Lol! My mum still asks both me and my husband (“techy” jobs according to her) to solve all her problems with computers/printers/ the internet at large/ any app that doesn’t work… the list is endless. I take it as a statement of how proud she is of me that she would still ask us first, even if we haven’t succeeded in fixing a single issue since the time the problem was an old cartridge in the printer some 5-6 years ago.

You are in for a great experience. Personally, Japanese teas are probably my favorites, with Gyokuro and Genmaica at the top of the list. Plenty of variety for “pure green teas”. :) Enjoy!

How did you like your first Sencha? Exciting!

Absolutely, and all the people that now have the artifacts benefit in keeping the status quo, so there is effectively little push to solve a very complex problem.

I personally feel represented in at least three categories, so I’d say it does!

I’m glad to see this discussion starting gathering attention. In general, I think we should start looking more and more at car sharing over car owning: nobody needs an SUV every day, but you might enjoy a longer trip driving one. So short term rental should be incentivized to decrease the overall number of cars on the road and parking lots.

It’s already a day later! You got this, the hardest part is flowing by. How are you doing?

My little piece of advice: you don’t have to think about the future, tomorrow, next week, they are all far off. Think about now, this hour, the next 5 minutes, or whatever stretch of time seems manageable. What do you do now? Cook dinner? Watch a show? Cry in the shower? The future might be scary and too much to manage now. You’ll handle it when you get to it. Now, you only have to think about right now.

Verbena tea is calming and soothing. Lavender is relaxing. Green tea for me is a calming ritual.

You got this. Maybe it doesn’t feel like it, but you only need to do one step, and you got that one step.

I know it’s a dumb meme… but girls acting weak to get hit on is a horrible mental construct!

For hard sci-fi I agree, but for soft one the difference becomes more and more tenuous.

As far as “best” go, I’m non plussed. Some of these I really liked, some… not so much.

Personal positive votes:

Perdido Street Station - absolutely loved it, great social commentary undertones while the story goes its own way in an incredibly vivid world

Fifth Season - great first book of a good series, good writing and good tension points

Saga - great art to match a great retelling of Romeo and Juliet in space, where all tropes are out the window

Personal “good but not great”: All Systems Red - fun light read, nothing more

Personal negative votes:

The Name of the Wind - it’s the archetypal fantasy story, with a lot of world building and little else, a Marie Sue as a main character and a love story with many many problems. I guess it’s there because it’s famous thus essential?

The Three Boby Problem - the writing is dry, the math is wrong, I can’t stand this book

American Goods - talking about dry writing style. And keeping the reader in the dark about completely arbitrary world rules. I did not enjoy it, often it feels Neil Gaiman writes to show you how much smarter he is than you. I will admit that Gaiman has been extremely influential, so I support it being on the list

Mistborn - page turner with little else to its name. The characters drop their life long ideals so easily to facilitate the plot, they are hardly believable

The other books in the list I haven’t read nor were on my reading list, most I hadn’t heard about before.

I loved its depiction of a complete world, where elements are introduced only for the flavor. It made it feel so lively, while destructuring the usual “Chekov’s gun” expectation. Most of the side stories also tie back into the immigration/discrimination theme that runs through the book.

I would wholeheartedly recommend it.

I never noticed that I also thought of “her”. I read the book a while ago, so I don’t remember your reference, but I remember finding it refreshing to find a robot that was “obviously female” instead of undefined therefore male.

Fossil fuel based solutions are significantly worse for climate change than nuclear. Saying that the other renewables are better is matter of discussion, but renewables without nuclear are not going to make the cut. Using both renewables and nuclear is best to cut emissions.

No, there should be rules to benefit the poor. But many of the laws now in effect in particular in the US are specifically not built for that. So many laws would better be dropped than enforced, and many are missing.

You talk as if benefiting the ruling class was an unwanted consequence of these laws. It’s not. The markets need to be free for the rich to benefit but restricted for the rich to benefit. And maybe some crumbs will fall of the table and the poors will think that the rich are so generous.

I’m overthinking this.

If everyone gets the full mark, it’s not a random variable anymore, you would have a collapse of the probability distribution, that would tend to a Dirac delta function. In this case, the very definition of “quartiles” would fail. So, yeah, there would be no one there because it wouldn’t exist.

You can’t skim an audio file, you have to listen from the beginning to the end. Audio makes symbols that are often used in programming difficult to parse or confusing. I… really dislike this

Finding a way to use less agricultural land is great, but I find the mere visual of these farms quite dystopian.

Same here: very far from top result, and links to this same article.