Outdoor cats mainly kill the things that kill mosquitoes, just saying.

Funny enough, that’s a leading theory of why attraction to and the desire to roll around in catnip by felines was selected for.

At least it’s an enclosed building this time and not a freestanding stack of blocks with wind sensitive construction cranes on top.

I mean, unless they’re directly cutting up old buildings into the final block shape for this (which would be a nightmare to actually do), it doesn’t actually help that much. You can’t practically un-make concrete and turn it back into that slurry that comes out of the mixer truck, AFAIK all “recycled” concrete means is old concrete gets crushed into fragments and used in place of gravel. But the gravel is not the truly problemic part, you still need more cement to bind those fragments into your desired shape, which releases carbon and consumes water.

Concrete has a very high carbon footprint. The manufacturing of cement liberates a lot of CO2 that had previously been in the ground as minerals. Different reaction from burning fossil fuels but indistinguishable as far as the atmosphere is concerned. Not to mention cement plant furnaces are usually fossil fuel powered.

Since the blocks are not (as) structural, less cement and more gravel/old concrete fragments can be used which would mitigate this to some extent, but I’d still imagine this is pretty similar to electric cars where it takes a significant portion of its service life to even reach net zero from the carbon released from building the thing.

Concrete is quite possibly the worst material ecologically speaking for this application. Presumably it was chosen for its physical properties, but still. I do wonder if just using straight stone quarried directly into the final block shapes could mitigate some of this, since concrete is basically just stone whose shape and composition we can control, and either way the same mass of material needs to be mined out of the ground so I imagine they’d break even on mining ecological footprint. In fact, if you just need something heavy to store gravitational potential energy, and water is not viable for whatever reason, why not use crushed cars or something?

I get why China wants to explore this, they’re just putting some chips into all emerging technologies just in case, but I’m still of the “just use the excess energy instead of trying to store it” camp. Storing energy at grid scale is just not practical with our current technology, 100MWh is basically nothing at the level of entire countries’ electricity demands, a single city goes through that in a very short amount of time. For example, data centres could be required to only use excess renewable energy for non-real-time computation like training AI, or scientific computation, since they’re a load that can ramp up or down almost instantly. Or you can make hydrogen from water or even hydrocarbons from the air with the excess energy, for things like airplanes and rockets that don’t yet have a viable path out of burning stuff to work. Or, since the majority of the world’s electricity is still fossil fuel based, just build infrastructure to send that energy to where it’s needed because there will always be somewhere that could ramp down a fossil fuel plant and use renewable instead. I think only after all electricity is renewable can storage really become viable, and technology will have long advanced by then and all the primitive storage schemes we come up with now will be obsolete anyway, so while I do support experimenting with storage methods (which this seems to be), actually committing to building out a ton of storage right now seems premature and a poor investment of our limited effort and resources.

Two layers of “based on” in your OS is indeed a bit much.

Before reading: probably because someone randomly chose it for the template and it’s really hard to change it because old crotchety government institution

After reading:

The agency said elevator inspection certificates are all system-generated. Whatever is causing the font to change is happening on the technological backend, which means the city’s central IT department has the answer.

It appears the quirky font choice happened when the city migrated old software to different servers, according to Grant Ulrich, managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Buildings.

“If the font is not installed with this really old software, it picks the font with the next alphabetical name in the list of whatever fonts are available on that server,” Ulrich said. “So this was not a choice. It was a ‘find the next best option’ decision made by a computer.”

Somehow even worse. Also, love the not giving a shit of whoever printed them, I’d probably ignore it too depending on how little they paid me.

Basically “because the most powerful countries in the world tried their absolute hardest to kill it for decades and they finally succeeded in its slow death.” Pretty much everything other than de-linking from the world economy was brought on by the West.

AKA “socialism doesn’t work because it’s our mandate to ensure it doesn’t work”

Infantino just sounds like a nickname for Trump lol

GOOD

/*

Or the (probably, IDK) more common way to do it accidentally, cd into /, think you’re somewhere else or type into the wrong shell, and then rm -rf *

Basically because we as individuals can’t compete with corporations, so when there are large corporate clients they will drive the price up for individuals. It’s not guaranteed to happen, but these types of business to business contracts are usually not a good sign for us.

A guy went to adobe.com and told the truth. This is what happened to his organs.

The dimentia took hold for a second.

I’d declare even more war if they tried shoving him on me.

Small loan of 80 billion dollars

deleted by creator

China: “Wow they’re a lot less tough than we thought”

A fool and their money are soon parted

Commodore as a brand has ruined every company that’s ever bought it. Cursed brand some say.