I personally support this plan. Smoking in the UK has already plummeted. A lot of smokers have moved to vaping. Unfortunately, those left are often the ruder ones. Limiting where they cam smoke, or reduce expire for everyone else is a big dead for me.

Additionally, it’s not banning nicotine, it’s banning cigarettes. Vapes have changes the balance on that one. They are less damaging, and cause far less issues with passive smoking. This acts as a pressure relief valve, rather than a blanket nicotine ban. Also, at no point will an existing (legal) smoker go from legal to illegal.

The vape issue definitely needs fixing. A number have found advertising to younger users is a good money maker. Limiting the options here l, without an outright ban would help reduce the harm to children. It wouldn’t significantly affect ex smokers who moved to vaping.

A modern nuke is FAR from the “bang 2 rocks together” designs that were first designed. For a start, most are fusion devices. Fairly exotic reactions are used to make a small amount of fusion material to go critical. This creates a shaped charge on a fusion core. The compression wave sets fusion happening, which releases 95% of the energy. Most of Russia’s arsenal is of this sort.

The downsides of these is the use of exotic elements. They often have a short half life, e.g. tritium, with 12.5 years. This means they decay. Even worse, some of the byproducts will actually poison the reaction. E.g. Rather than producing a flood of neutrons, they absorb them.

If any of this chain fails, then your fusion nuke becomes, at best, a low yield fission nuke. More likely, it becomes a dirty bomb. It’s still nasty, but not the city destroying terror weapon it would be intended as.

It’s less being stripped, and more a lack of maintenance. Nukes have a shelf life. The elements inside then can decay, this means they need replacing. This is a highly specialist job. It’s also expensive, and can only really be cross checked by the same people who do the work (or detonating it).

Nukes and ICBMs are extremely complex devices. They also require extremely specialist servi e work to remain functional. Even worse, the only people who can actually check that work are the ones doing it.

Russia hasn’t detonated a nuke in decades. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of their arsenal are now duds. The money embezzled, while boxes were ticked. Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of their ICBMs just wouldn’t launch.

Russia’s nuclear capabilities are likely a paper tiger, and Putin likely knows this. Until they try and use them, they are scary. If they try and they fail, they are in a VERY bad situation.

Putin is many things, but he’s not stupid. It would take a LOT more pressure from nato for him to even consider using nukes.

The message wouldn’t be to Putin directly. It would be to those both in his power base, or capable of disrupting it.

The goal would be to push Russians to the point they deal with Putin internally, and/or put putin in a position where he needs to end the war to stabilise his own position. It’s all about making the right people feel the effects.

Oh, and as a European, I think the risk is acceptable. If Putin struck at a NATO country, the results would likely be swift and short. The only unknown would be Russian nukes, and even those are far more of an unknown than most people think.

If a gang is using children to deal drugs, then it’s an unfortunate, but necessary, thing.

A while back, gangs realised that the police and courts will go easy on teenagers. Teenagers are also notoriously easy to manipulate. This makes them the perfect cover and scape goats for a gang.

The real question is why blacks are being targeted. Is it the police being racist, or are the gangs targeting them, and so the police follow?

That’s also my pet peave with situations like this.

Are they searching black people (and so racist)?

Are they searching poor people (and so classist)?

Are they searching based on evidence (fair)?

All could reach the same result, but the solution is vastly different.

Unfortunately, 1 points to a simple problem, with someone to blame. The other 2 are complex social problems that require complex solutions and don’t have a simple bogeyman to blame.

Most of the work on facturio has been on the underlying engine. Factories that would bring a high end PC to it’s knees, at the start, now race along on a mediocre PC.

The factorio devs don’t play factorio in the game anymore, they play it with the engine. By the results, they are both a team of geniouses and completely addicted.

I’ve found a layered approach is the best bet. A lot of articles have little to no political subtext. These can be read in a relaxed manner. Those that appear to have some bias can then be subject to a deeper analysis.

It’s not perfect, but it limits the cognitive load to something manageable, while allowing you to catch the worst articles easily.

The image posted makes a good 2nd or 3rd pass guide.

On the contrary, do not ignore them. People base their feeling on the group opinion almost entirely on how often they hear a particular argument. They won’t remember that 90% came from 1 person.

Secondly, unless an idea is actively disagreed with, people (subconsciously) assume you agree with it.

Take every opportunity to disagree with the idiots. You won’t convert them, but you will sow seeds in the minds of those they might be swaying.

HDDs can be made tolerant to it. Constant rotation still puts significant extra strain on the bearings, when spinning however. The drive will likely fail faster than an SSD.

Your best bet might be to use a laptop as the basis. They are already designed with power efficiency in mind, and you won’t need an external screen and keyboard for local problem solving.

I would also consider having a raspberry pi 3 or similar as a companion. Services that must be up all the time run on the pi (e.g. network admin). The main computer only gets kicked out of sleep mode when required. The pi 3 needs less power than the newer pis, while still having enough computing power to not lag unless pushed hard.

I definitely agree with SSDs. HDDs don’t do well when rotated when running. Boats are less than a stable platform.

Take a look at some of the taxidermy at the time. It’s horrifyingly bad. Then again modern amateur taxidermy can be as bad as well.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/hilariously-bad-lion-taxidermy

A depressing number also decided, I voted labour, and nothing changed (when they didn’t win). I’m going to try conservative now.

The worst thing is the advent of AI image generation. Until now, faking a photo took a lot of skilled effort to do well. Holocaust deniers get shot down fairly easily due to the diligent documentation done at the time. One of the generals even ordered it despite protests (it slowed down giving aid). He knew that future generations wouldn’t believe the level we can sink too.

Now (or in the near future) generating near flawless fakes will be easy. A photograph of a war crime will be no more believable than a scene from an action movie. We’ll likely find work around, but until then, we are in a dead zone on reliability of images.

Depressingly, that’s around 2x the cost/Tb.

I personally make use of the sonoff pow smart plugs, with Tasmota firmware. Though any Tasmota compatible smart plug with power readings will work.

The key thing is that with Tasmota, you can properly calibrate the readings. I have a friend with a high quality power meter. I used that to calibrate my smart plugs, they seem to track within a few % of the expensive one, once calibrated.

Depending on if you have access to an expensive meter or not, this will either be the best bet, or completely useless to you. Your local Hackspace might also be a good option for getting your hands on an expensive meter for an evening.

Nvidia GPUs aren’t the only way to run a machine learning type system. They are just the easiest to use, currently. China has also been developing their own AI optimised chips. Though I don’t know much/anything about them.

This is a good example of how AI can be used well.

Current AIs are effectively fuzzy pattern detection and matching engines. This one can sift all the data coming in, and spot patterns that previously corresponded to problems. It then flags them for human interpretation.

The AI chunks the vast sea of data. A human is then involved to sanity check what it has found, and react accordingly. E.g. a pattern appears that often precedes a broken rail within a month. A human can check the subset of the data, and schedule a maintenance team a week later. Conversely, a pattern that leads by hours would require an immediate response.

The thing throwing Israel off is that this isn’t new. The only difference is that the world is now paying (half hearted) attention. This was the goal of the attacks. Get the world to pay attention to what Israel has been doing.