Bluntly banning Megayachts seems excessively interventionalist when you could instead ban the fossil fuel engines they use and ban the emissions. Make them pass a smog test that’s no more lenient than a car. Why not effectively force them to be wind and solar powered and thus force them to blow their money on advancing green energy? If that kills the megayacht business anyway, well then fair enough.

It’s an old story. I don’t recall exactly what happened after I pushed back. I certainly was not fined and IIRC the city got off my back because they had no case.

I eventually landscaped by choice. I don’t recall the motivation but I think it was to exploit a rebate offered by the government.

Then years later weeds (ugly plants) emerged again because the weed blocker that was under the landscape was compromised. Neighbor was on it and I got cited. I then noticed one of the plants actually was a weed (or resembled one), legally. So I had to pull them. I acted within the deadline so there was no fine. I was bummed because I really wanted to give the neighbor the middle finger.

Gas stoves are better. Finer control, faster temp changes (esp. when decreasing).

Gas stoves are better in some ways, but “finer control” is debatable. If you turn the knob from 0 to 10, it’s obvious that the energy output is non-linear. On my stove the flame has like 50% of its increase between level 2 and 3 or 4. You also have a more narrow range of heat with gas. That is, the lowest setting has to be high enough that the flame does not blow out, so the min heat is higher than the min level on electric. Electric also gets hotter than gas on the high end.

With electric you get precise control. Power level 5 gives exactly half the heat energy that 10 gives; power level 6 is exactly triple the heat of power level 2. You don’t get that precision with gas. You can only eye-ball it which means harder to get reproduceable results.

You probably meant to say gas gives you /immediate/ control. Conventional electric is quite slow, but induction is fast.

I’ve never heard of cops being called dogs. Pigs, sure. Anyway, money confiscated in this way usually finances police station frills like high-end coffee machines.

The mere fact that the manufacturer had a remote kill switch is the safety issue that should have a big spotlight.(edit: this is not the case - see the reply below) What if a malicious hacker decides to trigger that kill switch while the train is loaded with people and at a sensitive moment (e.g. on bridge/cliff with a huge drop).

If the kill switch were in place for dealing with hi-jackers, perhaps fair enough. But having it for the purpose of business protectionism is an entirely reckless safety risk.

There’s an overlooked failure here: why doesn’t the Polish transport authority have a clause in their procurement contracts that bans trains with remote-control kill switches that are not under user control? And why wasn’t the code reviewed to catch that in advance? The hackers say they did not alter the code, which somewhat implies that the source code might have been available for inspection.

Since it’s a small amount of money, the legal process would be with small claims court. You don’t need a lawyer for that. Small claims is cheap and easy going. It’s typically under $100 to file (which you get back if you win) and in some states a registered letter is sufficient to serve the other party.

You would not want to sue OFAC though. In this case you would ideally keep a paper trail of your payment attempt and carry on. Give your landlord the proof of payment (attempt) and wait for the landlord to act against you. That’s the easiest.. you wait for the court date and show up with proof of your attempt to pay and a copy of your landlord’s payment procedure (which you followed). OFAC apparently did a money grab on the landlord, not you, so you would come away clean so long as you paid as per your landlord’s instructions.

Patagonia boxers are made using recycled plastics and they also accept worn out boxers for recycling. Patagonia is the only boxers I have found that are very loose fitting (baggy in fact), silky feeling, yet stretchy, yet moisture-wicking all at once. Nothing like this seems to exist in Europe.

So here’s a debate: synthetic vs cotton

Synthetic boxers can be recycled and can be made from recycled plastics. But every time synthetic clothes get washed they shed microplastics which most sewage treatment centers cannot filter out. You would have to buy a special filter to attach to your washing machine. Researchers in Ghent discovered that the bacteria that loves perspiration also loves synthetic clothes but not cotton. This is why synthetic clothes get stinky fast and thus need more frequent washing than natural fibers.

Cotton production consumes absurd amounts of water (2700 liters of water to produce 1 t-shirt). And when you wash it, hang drying takes /days/ (whereas microfibers hang dry in a couple hours). So people use energy wasting tumble dryers when cleaning cotton. But cotton has the advantage of being biodegradable. You can simply compost/landfill finished cotton as long as it doesn’t have harmful dyes that leech out. There is also a cotton t-shirt that is claimed to wearable 7 times before each wash. IIRC it’s blended with silver for anti-microbial effects.

The environmental debate can go either way depending on which problem you want to focus on, but cotton is clearly lousy performing underwear considering how it retains water and gets soggy. The only natural fiber that performs well for underwear is wool (ideally Marino from what I’ve read). But the prices on that are extortionate. €60+ for one pair of wool boxers, and they’re tight fitting.

Anyway, the OP’s thesis is lost. There is no BifL boxers AFAIK.

There are BifL socks though, called “Darn Tough” which have a lifetime warranty. They have 1 competitor but I forgot the brand. Both use marino wool.

update

Patagonia plans to open a store in Amsterdam.

I think you’re right. In one of the articles I posted, an apparent Boeing insider demanded exiting a 737 Max upon finding it was that specific aircraft model that he boarded.

