My thought was someone would wheel in a giant arch, say it’s a gift for Trump, have him bring it into the main area of the White House, then people would jump out and overthrow the White House?

Call it the Arc de Troyomph?

Great to hear Die Linke in Berlin found electoral success. Here’s the next, very crucial step for them… show how the left can actually govern.

Build the bike lanes. Fill the potholes, speed up the works. Freeze the rent. Tax the rich and prosecute greedy and negligent landlords. D the EI. Show that a motivated and sufficiently compensated civil service can get real things done for people. Work with State and Federal governments to get the required money to undertake things big and small in your city. Give homeless people a path off the streets and into recovery and supportive shelter. Show that the likes of AfD and centre-right parties are actually the do-nothing whiners. That will bring people from all sides, conservative, centrist and progressive, onto your side, and is part of Mamdani’s secret sauce. I’m hoping for the same for Katie Wilson in Seattle USA and mayor hopefuls like Nithya Raman of LA.

I know you’ve said Satisfactory and Mindustry… but I can’t believe no one has suggested Factorio…

That game is good at keeping me up at night til 2am wanting to expand and remake my factory.

You can think of it like 2D satisfactory, but there’s much more of a base defense mechanic because you get periodically rushed at by groups of bugs annoyed at your pollution.

Palantir “bought” the FDA back in April (/s), so your food is safe in their hands anyway.

Kid Rock or Boy George might be able to open for Ed, lol

100% buy for me at HALF this price, which sounds closer to what they wanted to release at if not for the PC components price spikes.

Even though I take an electric bike or electric buses and metros to get to work so I don’t need to burn it to go anywhere myself, but I know that lots of fuel is burned to get stuff to me, from farms and source industries, to processors, to the store.

I do like to travel internationally a few times a year so that really ups my personal carbon footprint and I do expect to get more expensive year-over-year and I may end up going less in the future.

In BC, flexible plastics are recyclable, and I’d even had my prior assumptions challenged by people on Lemmy that virgin plastics formed with by-products of petroleum fuel production (esters) would be too cheap and abundant for recycled plastics to be economical; the oil shock highlights how that may not always be the case.

We’ll need a bit of petroleum for lubrication (machine oil), cooling, jet fuel, a bit gor plastic etc., but we can, even today, replace a good chunk of it relatively quickly and reduce methane and CO2 emissions enough to make a difference and to ride out a shock like this. Synthetic glue took over the need to use animal products for all but the smallest niche of artisans. If electric vehicles, better mass transport, SAF, grid batteries are pushed for mass implementation, our dependence on oil can be massively reduced. Ironically, the biggest oil shills of the world have done more than any environmental activist could hope to accomplish, to show people why complete dependence on oil and fossil fuel is bad.

Has Trump cleverly extracted a concession from Russia? No? Okay, let the destruction of oil infrastructure continue.

Personally, the local model seems to be the future for AI within FOSS, and I think it may be refined to have lower usage requirements for a specific capability to run on smaller machines, not sure how much better general purpose models will get but after trying them, I expect modest progress over the next few years.

I don’t trust the large frontier models and the push to build data centers, that’s a grift at the expense of spending that could be useful elsewhere.

I’m lucky enough to have bought a 3090 2nd hand when they weren’t insanely expensive in 2023. I’m trying “vibecoding” on my personal half-finished coding projects. My coding style is poor by most professional standards, but the edits I have had my local model (Qwen 3.8 27B UD Q4) and harness (llama.cpp and Opencode) spit out are reviewable to me, make logical sense, follows my existing conventions and does run correctly. I think it is by default on highest quality, which means writing one function takes 15m to an hour, but I’d rather it be slow and hallucinate in my code less. There are other optimizations I could make to have it run faster, but it’s not a big deal to me. I can code the functions myself in less time, but what I think it is best at is catching bugs and my mistakes.

I agree. It’s also important to remember that that is not the destination, but the first milepost on the way to course correcting the entire system, even when following the incrementalist way to change one piece at a time.

https://www.techbusinessnews.com.au/news/app-store-age-checks-become-law-in-australia-from-september-9-with-fines-up-to-49-5-million/

Apparently a new legal policy in Australia that mandates app stores there to verify age somehow to access mature content took effect (end of grace period) a couple days ago on Sep 9 2026.

The thing is that many people are looking too short-sightedly for the internal (non-revolution-like) reform path. The goal for change is 2028, but change in 2028 can’t get off the ground running, if a 2026 sweep doesn’t. (I wish you had a Westminster system with no-confidence votes, but alas).

What Congress can do is to compel Trump administration officials to get their asses into the chamber. They can put articles and lawsuits with appropriate standing to:

• Halt ballroom construction.
• Halt reckless and unnecessary tariffs.
• Halt the endless war spending on the unauthorized military adventure Iran.
• Halt funding for Israel.
• Abolish/stymie/revoke funding from ICE.
• Have the DoJ release the Epstein files.
• Assess Trump’s mental state and capacity to lead.
• Release funding that Congress allocated but the Trump admin is withholding or disbursing unevenly (e.g. FEMA)
• Collect evidence to make the case to impeach the justices or reform the Supreme Court in 2028.

Congress under leadership of feckless Republicans and sometimes Democrats haven’t asserted the power of the purse. For budgetary matters, votes can be held without permanently removing the cloture rule. And if Trump refuses to sign a bill voted on D-party lines to fund the government while implementing changes, the government will shut down once again and the bill will await him on the desk until he signs it. He will try to shift blame as he always does, but the government has shutdown led by Republicans or Democrats, the common thread is his incompetent ass in charge for most of the time since 2016.

You think the Biden administration fought for it all the way to the Supreme(-ly Corrupt) Court, hoping it would be struck down? Really, you think this was the intended plan?

Anytime Biden tried to do anything good for people like cancel student loans, he’s been blocked by Republicans at every turn.

(With Paradox, expect endless DLC additions for the next decade 😅)

Over the various years growing up, I’m friendly with a lot of people, but I keep in touch with a select few from each time period, and they tend to keep me in the loop of the goings on in that circle.

And many of these good friends I am currently physically far away from, I try to make the effort to go and visit them, and invite them over if they ever consider coming to where I live.

Hogs aren’t supply managed and the difference is apparent. And absolutely, i’m no vegan but fuck Doug Ford’s industry kowtow with the ag-gag law.

Essentially I am contrasting it with Canadian supply managed chicken (which is one thing the USA has been long trying to make Canada give up), which allows…

• smaller flocks that can more easily manage biosecurity
• an enforced ban on growth hormones
• less of a stranglehold from the meatpackers
• avoids a race to the bottom for quality to compete on price, meaning stable prices and consistent quality

The issue is the USA’s giant flocks from the oligopolist’s farms andcontracted farms, who themselves are shortchanged and exploited by the meatpacker cartel.

More whinging from a government full of losers.