“live and work and build and pay in that world in an ongoing basis”

There, that’s more what they’re envisioning.

They’d better not be playing all my free games before I get to them.

Do they not have sharpies in Denmark?

A proper leader would ensure all of his subjects are treated before him. If he wishes to speed his own process he should fix the system, not circumvent or commandeer it.

Whether you take the stick out of your dog’s mouth or you tell the dog to give it to you, you’re the taking the stick. Breaking up and selling off IP is exceedingly commonplace.

We’ve already established they are whores, Tencent has simply been unsuccessful, so far, in negotiating their price.

In that case we’re going to need a bigger Death Star.

I don’t know why, but I somehow assumed that you were getting traditional mini-splits as your transition. I had to replace my boiler system (in the US) because there were no heat-pump boiler replacements, only forced air. My conversion was from oil, common in the 1950s/60s when my house was built, but my house isn’t serviced by gas, and domestic oil service is getting more expensive to maintain due to fewer vendors and higher fuel oil costs. It would have been nicer if I could have just dropped in a boiler replacement using heat pump technology.

as a consumer accepting that

That’s the special condition we get in the US, though - there is little or no effective choice across the spectrum. Without regulation, corporations will become asymptotic to maximum financial extraction techniques. There are few real choices at the consumer level and the barriers to entry are such that a single consumer - or even an uncoordinated (read: without a national, staffed organization) - cannot circumvent the system.

So…these heat pumps are doing recirculating hot water systems? I presume they have a heat exchanger that either heats the flow directly or has a (small?) reservoir tank that connects to the legacy system?

I ask because nearly every heat pump in the US is forced air and I’m not even aware (and I work in the architecture industry) of a residential product that uses an exterior heat exchanger to heat water. Your outdoor heat exchangers are indistinguishable from ours (the small units we refer to as “mini-splits”).

Maybe in somewhere free like the EU or SEA. In the US, most phones bought from a carrier (and most sales are that way, some exclusively so) are locked so that no other SIM (e or physical) can be used.

These should, instead, be implemented by NFC. You tap their “reader” with your phone, never surrendering it, and they get your ID number just like a merchant gets your CC info for a charge. Their backend pulls up your record just as if they’d scanned the qr code on the back of your physical card. Or you can locally transmit a facsimile image to a promiscuous reader (airdrop/nearby share) you approve.

Yeah, it’s high on my list. Along with a half dozen other AAAs from the last decade. I think Cyberpunk is next on my list, though there’s a Fallout languishing on my Deck I keep meaning to go back to.

At this point, I think my pavlov-like reaction to Thursdays and grabbing the free games is the game now. I know full well I’ll never play these games.

Yeah, I’m with you and it’s keeping me from really starting a new game. I got back into gaming with Elite Dangerous and got a kick out of the hours of offline research (because the in-game tools were fucking terrible when they even existed). It took me a while to get past the cool graphics and flight, but it got boring and tedious managing stuff. I failed to start Witcher 3 twice before just diving in and deciding I was going to not figure out anything and just play. It’s a far more forgiving system than most, and the gameplay benefits from it (to the suffering of realism).

While I enjoy the games, I loathe the min-max and inventory management necessary in most games. That’s not technically necessary if you spend a couple hundred hours perfecting technique. While that’s less than a month for a full time gamer, it’s about 5 years of play time in my life, so I end up looking up some obscure bit on line and chasing crafting for no good reason except to make my gaming time no fun. As a result, most of my SteamDeck time has been on simple arcade shooters and a couple of card-combat games. It’s frustrating to know there are good games out there if I just had 20-30 hours to get into them, and also knowing that I’ll have 20-30 hours free on a regular basis only when I retire some day. I guess my nursing home days will have lots of content, so I’ve got that going for me.

I tend to agree with you, of course, but I wonder if the large study were re-run with mass as the cause it would show similar distribution against the 6000lb+ vehicles. Mass tends to reduce braking deceleration and I didn’t see that as an explicit parameter. The “cause” is more salient to the second, smaller study which shows the “kneecap and hood carry” physics reduced hip and head injuries compated to the “body block and throw” mechanics of the flat- fronted cars.

Not to defend the Mack-Truck styling - I don’t disagree at all with the smaller impact study - I question the original implied hypothesis that the prevalence of large flat fronts as the cause of increase in deaths following the nadir in 2009. Of course anecdotes are not evidence, but I live in a college town and have since 2000 and the actions of pedestrians have changed substantially over the years. Specifically, the advent of smartphones has resulted in risky behavior both in pedestrians and behind the wheel. In 2009 less than 20% of phones were “smart.” Few of those were connected to the internet and fewer still to social media and entertainment services. Since then, the prevalence has increased to 80% and the consumption of media by orders of magnitude (measured by data usage and hours engaged). The original study implies the increase in pedestrian death solely due to nose geometry, but the quantity of impacts and conditions may not be as causative as the article seems to claim.

I guess that’s the question. For low speed impacts the body is pretty well protected compared to the lower extremities because the energy of impact is more readily absorbed without serious damage.

That’s actually surprising. I would think damage to lower extremities (delicate knee joints) would be far more severe from a concentrated impact area than a large area impact distributed over the entire body - when it occurs with a low speed impact.

lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.

Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.

Skip smoking and vape limits. Outlaw nicotine and other addictive synthetic nicotine-like compounds. For gods sake - you’re not allowed to buy acetaminophen or pseudoephedrine in bulk in the UK.

Stop allowing the sale of the addictive drug and a good deal of the problem will correct itself.

Can’t be any worse than season 8.