But the problem is not just with the nuts and bolts. A PBC documentary did a deep probe on the #737max. We have to accept that engineers make mistakes. But what I do NOT accept is managers making the deliberate calculated decision to coverup the mistakes to the extent of proactively consciously deciding not to train Boeing pilots on the KNOWN flaws and idiosyncracies to save money. Lives were lost because of these management decisions -- which are the same managers who lives depend on w.r.t. the older Boeing aircraft as well. These decisions also lead to under-trained Boeing pilots.

The 737 Max will probably go through copious scrutiny. But even if they make every nut, bolt, and sensor quite safe, that does nothing for the shitty infrastructure of right-wing business people who will continue working to pinch every penny for their shareholders.

I would love to see a dated line graph of the historic and current pay rate of Boeing test pilots with annotations on each incident.

Judging from the article and abstract (not the study itself), I think it shows that natural reforestation is clearly better than humans doing arbitrary ad hoc reforestation. It does not seem to suggest that natural reforestation would outperform well-designed strategically engineered reforestation. We could make it as diverse as we want.

But it’s interesting nonetheless to be able to conclude that reforestation that is not well thought out is worse than doing nothing. It also means that the greenwashing practice of just planting arbitrary trees to take credit for carbon offsetting is even worse than previously thought.

They probably weigh the birthday cards to see if anything seems worth opening.

Voting with your money works. But only when there are good options to vote for.

There are a couple BifL sock makers, but no BifL underwear makers. That’s the problem. If someone made loose-fitting stretchy aramid boxers with a drawstring that lasts 1+ lifetimes, people would pay $100/ea for them.

Belgium, France, and Spain all have had cash limits of €3k, €3k, and €1k respectively for some time now. And the US has a variety of reporting triggers set at $10k. None of those limits have been inflation adjusted. So indeed more and more people become subject to unwarranted surveillance as time moves further beyond 1984.

But then consider Germany. Germans are wise enough to understand what they give up when giving up cash, so while the EU law has little effect on Belgium, France, & Spain, Germans are getting fucked by the EU on this and AFAIK there is no inflation adjustment at the EU level either.

It’s a shit law but if we must have it I would like to see it indexed to postage costs, which has been going up by leaps and bounds. The cost of printing a page at the library has gone from 5¢ to 10¢ in the past year.. so that would be a good inflation index for this as well.

Good point. Downtime should carry that positive vibe.

Although Cloudflare also seems to go down often enough to muddle this – but nonetheless Cloudflare downtime is something to celebrate just because it gives cause to drive people off CF.

It would be a lot more environmentally effective to convince people to reduce beef consumption and replace it with chicken/pork instead,

Let’s not drive a wedge between the eco-vegans and the animal welfare vegans. Beef is the worst for climate while chickens get the least ethical treatment.

This duplicity muddies the waters and makes getting real actual change that would benefit the climate harder to achieve and less likely to happen.

Dividing an already tiny population of much needed activists is not how you get progressive change. Non-beef meats still shadow plant-based food in terms of their climate harm.

Your pic was too big for me to download but if it’s the same data I’ve seen, then beef is the worst and lamb is 2nd at about ½ the emissions of beef, and all the meats are substantially more harmful than plant based options.

You mentioned FedEx and UPS. That’s basically every package dealer.

I have not used FedEx and UPS for like 15 years now. Boycotting Amazon really helps because it essentially boils down to buying local.

No e-commerce, no sending items to loved ones, no freight whatsoever.

Not true. USPS ships pkgs.

In one very rare circumstance where I bought online in the past 15 yrs, the seller had a field for notes on the order form. I wrote something like “You do not say how you ship this. Please ship it USPS or DHL, or if that is not possible then cancel my order. Thanks.” They shipped it USPS.

The whole “vote with your wallet” thing is drivel concocted by those in power

Those in power love you for saying this. You could not advocate for them better than this boot-licking drivel.

Fun video, but fucking hell.. even that webpage is enshitified by some vimeo garbage:

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Ray ID: …

From the article:

See the U.S. flatlining in transit miles per capita

A devil’s advocate would rightfully argue that that’s expected given the much lower average population density of the US -- the same factor that made it a struggle to get broadband Internet to everyone in the US. Bizarre to use a nationwide per capita as a basis for mass transit comparisons. It should be a city-by-city comparison that groups cities by comparable population density. US cities would likely still come out behind and embarrassed, but more accurately so.

Consider the marketing angle -- instead of saying “the US is losing” (which diffuses responsibility and makes plenty of room for finger-pointing), instead say “@conditional_soup@lemm.ee’s city lost its ass in the bi-annual city infra competency competition”. Then that mayor has some direct embarrassment to pressure action.

I don’t have it in front of me but it’s the cylindrical fabric speaker that looks like this:

https://www.cravingtech.com/...

That will be nice if I can put Lineage OS on it. Though I have to wonder how useful a headless unit could be.. if I could get a remote display on my PC that would be cool.

What other options are you talking about? I think the aloe was Aloe King by OKF and Arizona is the name of the iced tea maker. Neither have ties to Coca Cola AFAIK.

I’ve not used one myself but my workplace cafeteria occasionally does made-to-order wok lunches where they pull out induction woks where the induction surface is parabolic so the wok can have the proper wok shape (not a flat bottom). When they crank the heat up, it’s clear from the immediate sizzling that the heat comes fast enough.