Skua

On the one hand something like 80% of China’s population is lactose intolerant, but on the other that certainly never stopped any lactose intolerant people I know

• Launch a ball of dough against a designated target at the correct speed for it to flatten out on impact
• Borrow modern artillery targeting systems so that a ball of toppings impacts the same spot a moment afterwards
• Fire a HESH round to cook it

What I’m taking from this is that if we had invented Western musical notation in 2016 we would undoubtably have used 🅱for everything

As I understand it, yes. The b rotundum and b quadratum. I actually have no idea where the natural sign comes from though, now that I think about it

I really dislike that German system, but for those that want an explanation:

Traditional European music theory evolved towards using sets of seven notes out of twelve in an octave. We eventually labelled those notes A through to G. Originally A was the lowest note available in common notation and we built our instruments accordingly (see the lowest and highest note on most pianos even today), but we then take a particular liking to the scale that starts on C using this system.

Even though this worked really well most of the time, in each seven note scale there was one standard combination that was pretty harsh (the diminished chord, such as the B chord in C major). To get around this, people just kind of accepted that B could be in two different places - the usual position if that sounded better, the flattened one (one twelfth of the octave lower) if that worked better. The system of sharps and flats wasn’t standard yet - nor was the modern staff system at all, for that matter - and it was only really this note that it mattered for most of the time, so the solution was to write the letter B in two different ways depending on which one you meant. There was a round B and a square B.

And then Germany gets really good at making printing presses. This is very useful for spreading copies of musical notation, but it does present a problem: your press probably doesn’t have two ways to write the letter B. So what do you do instead? Use another letter for one of them. H is the eighth letter, and it even looks kinda like the square B anyway, so that becomes the standard practice.

One fun quirk of this is that it permitted Johann Sebastian Bach to write his last name in musical form, which he went on to do in a whole bunch of his compositions

By 2019 he had already tried to convince everyone that that cave rescue diver was a paedophile for thinking the submarine was a stupid idea

There’s a region close to the UN-forces-only section where each side is allowed a limited presence under the agreement. Israel still shouldn’t be occupying it, but putting troops there doesn’t necessarily violate this specific agreement deoending on the numbers involved

On a per capita basis it still emits about half as much as the United States.

This is still high, and China’s per capita emissions have only gone up over time so far. It currently emits about as much per person as the EU does. This is too much, and both China and Europe need to reduce their emissions by a lot. Every year that they don’t is more damage done.

Also, China’s emissions figures are misleading since it has an enormous surplus in trade of manufactured goods.

Consumption-based emissions paints a slightly better picture of China, but only slightly. It is still 90% of the EU’s per capita emissions on this metric.

And just generally, what on Earth is that last full paragraph? “If China almost doubles the number of cars it sells, and it subsidises all of them by this number that appears to have been plucked from nowhere, and then it also subsidises batteries and solar panels by the same amount, well that makes a really big number that America isn’t doing nearly as much as!”

The WP article is not some anti-China screed; it is openly discussing China’s very real opportunity to lead the way for the world here. It brings up a lot of the progress that China has made and its enormous success in manufacturing the things needed for cleaner power. That it also brings up some of the challenges China faces in doing so hardly seems “bizarre” to me. Right now China is doing no better than Europe, and the fact that they’re both better than America will help exactly none of us.

It’s worth considering that that still means a (slim) majority of millennials don’t own a home. You’re also roughly in the middle of the generation, and the hone ownership is quite heavily weighted towards the older end

If my time working in one is any indication, taxi drivers and drunk people. I don’t think those demographics overlapped often, or at least I hope they didn’t

If you’re on board with puzzle games and a bit of Souls-adjacent combat, you should check out Tunic. It is very relevant to the thing about manuals, even as a digital-only game

Right, so the “where” is the USA.

If we take this definition of the generations and table 12 from here, we can compare the values 16 years apart to see generations at equivalent ages. 2023 is the most recent data on that table, so millennials would be 27 to 42. We can’t match that perfectly with the 5 year bins on the table, so I’ll just average every bin that that generation covers a majority of. With that, we get:

We can compare generations at the same age by looking along the topleft-bottomright diagonal. This shows gen Z having a lower ownership rate than Millennials did 16 years ago. Millennials were doing better than gen X 16 years before that, but have now fallen behind both gen X and the boomers.

Sure enough, the entirety of the discussion of homeownership in the article you linked is:

American Zoomers’ home-ownership rates are higher than millennials’ at the same age (even if they are lower than previous generations’).

Not sure what data they’re using since that doesn’t tally with the above, but that’s still second-worst, and the actual worst is the generation the post is actually talking about.

Up compared to what, where, and by how much?

I have to use Teams for a remote course I’m doing and holy shit no program I have ever used is worse for notifications than Teams. Even turning off everything doesn’t prevent it from flashing on the taskbar, so you then have to go disable that for everything as well. I know someone sent a message in chat, Teams, I am in the fucking call where they sent it

The guy that got “installed” was the leader of the opposition in the parliament, had the backing of a clear majority of the parliament, and had been supportive of the protests. It would be weirder for the Americans to support anyone else

Hamstrung or not, the delivery in that article is 70,000 tonnes of fuel. That’s almost as much as the Russian delivery in the article.

Mexico been doing a lot

Where I am, autumn is when the spiders decide they want to be indoors

Russia did author this one, and it was in November 2021

Hell even on the issue of Cuba specifically, during his presidency Trump chose to undo the progress Obama had made. He has already made it worse