Biogas and hydrogen are both greenwashing products. Neither is better than electric alternatives where they are being sold. They have major major flaws that the fossil fuel industry (y’know, the one selling both of those products) won’t advertise to you:

• Biogas is derived from agricultural products. All the agricultural waste we produce can’t cover a meaningful part of even just our heating needs. This inevitably leads to a major misincentive to grow crops just to turn into methane, like we are doing with bioethanol, which has catastrophic land-use and environmental impacts.
• Hydrogen is very inefficient to produce. Most often produced with gas (lol), but even if produced through electrolysis it’s less efficient to have a double conversion than just use the electricity directly. It is also very hard to store/transport safely and efficiently.
• Regardless of any of the above, heat pumps have a COP of 3-5. A boiler has a COP of 1. I don’t care how clean your fuel is, it will always be more efficient to burn it in a regular power plant to power a heat pump than to burn it in a boiler.

And even if the above wasn’t true and biogas was awesome (it’s awful), the simple fact that they are selling trace amounts in order to promote fossil gas as their main product is an obvious act of greenwashing unto itself.

Greenpeace knows all of the above very well. I can’t say for sure that they are corrupt and bought out by the fossil fuel industry. All I can say is that I don’t have a better explanation for their stupidity.

Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.

I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.

Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.

Oh boohoo. Chocolate will be more expensive for westerners. Cry me a river.

What the discussion was centered on is famine. Actual famine. Which will only affect poor countries and will kill millions. Whether or not individual Canadians stockpile grains in their basement (OP’s actual suggestion) has literally no bearing on anyone’s food security.

I’m sorry but I just can’t equate the economic struggle of a few more percent of inflation for mostly middle-class westerners with that of Global South subsistence farmers who are actually going to have to find out how far they can stretch out a grain silo or a fertilizer bag.

Both your examples are pre Haber-Bosch. Not that it entirely invalidates your point, but daily calorie consumption for a Westerner is orders of magnitude cheaper than it was for a Victorian coal miner. In fact what we generally struggle with nowadays in rich countries is an overabundance of (poor quality) food.

It’s not out of the question for poor people to lack calories in rich countries, but that’s a monumental policy failure. And critically it happens to socioeconomic classes that have neither the time nor the land area to dedicate to things like doomsday prepping (i.e. poor and marginalized communities in urban areas). The only solution to food insecurity is social programs, not doomsday prepping or grain hoarding.

This will only affect poor countries. Rich, industrialized countries have more than enough capacity to make or buy their own fertilizer. Yes prices will go up again, but it’s an economics issue, not anything close to an existential threat. There is simply more than enough calorie production for everyone even with strong perturbations in global shipping. Fertilizer is only a marginal use for methane in terms of volume.

If you live in a poor country however, things are a lot more dire. The price of fertilizer is indexed on the price of gas, of which there is still enough for everyone; but your country will be competing with AI datacenters for the fucking stuff which means millions will have to die so Musk can continue to jerk it to AI child porn.

It’s not a gas pricing issue, it’s a wealth hoarding issue compounded by the aimless crusade of a demented manlet commanded by religious fanatics.

Gardening and foraging won’t get you anywhere if you live in an urban area. You need an absurd amount of arable land per capita if you want to survive. A vegetable garden is useful in times of war not for raw calorie input but for supplements (either for specific nutrients not commonly found in rationed food supply or for taste).

The good news is that food production is a “solved” issue. Any industrialized country is capable of producing enough calories to feed itself and then some, even without gas imports. Worst case you just stop growing bioethanol and beef to double the amount of available arable land at no tangible human cost.

Those who’ll get fucked by Trump’s war are not Americans or Europeans, it’ll be poor economies that can barely support industrial agriculture in the best of times. Their ability to buy fertilizer is very price-sensitive, which we already saw in 2022, though at the time the US had leadership willing to intercede and guarantee grain shipments.

This time, millions will die, but not in a prepper fantasy kind of way, but in a “they live in a ‘shithole country’ and we won’t care to help because our money finances ICE and bribes now” kind of way.

Every time they add the feature, half of the product breaks. The other half start using twice as much memory and compute, somehow.

They’ve got a pile of technical debt disguised as a product and the development velocity of the snail as a consequence. Very typical. The real question is “why hasn’t the competition eaten their lunch already”.

Real answer: those things matter to me because a quick frictionless experience very heavily dependant on muscle memory really helps with my ADHD. Laggy interfaces, having to hold left key for several seconds, and similar issues quickly pull my out of my train of thought.

It’s not about shaving 2 minutes off my day, it’s about not interrupting the flow.

I’ve been dailying the exact same arch installation since 2014 without reinstalling it a single time.

Now to be fair I did have it non-bootable at several points. Worst of which was a PAM update which broke it completely because the new config was in a .pacnew file and the old one was not compatible anymore. But since it was a edge-case there was no forum post about it. Still recovered it just fine after an hour or so of troubleshooting.

It’s all open-source and usually decently documented. The only reason anyone should have to reinstall a Linux desktop is lack of experience, but I would always advise to persevere because troubleshooting my system is how I gained much of my expertise. If that’s not what you want, stick to Debian.

Or it’s the opposite. I refuse to watch shows without giving them my undivided attention, but that kind of pacing begs to be background noise while you do something else.

Sometimes there is nothing significantly plot-relevant happening for entire episodes at a time, both for bad reasons (the incentive structure for children’s show rewards empty filler slop with zero plot value because it’s easy to re-run) and less bad reasons (children like repetition). Both of which are painfully evident throughout the whole experience.

Good for you if that’s your jam, if you find it comforting or like it as background noise or like it because it leads to better paced seasons down the line or whatever, but I refuse to accept that it’s an issue for me to dislike objectively horrendous pacing.

I tried but like most children’s shows I just can’t deal with (at least the early seasons’) pacing. It’s excruciatingly slow, full of obvious filler content, and doesn’t seem to be trying to get anywhere.

Typically those children shows’ pacing tends to get a lot better in the latter seasons as the audience ages out and the showrunners are trusted with bolder story arcs, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are tens of hours of slop to get through before that point is reached.

I am not saying it did not sell. That’s the one thing it did really well. But it’s hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s certainly not good.

Over 6+ books it’s really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it’s really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don’t risk writing yourself into a corner. I’m sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically – it’s hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it’s hard, but that’s what storytellers do.

Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with “yer a wizard” in the first 50 pages and that’s the end of his character arc. From then on he’s a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

… As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry’s uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don’t recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

The last thing I want is merge conflicts in my issue tracker. The git data model is simply not right for conversational histories.

ActivityPub is the obvious solution to decentralize public communication. We’re using it right now and AFAIK Forgejo is working to implement it for their issue tracker.

I mean, Nestlé killed hundreds of thousands in impoverished countries. I think the Oracle service APIs can’t be that bad, though I’m sure they would be if it made Larry Ellison $50.

That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.

The sun is just a particularly angry cloud.