these might be lyrics from a dutch song).

The Netherlands has proportional vote, that’s why.

With electoral circles instead of PV, mathematically the two largest parties get way more representatives than the percentage of the public votes they get, and the bigger the electoral circles and fewer the representatives the worse it gets.

(Further, voters own behaviour changes to one of “useful vote” rather than “choosing those who better represents them”, plus tribalism becomes way more extreme when there is only a black & white choice - so lots of votes are driven by team loyalty - all of which makes it even worse)

(Also smaller parties dissapear, both because they can’t secure funding and because their members lose hope of ever making a difference. The closest you get to “small parties” in the US are independents, running for a very specific electoral circle only and whose voice is a drop in the ocean in a place like the US Congress)

The US has single representative very large electoral circles for Congress and double representative State-sized electoral circles for the Senate, so their system is rigged to pretty much the max it can and the result is a power duopoly.

I lived in The Netherlands and now I live in a country where the system is somewhat less so (smaller electoral circles, multiple representatives per circle) and even here you see the two largest parties getting and extra 10-20% each representatives in parliament compared to the popular vote (the governing party has 56% of parliamentary seats on 42% of votes cast) whilst the smaller parties have half as many representatives as their popular vote (in other words, every vote for a smaller party counts less than half as much as a vote for a large party, which is hardly democratic).

Most so-called “democratic” nations have this kind of rigged system, but places like the US and Britain take it to the extreme, so it’s unsurprising that when the economic supercycle is at the point where the many start hurting, in the absence of true choice you get instead the internal takeover of the rightmost of the party dupoly by the Trumps and Boris Johnsons of this world offering an ultra-nationalist far-right populist mix of othering, scapegoating and simple “solutions”.

(Funilly enough if you compare The Netherlands with Britain, whilst even now the far-right is stuck at maybe 20% in the former, in the latter it took over the Tory Party from the inside - which is far easier than convince half the population to vote for them - and hence has been in power for almost a decade with an absolute majority).

The system was rigged from the get-go by the slave-owner landowners who designed it along the lines of the Ancient Greek system were only the men of the owner class got to choose how the nation was managed.

Of course benificiaries of it will, whenever the can, take advantage of the systems characteristics to extend how much they get out of it: when “greed is good”, politicians are hardly likely to sideline personal upside maximization for the greater good.