You don’t say!

Oh that’s cool!

It’s to embed Javascript into embedded markup in Javascript

This somehow reminds me Altered Carbon

For some little config it’s fine, but it’s horrible when used when you have thousands upon thousands of lines of it. Lots of DevOps tools tend to use it like a fully-blown turing-complete programming language, and each has a different DSL of doing variables, loops etc. And that becomes an abomination.

I’m from a country where the main focus of the judicial system is rehabilitation. Mental health facilities are in fact part of it.

If our experience is anything to go by, you will absolutely still need to lock up certain people. For their own safety and that of society at large.

Some people cannot be cured, or resist treatment to such an extend that it is effectively impossible.

It’s an uncomfortable truth.

My country has psychiatric treatment facilities as part of the judicial systems (ours is mostly based on rehabilitation, not punitive). The problem with them is that being send to one of them is indefinite, until one is deemed cured. Is that ethical?

Ironically, this means that bona fide gangsters will often try to prove they do not have a mental health problem, because ordinary prison at least has a well-defined end date.

My country tried to privatize mail. It failed. Why: it’s very hard to operate profitably.

Since this week I get some form of ad in the github diff viewer. “Copilot is available for purchase for you organization”. Horrible.

Everyone who has ever consumed dihydrogenmonoxide will die!

Looks like internalized costs for this rather than the externalized costs for fossil fuels. Only regulation can truly fix that.

You’re not getting many answers yet regarding nitrogen.

As a preface: When it comes to climate and environmental concerns with respect to agriculture, the word “nitrogen” does usually not refer to the completely harmless atmospheric nitrogen (N2). Instead, it refers to various compounds that contain nitrogen.

Nitrogenous pollution from cattle comes in two shapes:

The first is methane (NH3). A single cow burps and farts out about 100kg of methane each year. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 28 times as potent as CO2. This means a single cow is responsible for as much as 2800kg equivalent in CO2 each year due to burps and farts alone. For reference, the CO2 per capita emissions globally are about 4 tons (4000kg) per year, for all sources combined. Cows, relatively speaking, therefore produce a huge amount of CO2 equivalent.

The second is all the nitrogenous compounds in their excrements. This acts as a fertilizer on soil and in the water. While that sounds good, it leads to various unwanted effects. One is that agricultural runoff causes algal blooms in water that then ends up killing a significant amount of marine life. Another is that nutrient-rich soils tend to seriously decrease plant species diversity. Many native and wild plants actually need nutrient-poor soils to thrive. Those plants will get outcompeted by a small group of fast-growing plants that do well in all the cow-poop-infested soil. These compounds also tend to travel far, via agricultural runoff or even via the air, so ecosystems far away from farms are also impacted.

This was a fun read.

This is just completely out of my frame of reference. Why not? Who are opposed to this?

While these are very cool, they’re not exactly accessible to the average citizen. These are close a million euros per house.

That said, living right next to water is indeed very common. My building in an urban renewal project is too, and we’re getting a pier to moor boats in a while.

For those asking: floods, rising water levels due to climate change etc, isn’t this dangerous? Yes, that is a concern. But probably for other reasons than you might think. Building in river beds is a big no no (unlike in some neighboring countries), and river beds have actually been expanded significantly in recent decades. Sea dikes and levees have acceptable failure risk of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 years (and yeah this can be tomorrow). At current sea levels and storm rates of course. The main new risks are flash flooding due to heavy rainfall (see 2021 European floods), and, in the longer term, sea water seeping underneath dikes and levees. We can probably handle another meter of sea water rise with current technology. After that, levees would have to be made so high that the pressure on the seabed is high enough to force water underneath. Rivers would also start flowing backwards at some point (this already happens at smaller scale during dry spells. It’s usually managed by having drainage pumps run in reverse). We’ll probably have to give up parts of the country in 22nd century. It is what it is.

Also interesting: where insurers are leaving Florida due to climate-changed induced risk, Dutch insurers are actually increasing flood coverage. Previously only floods due to rainwater would be covered by most insurances. With the government being responsible for floods caused by dike/levee failure. After the 2021 European floods it became obvious that that is not always a clear distinction. While we were far less affected than our neighboring countries, some creeks did turn into violent rivers, especially damaging the old town of Valkenburg. While technically no levees were breached (because it was a creek), and technically it was caused by rainwater, it did behave like a levee failure. Ultimately both insurers and the government paid part of the damages. But figuring out who to get money from was a mess for victims. Thus, the union of insurers is actually expanding coverage from 2025 onwards, so that levee failure is also (partly) covered by most home insurers. Hopefully that reduces insecurity for the next flash flooding event.

So which is the lesser evil?

So can’t we reintroduce the sulfur?

Looks like we’ve entered a completely new regime now.

what is this limit you are talking of?

I did. It just offloads people to Google, which IMHO has a tendency of returning just a random blog filled with falsehoods that just happens to be good at SEO.