barsoap

hink about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.

a) it's not significant amounts, it's quite cheap, per user, to run lemmy, e.g. lemm.ee is one of the bigger instances and costs 200 Euro a month, b) tipping 20% on a bill that doesn't even include any service is not the same as donating to a service you like. This is more like a patreon which doesn't lock anything for non-donating users.

US gets to appoint Ukrainian politicians [...]

LMFAO so if, say, Scholz says to Macron "I don't think Trump should be US president, he's not suitable, Harris is a much better option" then it necessarily follows that the EU is controlling US politics.

i’m an individual with imperfect knowledge doing my best to reach the closest thing to truth i can with the information i have available

No you aren't, or you wouldn't just take those "US appoints Ukrainian politicians" talking points at face value. You'd use your own head and assess for yourself what that tape means.

She's a good science communicator in her specialised area from a particular POV (No, Sabine, physics, also theoretical physics, has made progress in the last 50 years) but past that she neither has a clue nor the discipline to work towards having a clue, or the sense to work with people who have a clue.

She lacks that one crucial virtue of a scientist: Considering herself to be clueless. And as a science communicator you need to be a good scientist -- not in pedigree of your degree, but approach to knowledge.

Note before I get the inevitable Russian shill comments - I’m not justifying any aggressive invasion by Russia.

No, you're just parroting their BS propaganda.

Some of those organizations just happen to be associated with the far-right groups that were part of the initial government that was unconstitutionally appointed In 2014 after Euromaidan- a series of violent protests that forced the pro-Russian president to flee the country.

The constitutionality of the confusing as fuck situation is quite irrelevant (the Rada had the power to do what it did, it did have the votes, but procedure was not necessarily followed properly when disposing of the AWOL president) because there were new elections right after, healing any hiccup. Elections which tanked the results of those far-right parties which weren't exactly impressive in the first place.

Elections which solved a popular uprising caused by the president to renege on the country's path to EU accession. That was the sparking point for the protests, which at that point could've been solved without an erm special electoral operation, but the Russian puppet ordered Berkut to fire on protestors, which those didn't appreciate and consequently failed to calm down and disperse.

After said puppet went AWOL and got disposed and the interim government did nothing much really but organise elections, Poroshenko got elected (yay, another oligarch, as is tradition), trying to solve Russia's invasion (the green men one) militarily. Zelensky pushed him out of office in the next elections, on a peace ticket, as a Russian native speaker... and then Russia invaded even more. They fucking hit Kiev. The Ukrainian army had re-grouped extensively after the little green men operation, the SBU had identified and neutralised gazillions of Russian operatives, either the FSB didn't notice or they didn't want to tell Putin what he didn't want to hear. The rest is taxi memes.

If that -- those totally irrelevant right sector fucks -- is the US's influence in Ukraine then it truly is pitiful. Compare the influence of glorious Europe: Ukraine actually wants to join up!

We’re not supporting Ukraine because of democracy and sovereignty and human rights, we’re doing it for geopolitical motives.

You should be supporting Ukraine because of democracy, sovereignty, and the security guarantees you gave them by signing the Budapest memorandum, remember, when Ukraine gave up its nukes. You are supporting them not because you care about any of that including your promises, agreed, you're too fickle for that, but because you don't want to lose Europe as an ally, a geopolitical motive, because boy can I tell you Europe cares about all four points, more than everything Europe cares about Ukrainians caring, about supporting a rightful struggle by a people dreaming of a better future, and Russia re-igniting imperialist BS. And you'll continue to support Ukraine even if you don't care about Europe because you care about Ukraine not nuking up.

All this, ultimately, just amounts to a French win. They wanted strategic autonomy for Europe for a long while, they considered NATO braindead for a long while, getting the US out of the equation, having everyone see how fickle, unreliable, and of course self-absorbed and self-righteous or self-hating (depending on how that exceptionalism swings) you are, is just what's needed to for the rest of Europe to fully buy into French doctrine. The US is driving nail after nail into the coffin of Atlanticism and the French are loving it.

...and that's another reason why you won't be dropping Ukraine: Because then your military-industrial complex would lose a very affluent customer. Currently European states get shouted at by the French when they buy US instead of European, that voice would fall completely silent because noone would be buying US, any more. Who'd have thunk in the face of Trump greed might just save your geopolitical standing.

Relevant Indian Metal.

The actual leader is Bernd das Brot.

The EU is plenty strong enough to defend itself -- and Ukraine -- against Russia. Several times over. Without switching to a war economy. Your maths fall flat once you realise that much of those 70% are aircraft carries in the Pacific and random research projects into fusion or whatever, utterly irrelevant to the question at hand.

On the contrary without the US in the game expect Poland to put boots on Ukrainian soil pretty much instantly, and that's after the rest of the EU convinced them to not march straight on Moscow.

OMG yes I said "blast furnace to reduce steel". I meant "to reduce iron [to produce steel]". Obviously: What else would you use hydrogen for in a blast furnace?

But "reduce steel" is still, at least colloquially, correct for recycling steel: Scrap has rust on it so it also needs to be reduced. Which you would've realised instead of trying to turn this into a silly gotcha if you knew what you were talking about.

Go ahead, do tell me about your plan on how to produce steel, from ore, without getting fossil fuels or hydrogen involved. Charcoal? Could work, but I don't think the economics make sense.

What makes iron is the lack of O in Fe~3~O~4~ (that's magnetite, other ores are similar). Carbon for alloying is not an issue it can be easily covered by biomass, you smelt the magnetite by combining it with hydrogen resulting in iron and (very hot) water, no carbon involved, then you add carbon, something like 2% thereabouts, to get steel. Add too much and you get cast iron. The overwhelming majority of coke used in the coke process is not used for alloying, but smelting and reducing the iron. That part of the steel making process is completely decarbonised in the hydrogen process, and the carbon that's used in alloying, well, it's not in the atmosphere is it.

You can rip the oxygen off iron ore with electricity but that's less energy-efficient than taking a detour via electrolysis. It's different with aluminium, there using electricity directly is more efficient.

Sad to day I now understand your point of view. Natural gas wins.

If you think that's what I'm saying then no, you don't understand my POV.

In essence, yes. And we need the hydrogen/ammonia/methane/methanol/whatever anyway to do chemistry with, so we'll have to produce them in some renewable way anyway, and at scale. Using them in peaker plants is only a fraction of the total use.

Even with fusion up and running we're going to do hydrolysis. You can run a car on electricity, or domestic heating, also aluminium smelting, but not a blast furnace to reduce steel nor a chemical industry. Hydrogen, in one form or another, is the answer to all of those things. As things currently stand the market is in its infancy but the first pipelines are getting dedicated to hydrogen, the first blast furnaces made for operation with hydrogen are up and running... and the hydrogen mostly comes from fossil gas. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem you need demand to have supply but you need supply to have demand, so kick-starting the demand side by supplying it fossil hydrogen makes a lot of economical sense, that means that the supply investments can go big and be sure that they'll have customers from day one.

Yes it's a good thing and it's more locally-running stuff that they're investigating. Things like fuzzy search on your history, tl;dr bot, etc.

Malware site detection would be another idea, though they of course already have a non-local solution for that. Maybe, we do have to come full circle after all don't we, a model that can give you an estimation of how likely it is that the page you're looking at is AI slop.