redditmademedoit

one of Europe’s greatest vulnerabilities: its heavy reliance on US [insert noun]

Mother fucker, I can see that’s your library card. Don’t test me. I’m elite hax.

The UK is not in the EEA though

Absolutely, I think games should dispense with the good/evil thing all together and, for instance,focus on whether choices are self-serving, “pragmatic”, diplomatic, earnestly attempting to be moral (i.e motivations). Of course, this only gets interesting if the game doesn’t consistently punish you for being amoral by imposing consequences that are harsher than the rewards. This also means not punishing the player with worse and less content for not following the “intended” story arch.

I haven’t played a lot of Frostpunk 2, but I think that game does a lot with similar concepts.

I don’t know how it works in Australia, but a plus to subsidizing solar installation on roofs is that the home owner still has to co-invest for a considerable part, so you kinda get a leveraged build out, as opposed to the government directly building installations. But the balance between private and public good should be weighed carefully all the same.

In Sweden, people – wealthy home owners – have gotten a lot of public financial assistance for mounting solar panels that would either way have paid for themselves in a matter of years, lowering electrical bills and raising house prices for the owners.

Overall that is a good thing, the pros of increased solar adoption outweigh the glaring inequity, but all the same it’s hard to feel that it’s a part of the general fuckery of governments competing on who can pamper the upper middle class the most. Sweden also subsidizes mortgage interest and has essentially abolished (hard-capped at a low.level) the property tax on private homes. And Sweden has in recent years given financial relief to households based on their electrical consumption, I.e. very little (or nothing if electric is added to the rent) to renters and most of the money going to people with big houses and year-round heated pools.

The discussion on equity needs to enter the debate on things like incentives for solar panels on private homes or grants for energy saving insulation. These are good things, but the money can’t just stack up on top of other political favors to the wealthy. Less useful subsidies need to go. They need to replace other benefits.

So they are already running out of ressources to keep pumping that insane bubble and now need Europe to subscribe to their mass delusion, too?

The last years, possibly aside from the last weeks, I feel like I haven’t seen Ursula von der Leyen talk without rambling avout embracing AI. Nevermind that the EU wants to use mass surveilance against thought crime [cough] evil pedophile terrorist, no one else (promise).

There’s no way Russia could just nibble a little on an EU/Nato country with a full response from Europe, regardless of whether the US backs it up. Whether Europe is in good shape to deal with that is a different story, but I’d say there’s little room to do anything “small” under their own flag.

Yeah, he wouldn’t dare join a direct war against Iran, invade Venezuela or impose massive (even if not as big as he said) tariffs on the world…

The bisexual union

Oh, I agree fully about the focus on phasing out fossil fuels. My impression was that the article argued that it was a temporary method and therefore less valuable than other methods of capturing and storing carbon in terms of offsetting/a carbon credit system.

But what about the climate mitigation (e.g. preventing soil erosion) or potential ecological impact (e.g. habitat restoration). Is it really trivial to compare that to the climate use?

I don’t claim to have comprehensive knowledge on any parts of the equation or how they stack up to each other, I’m just saying that if you have an economical policy that incentivices one measure over the other – which at the of the day is what we’re talking about – it seems sensible to base it on the sum of the measures’ value. If we, for instance, want to disincentivice afforestation that should not strictly be made on the basis of how much carbon it can offset compared to other options.

But maybe that is just my general scepticism towards the promises of future CCS technology talking.

If, for example, the stored carbon in an afforestation project falls by 50 percent every 50 years, it is only half as valuable as a removal project that stores carbon permanently.

Is this really an apple to apple comparison? I could imagine an afforestation project being less effective in sequestering carbon than other permanent efforts (underground deposits?) but still being more valuable overall if taking all externalities into account.

Conceptually, I’m not against the American threat to our way of life being discussed in fewer threads (as opposed to a single megathread). But where you draw the line on what’s “a new and important developement” is hard. Most would draw it far before the US invading Greenland, I.e. the probable triggering of the “find god, quickly” phase of human civilization.

I think you just have to live with a lot of posts being about the unfolding break in the world order for a while. I mean, sure, some posts might have been suitable to merge, but mostly they’re about different developments. The posts are also getting a lot of engagement and generating discussion.

Sweet synthesis: We need a GrokGPT that tells nazis to kill themselves.

Removed by mod

Its both, he’s playing to his fans by being an insufferable edge lord, and declaring hostile intent.

I’m not a developer and not knowledgeable about how his tech works, but shouldn’t it be possible to make a free mod that can interface with his proprietary VR software (which he then could license)?

I think it’s better to focus on the tail end of their arguments, as opposed to whether it’s technically possible.

European banks and investors are stuffed with Treasuries. If they tumble in value because of a threat of a European boycott, then it would probably end up harming Europe just as much as the US, if not more so. Moreover, a large-scale repatriation of capital would send the dollar tumbling and the euro rocketing, which would alone possibly be enough to send many European countries into a recession.

For example, forcing your bank sector to sell off a bunch of assets that are considered “risk free”, comes with consequences.

Also consider that a majority of European leaders seem to be banking on the whole Trump era to blow over at some point soon. They hope to be able to rely on the US again and don’t really want to do any lasting harm (probably).