The dick-shooting has been real. Canada massively depends on the US, and US tariffs against Canada are devastating, but look at the CAD vs USD graph. Yes, Canada is taking damage, but the US is doing so much damage to itself that the Canadian dollar keeps climbing.

Writing them that way would be Sodum.

The revised name is better though:

• Helium
• Lithium
• Beryllium
• Sodium
• Magnesium

And the next should be…? If an element ends in “um” there’s normally an “i” before the “um”. We should also fix Molybdenum, Lanthanum and Tantalum while we’re at it. There are 80 elements with an “ium” ending, but only 3 or 4 (depending on if you say Aluminum or Aluminium) without the “i”.

Also, screw it, #79 should be Aurium.

What counts as advertising?

Let’s say you ban ad breaks on TV / streams. In the early days of radio and TV they didn’t have ad breaks, the host of the show would just go on for a while about his favourite brand of cigarettes. In the modern world, pretty much any time you see a name brand in a TV show or movie, it’s because they’ve been paid for product placement.

So… you could solve that by never allowing the mentioning of any brand name in any form of media. That would make reviews illegal. That’s fair, I suppose, because reviews are definitely seen as a form of advertising. That’s why companies often provide review copies of things for free to journalists in the hope they might talk/write about them. Maybe you could carve out an exception allowing a brand and model to be mentioned if there are safety issues or product recalls?

Ok, so now you have a Formula 1 event, it’s on TV but you have to pay for that broadcast because it’s not ad supported. The cars, of course, don’t have any ads on them. But, are they allowed to have the manufacturer’s name and logo on them? Is it advertising if say Ferrari puts a lot of money into F1, wins a lot, and so when you watch the news you see Ferrari-red cars with Ferrari logos winning a race? Also, could the drivers wear coveralls with the Ferrari logo on them? What about fans of Ferrari, could they wear a shirt with the Ferrari logo on them if they were simply fans of the brand? What if this supposed Ferrari fan were a supermodel? Does someone have to carefully go through the finances of any very attractive person to see if they’re ever wearing a logo not because they’re a fan but because they’ve been compensated?

I’m in favour of reducing the amount of advertising we see. I think it’s a bit absurd now. But, while it’s possible to tax it or regulate it, I think it would be very hard to completely eliminate it.

Another example of that is Pyongyang. They do have billboards to Kim Jong Un, and memorials to Kim Jong Il. But, for the most part the city is free of billboards. It’s really strange if you’re used to modern western cities.

The privacy issues are nasty, but a smart toilet could actually be an incredibly useful device.

Can you imagine if every time you went to the bathroom, your toilet could do some of the basic stool / urine tests you get at the doctor’s office? Certain diseases could be caught extremely early, and you wouldn’t have to do anything different.

And then there are bidet functions. Forget smearing poop all over your ass with paper, wash the poop off with nice warm water every time.

I wouldn’t want to have to use a smartphone app for that, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a simple set of buttons on the toilet itself. You could keep the manual flush lever and only use that if you preferred, but if you wanted an even better experience and a better clean, that option would be available.

Reminder: never go have pancakes at wise_pancake’s house.

I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy to control the narrative. There are just various corporate media sources each with their own bias.

Washington Post is owned by a billionaire, so it’s naturally going to run pro-billionaire, anti-billionaire-killer articles.

Reddit is desperate to avoid controversial things as it tries to survive going public. It wants to be the place people go for cute pictures of cats, funny memes, celeb interviews, etc. If someone like Elon Musk threatens to put them in the MAGA hate spotlight, they’ll do whatever they can to avoid that. They rightly think they don’t need to care about users anymore. People who stuck around after they effectively killed the API and after all the mods went on strike will stick around for anything. They have to care about advertisers now, and advertisers want to advertise next to safe things.

The NY Times is just a very old, very small-c conservative newspaper. They don’t want to disrupt the status quo. The higher-ups at the NY Times are likely to show up at the same dinner party as Brian Thompson, so he’s the one they sympathize with.

As for TMZ, all they care about is clickbait. If a CEO freaked out and gunned down a random person on the street, they’d just as happily make some tawdry movie about that too.

If this were some kind of concerted effort to control the narrative, they wouldn’t publish info that went against that narrative. But, when there were hints that the cops might have screwed up the evidence gathering procedures at the crime scene, almost every major news outlet jumped on that story too.

There’s no upside or downside to setting a tariff on uninhabited islands. Why not include Atlantis just in case? Why not also set a tariff on Mars, Venus or Pluto just to be sure? Why not also include Middle Earth and Vulcan in case they turn out to be real?

If all they wanted was to ensure that every place in the world was covered, they could have just said that the standard tariff rate was 10%. What’s more likely is they used an LLM to generate a list of every place on earth and just put a 10% next to it, showing how unserious they are.

Assuming you’re talking about the “no brown m&ms” clause that Van Halen had as part of their tour contract. If so, you might not know that it may have been a form of quality control. Van Halen had a big and complex stage show. A typical show would use 3 18-wheeler trucks, Van Halen would use 9 of them.

The complex contract ensured that they had a stage that could support all the weight of the Van Halen show. That any overhead girders were sturdy enough to hang the things they needed to hang. That the electrical system in the venue could support all their equipment. That the doors were big enough to allow the equipment to be pushed through, etc.

If the band went backstage and saw there were brown m&ms in the bowl, they’d know that the venue hadn’t carefully read the contract, so they’d need to double check everything else.

It’s not really a small point though. It’s a huge signal about how serious these people are.

Like, if a scientific paper has the text “as an AI language model” in it, you can be sure that there’s no point in reading the paper deeply. Similarly, tariffs on uninhabited islands tells you that there’s no “5d chess” being played here, these people are absolute morons.

It’s also the system administrator and SRE mindset.

What exactly do you mean by “news is censored”? Are you saying that certain stories aren’t getting the kinds of traction you think they should be getting? Or, are you saying that major events are not being covered at all because the government is threatening news organizations that cover them?

Go Iceland. Simplify down from 4 letters to 2, and make one of those 2 letters a letter that doesn’t even appear in the original.

It’s not so much that the tech just worked. Often it doesn’t work. The difference is that when it doesn’t work it’s not user-serviceable. Up until maybe 2010 or so, when things broke there was often something a user could do to fix them. But, especially with the introduction of locked-down mobile phone OSes, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s just “wait for an update”.

Some can’t. Computers weren’t commonplace until many GenXers were in their 20s, so some never learned. Those that did learn often learned the deep magic.

Silly millennial, even Boomers were using regexen in the 70s, and they were commonplace by the time GenX nerds started playing with them in the 80s and 90s. Your elders also know that regexen are fun but extremely dangerous, and should only be used in cases where they won’t make things much worse.

Write machine code? For what kind of processor?

That is one ability that doesn’t really belong. That’s much more of a Boomer thing. Not all boomers, obviously, but the ones who were computer experts were the ones who had to learn machine code. By the time even Gen X came along, assembler and C were already much more common.

That monitor was really underrated. I used it for decades for game consoles, VCRs, etc. after the C64 went obsolete.

I’m old enough to know why people used pencils for cassettes. It wasn’t coincidence. Count the number of teeth in the casette, then look at the number of facets on a standard pencil.