Distraction from the Epstein Files, … and oil.

[Russia enters the chat]

It’s a bad sign when you’re looking at two options and have to decide which one sucks worse.

Welcome to US elections for decades.

If your interest is in useful prints, I would highly recommend learning FreeCAD and just making your own to solve your own problems.

Nothing beats the feeling of trying to do something, wishing some tool exists to simplify the process, visualizing what that tool would look like in your own head, designing it yourself, and then watching it (a thing that, as far as you know, has never existed before) get printed into existence for the first time ever.

…

And then realizing that your design has some flaws and iterating over multiple versions as you make improvements. 😉

There are lots of excellent FreeCAD tutorial videos online targeting 3D printing.

“The settlers are trying to provoke the local people into protecting themselves, but if they do the army and police will storm the community and arrest everyone,” said one of the Israeli volunteers, Amir Pansky, a retired Israeli army major.

That’s called terrorism.

Europe needs to ditch the US and do the same deal but with Ukraine kicking Russia out of all of its territory.

And Crimea is Ukrainian territory.

Supporters say it’s over her advocacy for Gazan children.

How DARE she!!! /s

Well, then any mediocre journalist would be asking the obvious next question, “What in the hell were the authorities doing about it for those months?” That would probably have been a good story.

“If it’s been going on nightly for months, did you report it to anyone?” is an obvious question that people would want to know and the reporter should be asking, along with follow up questions depending on the answer.

That’s the problem with most modern journalists. They’re not doing anything remotely akin to investigative journalism. They’re just doing ask softball questions and regurgitate the answer journalism.

The landowner of the neighbouring site said he saw truckloads of rubbish dumped there every night for months.

“I swear, I was going to report it to the authorities first thing tomorrow morning. Honest!”

Russia will not stick to any deal. Even the complete surrender and subjugation of Ukraine will just lead to Putin putting more focus on his actives in Europe.

Later…

“The Palestinians aren’t using this land, so we’re just going to claim it.” ~ Israel

My first thought was, why is Canada allowing these trees to get cut down in the first place. Answer is at the very end of the article.

Drax said the “low-grade” wood used to make biomass pellets had typically been rejected by commercial sawmills and either sold to the biomass industry as waste wood or burned to prevent wildfires. A spokesperson said it was “far better to use [waste wood] to generate renewable electricity rather than leaving it to burn”.

The rules that allow companies in the forestry industry to disregard old growth as commercial waste are part of the problem, Hansen said.

“Even exceptionally old trees can rot in the middle, which is one of their features that makes them so important for wildlife, but could mean the tree is called defective by the logging industry. This could mean that the tree is dismissed as waste wood. But a tree standing up in a forest is not waste,” she said.

So, the law has a gaping loophole that allows the logging industry to cut pretty much everything down.

“You can’t explain that.” ~ Bill O’Reilly

For those, like me, that are curious how they decide who’s eligible…

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-scheme-guidelines/#eligibility

I can’t decide what’s more depressing.

A) The subject of the linked article, or

B) The fact that an article on World Socialist Web Site is linking to posts by Amnesty UK and Defend our Juries (three organizations that should all know better by now) on Xitter.

Jesus

At an absolute bare minimum, the last two should be cross posting everything to Mastodon, and the first should be linking to the Mastodon accounts whenever available.

Oh, look! Amnesty UK has a Mastodon account that they’re not fucking using, apparently never have.

[Edit: spelling]

UG Solutions (UGS) defended its employees’ qualifications for the job, saying it does not screen people out for “personal hobbies or affiliations unrelated to job performance”.

I had to submit to a background check for a job sitting at a desk writing code and had absolutely nothing to do with security or carrying a weapon. Pretty sure that being a member of an anti-Islamic biker gang would have disqualified me.

No. My memory is that the English language article was a bit unclear on the details and had several indications that the author didn’t actually understand the technology, but someone said a Japanese language article did a better job of explaining it.

Brine and fresh water doesn’t make any sense, because you’re spending energy to create fresh water with the brine as the waste. Just turning around and recombining it to make evergy again is stupid. You can’t even get back as much energy as you used to make the fresh water.

But, spending the energy to create the fresh water, letting people use that water as normal, collecting their waste water as normal, treating the waste water as normal, and then, instead of just dumping the treated waste water into the sea, recombining it with the brine to make energy makes a ton of sense.

There was an article the other day about a new plant in Japan that takes the brine from a reverse osmosis plant, and reverse osmosisizes [?] it again back into treated waste water to generate electricity. As I recall, it’s not full scale and meant more as a test/demo/proof of concept, but apparently it works ok for a first attempt.

Russia has won stolen a lot of land and technically they have won stolen (at a big cost).

It matters fuck all what it cost them to steal land.

“Oh, it cost me a lot of money for all the equipment I needed to ‘win’ the money from your bank vault, so you should just let me keep what I 'won '” 🙄