Scientists didn’t become pickier - they just later found that Pluto was in a belt of thousands of massive object (called the Kuiper belt), like the asteroid belt but much bigger.

When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was thought to be a comet, later a planet, but after discovering it was one of many asteroids in the asteroid belt (which it wasn’t big enough to clear), they realized it wasn’t a planet.

When Pluto was first discovered in 1930, it was in a similar situation as Ceres and thought of as a planet, but when other Kuiper belt objects started to be discovered by 1992, they realized Pluto also wasn’t a planet.

It’s sad that Burgess was attacked by the officers leading to him being sent to a hospital where he may have caught Covid-19 and died, but the officers

1. were called out on “a grade 1 call, meaning it was treated as the highest level of emergency”,
2. may have heard that Burgess “was seen poking a care worker in the stomach with a cutlery knife”,
3. may not have seen or been told Burgess couldn’t reach them if they stayed a few metres away.

If Burgess was in an unlocked room, then the officers were criminally rash.

If however he was in a room locked from the outside, then they may not have known that he wasn’t much of a threat.

They should be charged with excessive force because they didn’t assess the situation before using force, or people at the site should be charged for lying and making it seem much more dangerous than it was; but this is not like the headline makes it sound.

Factory farming for the vast majority of chickens, is life-long enslavement in torturous conditions.

Hundreds of billions of non-aquatic animals are enslaved by factory farmers every year.

Trillions of fish are enslaved in factory farms every single year.

Only Yesterday is my favorite by far. If Grave of the Fireflies didn’t have the supernatural/Deus-ex-machina/genre whiplash scenes at the end, it would’ve been my favorite, but that ending ruins the movie for me.

What religion are they? The opposite-of-what-Jesus-taught religion?

“One of the most effective ways to avoid consumption in the first place, Dr. Rees said, is to have a smaller family.”

Yip, human overpopulation is the biggest cause of anthropogenic climate change (compare it to other causes), and the root cause of it. It’s also the root cause of the anthropocene extinction event and of that becoming a mass extinction event, and of factory farming, and of industrial fishing, and of habitat degradation and destruction, and of unsustainable pollution, …

If I remember correctly I had the same start: tested Knoppix, tried Mandrake for a short time, then Ubuntu which I used for several years until Gnome 3 when I switched to Xubuntu for several years, but when snap happened I tried Debian, then Mint for a while, but I’m now trying MX.

What do you think their lives will be like after the climate change cascade?

“All it takes for evil to succeed, is good people to say, “it’s just business.”” - Janet Leahy, Michael Reisz

It’ll be interesting to see a character following the teachings of Jesus Christ, like

• Luke 16:13 “You cannot serve both God and money.”
• Mark 10:21 “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor”
• Matthew 5:39 “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.”
• Matthew 5:44 “love your enemies”

So there’s no chance the character will be a capitalist, troop-supporting, neo-Nazi. Right?

“In November of 2019 Kennedy sent a letter to the prime minister, obtained by Scott Kennedy and shared with Vanity Fair, speculating that the measles outbreak might be attributed to the vaccine itself.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/robert-kennedy-jr-shocking-history

“On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities.”

Since we gave people the death penalty at the Nuremberg trials ex post facto, we can do the same with anthropogenic climate change. I would support such death penalties now already, tho I suspect more than a hundred million people would have to die directly from unambiguous climate change events within a short period like a week, before more people would agree. The problem is that the climate-change tipping-points will cascade, which means that the 1st one may cause other tipping points to be triggered, at which point billions of people will die unnecessarily in a Mad Max world.

This whataboutism may not be saying that what the Saudis are doing is excusable, but instead pointing out the hypocrisy and saying that if you’re going to complain about the psychotic Saudi regime, you have to admit that the voters who elected Bush and then re-elected him after his invasion of Iraq, are vastly worse than the Saudis. It’s important to know if we are the baddies, especially if we are vastly worse and propping up the Saudis.

I think it’s important to criticize and boycott the psychotic Saudi regime, but also to keep in perspective that there are worse people out there: people who are orders-of-magnitude worse.

Iraqi deaths in the Iraq war in the 8 years from 2003 to 2011 = approximately 461 000 (PLOS Medicine 2013) to 655 000 (Lancet 2006 (PDF)).

That’s currently even worse than the psychotic Russian invasion of Ukraine:

• Ukrainians killed by Russia in the 7 years from 2014 to 2021: approximately 7 800 (OHCHR 2022 p. 3 (PDF)).
• Ukrainians killed by Russia in the 2.5 years 2022 to 2023 = upper estimates of approximately 59 500 (Reuters 2023-04-12+Fox 2023-05-21).

I’m not sure about the Saudi/Kuwait/UAE/Egypt/Morocco/Jordan/Sudan/Senegal/Bahrain/Blackwater (supported by US/UK/France) coalition’s actions in the war in Yemen since 2015.

Edit: I’m also not sure how many the Saudis have killed in the Iran-Saudi proxy wars, so maybe the Saudis do actually have more direct blood on their hands than the western powers in the last 50 years or so.

Editors in Vice’s news division actively welcomed the piece, Lubbock said, as it fitted with the outlet’s track record of reporting on LGBTQ+ rights, autocratic regimes and the Middle East.

Bad bot. The sentences before and after this are needed to understand the quoted sentence:

“Their reporting claimed the Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas.”

[…]

“However, publication of the article was repeatedly postponed and then cancelled at the last minute. Multiple sources at Vice said it was pulled after a high-level intervention by senior Vice managers, who said its publication could pose a threat to the safety of the company’s staff working in Saudi Arabia.”

No they’re not - having a kid in an overpopulated world is 2 orders of magnitude worse in the USA.

• 2.4 tonnes of CO2e released per driver per year with the average fossil-fuel powered car.
• 1.2 tonnes of CO2e released for electric car users in most countries.
• 117.7 tonnes per kid per parent per year. Wynes et al. 2017

Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us over climate-change tipping-points, it’s also the root cause of almost all other causes. It’s also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It’s also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed in all of history combined.

Is the Wikipedia article on granularity wrong when it says the USA uses middle-endian addresses when there’s both an apartment and a street address, e.g. “200 2nd Ave. South #358”?

For me big endian is logical, while middle endian just seems batshit insane.

While English messes up 11-19 when saying or writing with words, other languages like German keep up the ridiculous small-endian names even after 20 (einundzwanzig is “one and twenty”).

“Enslave” is a bit harsh, considering there are about 38-50 million people who are currently slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

We’re choosing to allow a lot of the things these companies are doing to us; but we could choose to walk away at the cost of some shiny things.

• Weak atheist: doesn’t think gods exist.
• Strong atheist: knows that gods do not exist.
• Weak agnostic: doesn’t know if gods exist.
• Strong agnostic: says no one can know if any gods exist.
• Physicalist: doesn’t think supernatural things exist (unlike some atheists who think things like souls/spirits/spirituality/reincarnation exist).

I’m a weak agnostic, weak atheist, physicalist. I’ll change my position when presented with scientific evidence, or good honest arguments.

To view a text only version of CNN pages, replace “www” with “lite”. https://lite.cnn.com/2023/07/26/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk/index.html is about 50 kB, whereas the original is about 2.7 MB.

BBC article.