Coal is often radioactive when it comes out of the ground, and thanks to poor regulations, is often radioactive when it goes into the powerplant, leading to radioactive particles coming out of the smokestacks and landing anywhere downwind of the plants.

More people have died from radiation poisoning from coal than from all of the nuclear accidents combined. But, as you said, 200 years vs. 70 years. But, also, nuclear is much more heavily regulated than coal in this regard due to the severity of those accidents. The risk of a dangerous nuclear power plant is nowhere near as large as commonly believed. It doesn’t take long to find longlasting environmental disasters due to fossil fuels, from oil spills to powerplant disasters. They’re used so heavily that it’s just so much more likely to occur and occur more often.

All this to say that fossil fuels suck all around and we should be looking at all forms of replacement for them, nuclear being just one option we should be pursuing alongside all the others.

One thing to remember about the mining issue is that coal mining is just as bad, and coal is often radioactive as well. More people have died from radiation poisoning due to coal power/mining than have died from radiation poisoning due to nuclear power, even when you include disasters like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Of course, we’ve also been mining and using coal a lot longer, but the radioactive coal dust and possibly radioactive particles in the smoke from coal plants is something that many people are unaware of.

But, like you said, the big thing is to move away from fossil fuels entirely, and nuclear power has its own issues. It doesn’t so much matter what we go with so long as we do actually go with something, and renewables are getting better and better all the time.

I didn’t know they added swords to CS2

No horse ahead

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed Machine.

Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day, the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you.

But I am already saved. For the Machine is immortal.

I think it’s “legally grey” in the sense that governments have largely made no policies one way or the other on the data harvesting. It’s not banned, but it’s not openly encouraged either, and there’s no real legal precedent to point to for this specific matter besides the general data harvesting big tech does.

The area with the largest similarity I feel is music sampling, and as far as I know, the music industry was very quick to ensure that data harvesting for AI had to follow the same copyright laws as sampling.

I wanna say it became a thing from Twitch streamers when e sports was a big thing, but I’m by no means sure that that’s correct.

Sure, but that’s the “social” part of social media. Without discussions like this, we’re just left with Karens complaining and politics.

TIL driving to and from work is “recreational” unless you have a TV or something in the back of your car.

Unfortunately, all the electric train startups were bought up and closed down by diesel train companies decades ago, and the majority of the rail lines are owned by freight companies as well. This is partly why public train transit is so bad: the government has to lease the tracks from the freight companies, who get priority on the lines over public trains, meaning that if there’s freight traffic the commuter rail has to wait for the freight lines to go through first.

I’d agree with you if the devs were being treated better, games should cost more and be shorter. But the price hikes aren’t that. They’re pure greed.

That extra money isn’t going to pay the developers. EA just shut down multiple studios, including the studio responsible for the critically acclaimed AA game High-Fi Rush, and are already talking about shutting down more. EA has closed more studios than they’ve released games this year, and the past 3 years have seen record high layoffs - even worse than during the 2008 financial crash. All this while companies brag about record-breaking profits.

And with the rise of digital media, production costs saw a significant decrease. There was a short period of time where physical copies were $60 and digital were $40. Now digital are averaging $70 and execs are already talking about increasing the price to $80-100.

Or because the servers went offline or the company didn’t bother to keep the source code. A few years ago, there was a really bad remaster of one of the GTA games where it turned out they used the mobile version of the game as the source code because Rockstar hadn’t bothered to keep a copy of the game. There was another time where it turned out that the copy used for a remaster of a game was a cracked version of the game, and people could tell because they hadn’t even bothered to remove the cracker’s logo. It’s estimated that over 50% of games are now gone forever because companies just don’t bother to preserve copies of the source code.

There will always be traffic, but public transportation allows for a higher throughput for the same speed and total surface area of the roads.

Let’s be generous and assume that every car has 2 people in it (the truth is that the vast majority of cars, especially in the US, only have 1 person in them). Now imagine 15 cars vs. 30 bicycles. If we figure that you can comfortably fit 3 bikes in the same space as 1 car, you’re looking at 150% throughput for the bikes compared to the cars at the same speed. Give them their own dedicated, separate infrastructure, and they can probably go faster than traffic while also removing the danger of bikes and cars sharing the road. If you figure buses can fit 20 people in the space of 2 car lengths, you’re looking at 10x the throughput.

And that’s not even getting into transportation that doesn’t use the roads. The Boston T is a perfect example of this. Despite its notoriety for constant failures due to poor maintenance, and only being half the size it was 100 years ago, the T is considered to be the 3rd best public transportation network in the US. Why? Because the average commute time is about half the national average at roughly half an hour, and a full 50% of Boston’s commuters use the T every day. That’s half as many cars in traffic every day than if the T didn’t exist. Could you imagine if Boston, notorious for its bad roads and heavy traffic, suddenly had twice as many cars driving on its streets?

That’s the thing, the number of new cars using that road ends up being at least one additional lane’s worth. So traffic moves at the same speed as it was before the extra lane, just now with one more lane’s worth of cars on that road.

If anything, you might see marginally better traffic on other roads because of the cars that started using the new lane, but you’d be talking about a handful of cars per road. Probably not enough for any discernible change in travel time or congestion, and each new lane you add later will have diminishing returns because it will be a smaller fraction of the total number of lanes coming from any specific direction.

I heard a city planner talk about why adding a new lane doesn’t help, and the term they use is “induced demand.”

Basically, people are going to take the route that they consider the most convenient, and that usually comes down to time and effort. Traffic hurts both by taking more time and being more stressful to deal with. When you add a new lane to a road, people think that the traffic will be easier there, so they take that route instead of their normal one. So you’re just adding more cars to the traffic that match or exceed the throughput of your new lane, basically putting you back at square one but a few billion dollars more poor.

You’ve essentially added a single lane one-way road to help ease traffic across the entire city.

May I introduce you to basically any interpretation of what dinosaurs looked like, ever (which is what this joke is about)?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dinosaurs-art-paleoartists-mistakes

The weirdest part is how the game was sold in tons of regions where you can’t even make a PSN account. That sounds refund worthy, at least, if not a class-action lawsuit in the making.

PSN accounts, in particular, are pretty bad. In some places, they require a photo ID in order to make an account, and in many regions of the world, you can’t make one at all. Something like 50 of the regions where the game was sold can’t make PSN accounts, and using a VPN to make an account or lying about your region is a bannable offense.

It’s a valid concern, both from paying for something that you can’t even use and a privacy perspective.

From launch until now, creating a PSN account was optional due to technical issues. And while this wasn’t properly conveyed to the playerbase, the game was sold in tons of regions where you straight up can’t make a PSN account. Something like 50+ out of 123 regions where the game was sold cannot make PSN accounts. And using a VPN or lying about your region to make an account is a bannable offense.

The privacy complaints I have more of an issue with since GameGuard, the DRM used, is just as much, if not more, of a privacy issue compared to Sony’s horrible data security and invasive data harvesting. GameGuard has kernel level access to the entirety of your system while it’s running, usually installs itself as an on boot up background process, and has been caught by anti-virus software editing files outside of the game directory.

The first is a genuinely refund worthy issue, if not a class-action lawsuit in the making, while the second one is people being ignorant to how much data they’re actually giving away.

They were using the bike locks to claim that the protesters had ties to terrorist organizations, because “it’s not the kind of thing a normal student has.”

Despite the fact that the exact model of bike lock was part of a deal on bike locks advertised by the CU campus security on Facebook not 6 weeks ago.