sushibowl

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 25 points 3 days ago

So the right is against self-service now? wtf

You may want to look into Grover Norquist and his organisation Americans for Tax Reform. It is one of the most influential political lobbying groups in the United States, and it has the support of essentially the entire republican party. They essentially consider tax to be evil on principle and ask every politician to sign a pledge opposing any tax hike.

ATR is strongly against automatic filing, as they want to keep taxes difficult and complicated to stoke anti-tax sentiment. That is to say, they fear that if filing tax is easier, citizens would be less likely to fight taxes in the way that the ATR wants (mostly they like a low flat tax, because it's simple and good for rich people).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Technically just a little bit different from fracking as used in the oil/gas industry, since it doesn't create new fractures in the rock, it only expands existing ones. However it carries basically the same risks with at most a difference in magnitude.

There's an interesting case in Switzerland where they tried to drill one over an historically active fault line, without first doing a seismic risk assessment.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (2 children)

They are emissions credits. Every company receives some amount of "CO2 emission credits" from the government. These allow you to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide. If you don't emit all the CO2 that your credits allow, you can sell those credits to other companies that need more than the government gives them.

The idea is to put a total limit on the amount of emissions in the country, while letting the market figure out where it makes most sense economically to invest in emission reduction.

Tesla makes only EV cars and so it doesn't need all the credits a typical gasoline car company would receive. So they sell them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

The CEO said on twitter that even their $200/month pro plan was losing money on every customer: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/

I don't see how they would become profitable any time soon if their costs are that high. Maybe if they adapt the innovations of deepseek to their own model.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Most likely there is a separate censor LLM watching the model output. When it detects something that needs to be censored it will zap the output away and stop further processing. So at first you can actually see the answer because the censor model is still "thinking."

When you download the model and run it locally it has no such censorship.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Skyrim is a totally different beast because the ingredient effects you know about don't depend on your Alchemy skill anymore: instead you simply discover the effects by successfully making a potion with them. So there's a sort of minigame of trying different ingredients together to discover what kind of effects they give to potions, which in my opinion is neat because it matches up with how you might do this in reality.

I think the developers didn't like the "surprise" extra potion effects you could get in Morrowind, so they changed it in oblivion.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I was curious what the official supposed purpose of these tokens was, since i have a hard time believing anyone would seriously see themselves buying anything with these at any point. The official website is hilarious. They're not claiming any purpose at all, you're just buying an "official meme":

Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol "$TRUMP" and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type. GetTrumpMemes.com is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency. See Terms & Conditions Here, See Card Allocation Here

The grift is fully out in the open I guess.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Are we painting Stalin as a good guy here? He only fought Germany because they tried to invade. Before that he repeatedly made attempts to court Nazi Germany. He signed a nonaggression pact, made an agreement to secretly divide Eastern Europe together, and continued trading. Stalin didn't really give a shit about the fascism part, he only cared once his own territory and sphere of influence were threatened. Same as all the other major allies, btw. Everyone tried appeasement first, nobody really cared about the fascism.

"Saving Europe from Hitler" paints it as a selfless act of heroism when really everyone was mostly concerned with maintaining their own power.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

is the energy used to heat the solvent creates more CO2 than the CO2 it captured?

Ah yeah, no absolutely not. In total it takes much more energy to capture the CO2 than was generated by burning the fossil fuel that emitted it.

What about algae or moss? They can be more space efficient than trees, and we can technically build a structure vertically.

I'm not too familiar with algea/moss CO2 absorption, but it could be better. Usually the downside of a vertical structure is you increase the capital investment again, negating the advantage of plants. And to provide lighting you'll need energy which takes space as well (e.g. solar panel field)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

A typical process passes ambient air over some liquid or solid solvent that can absorb CO2, then later inserts energy to separate the CO2 again for storage. For example, sodium hydroxide reacts with CO2 in the air to form sodium carbonate. Then later, the sodium carbonate is heated to release pure CO2, regenerating the sodium hydroxide in the process.

This doesn't violate any laws of thermodynamics because of the constant energy required. Compared to growing trees, direct air capture is generally much more expensive, requiring large capital investment and constant energy input. It is more space efficient though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I had one in high school. The design was kinda gimmicky but the phone had good features for its time. it had an FM radio receiver, and I remember you could even transfer MP3 files onto it, although it was a hassle to do so.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The translation of the Dutch one is awkward. It's more like "it can rust on my ass"

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