tal

Probably have better luck working on making mines that self-disarm to bound the time that they're a danger. If states assess mines to be militarily-important

and this war has shown them to be pretty useful

they probably won't forego them.

https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/britain-building-nimbys-hs2-housing

Why do we find it so much harder to build in this country than comparable countries? The obvious culprit is a planning system designed to prioritise objections over permissions, and which benefits existing local homeowners over a wider community who may stand to gain. Throw in the fact that those who have time to campaign on planning issues tend to be older, richer and have less stake in growth, and nature has run its course.

People are more favorable towards development in general than development near them. If you permit local interests to block construction, you will then tend to see less construction.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/a-very-short-guide-to-planning-reform/

Britain’s housing crisis is caused by a deep shortage of homes, especially in the most prosperous cities and large towns. We have built much less than other rich countries for decades – for instance, while England currently builds around 220,000-240,000 new homes a year, the highest in decades, France builds roughly 380,000 a year, a decline from a recent peak of nearly 500,000 before the financial crisis. Japan is currently building 860,000 homes a year, even though their population is shrinking.

The English planning system causes this shortage of homes by making it very difficult to build, in two ways. First, it imposes explicit bans on new construction in large parts of the country – by far the most important and costly of these is the green belt, which exists to block the growth of the country’s most economically important cities and large towns.

Second, the planning process for almost all of the remaining land is highly discretionary with nearly all significant decisions made case-by-case. The uncertainty this creates in the development process reduces the number of new homes and commercial buildings that are built, as it is possible to propose a new development that complies with the local plan and nevertheless have it rejected.

England’s system is internationally unusual – most other countries do not have construction bans outside their biggest and most innovative cities, and instead have rules-based planning systems where applications that follow the local plan must be granted planning permission. Introducing these rules-based decision-making processes is the key goal of planning reform.

Also this legitimates the tech. Just like porn and VHS, the drug cartels endorse stardink.

"Hi there! I'm José Perez. Between 2025 and 2032, I ran over two thousand tons of cocaine into the United States. And when I needed reliable, high speed Internet access to safeguard my very valuable cargo, I knew that I couldn't settle for the second-best. I used Starlink™. Only Starlink™ gave me the peace of mind that my critical business operations would remain robust in the face of unexpected difficulties, be they hurricanes or US Coast Guard cutters. In today's fast-paced, competitive business world, whether you need a reliable video stream to a conference room in one of your branch offices or to a night-vision piloting camera on a semi-submersible smuggling platform, you can count on Starlink™!"

While it's usable and I've read material that way, I've found that I want a larger screen. I've read books on a Kobo e-reader, a tablet, a laptop, and a desktop, and those are fine. The phone requires movement to the next page with more frequency than I'd like.

I agree that OLED screens doing light-on-dark look great at night, though.

EDIT: YouTube clip of an OLED and LCD phone side-by-side in the dark:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I1aGY0Wq5KU

I guess that that's good news for Coca-Cola and other vendors of bottled water.

While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can't see the appeal of the stuff. It's a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can't see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things

if I'm going to read fantasy, I'd far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I've seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.

I've wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven't gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they're getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it's the only fantasy that they've read.

Yeah, I have a friend who develops video games and has given some good recommendations who kept trying to convince me to play the series. I've dipped in a couple times and just walked away unimpressed.

I can think of lots of series that I don't like, just because I'm not into the genre. I think that everyone has genres that they don't like.

I think a more-interesting question is about popular series that I don't like within a genre that I do like.

I didn't like Frostpunk, despite liking city-builders. Felt like the decisions were largely mechanical, didn't involve a lot of analysis and tweaking levers.

I didn't like Sudden Strike 4, despite liking lots of real time tactics games, like Close Combat. It felt really simplified.

I didn't like Pacific Drive, despite liking survival games. It has time limits, and I often dislike time limits in games.

I didn't like Outer Wilds, despite liking a lot of space games. Didn't like the cartoony style, the low-tech vibe, felt like it wasn't respectful of player time.

I didn't like Elden Ring, though I like a number of swords and sorcery games. Just felt simple, repetitive and uninteresting.

EDIT: A couple of honorable mentions that I don't hate, but which were disappointing:

Borderlands. The gunplay can be all right, and the flow of new guns and having to adapt to them is interesting. But every Borderlands game I play, the always-respawning enemies are a turnoff. Feels like the world is immutable. Also don't like the mindless farming of every container with glowing green dots. And for a combat-oriented game, it doesn't make me mix up my tactics much based on whatever I'm facing. While I finish the game, I always wind up feeling like I'm not having nearly as much fun as I should be having.

Choice of Games. I like text-based games, but a lot of games published by this company, even otherwise well-written ones, have adopted a convention of making one win by playing consistently to certain characteristics of a character, so one tries to just figure out at every choice what option will maximize that characteristic. That's extremely uninteresting gameplay, even if the story is nice and the text well-written. I feel like the same authors would have done better just writing choose-your-own-adventure type games if they weren't focused on the stats. I also really dislike the lack of an undo, to the point that I've put some work into a Choicescript-to-Sugarcube converter.

You don't pipe salt water through the data center. You have a heat exchanger that touches the salt water.

The fragrance is available in two versions – one for men and one for women – and will set back supporters a whopping $249 for each 100ml bottle.

https://www.opeu.org.br/2024/09/18/a-profile-of-trump-voters-the-demographics-of-his-maga-enthusiasts/

A Profile of Trump Voters: The Demographics of his MAGA Enthusiasts and Their Relationship to Him

In their majority they tend to be white, male, and mainly older, are highly conservative, support traditional values such as religion and proud patriotism, are less likely to have a college degree, are more likely to be rural or small town-based and lower-income

I dunno if $250 bottles of cologne is highly aligned with what Trump's demographic wants, but I suppose he has more experience in brand building than I have.

It takes more work to avoid salt buildup, but you can evaporate saltwater as a place to dump heat, and we aren't gonna run out of saltwater any time soon. 'Course, only so many places have saltwater access.

EDIT: You evaporate enough water for cooling, you can increase rainfall somewhat in the local area, which boosts crop growth measurably. I remember reading an article about nuclear power plants that use evaporative cooling producing that effect.

kagis

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultural-and-applied-economics/article/effect-of-nuclear-power-plants-on-local-crop-yields/5CE7792374CCEF73CCBA9FC39BF131F6

The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent.

As @papertowels@mander.xyz said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control

Historically, if you were in a noisy environment, you could get closed-back, circumaural headphones

headphones that fit around your ears and had a lot of sound-absorption padding

to help soak up the sound. I still use decent non-ANC circumaural headphones at home.

There are also some people who are more-willing to tolerate discomfort than I am who get in-ear buds, which block noise in their ear canal, and on top of that, fit ear protectors intended for industrial use, like 3M X5 Peltor ear protectors, which have even more passive sound absorption stuff than current circumaural headphones do, and are even larger.

That sort of thing works well on higher frequency sound, but not as well on low-frequency stuff, like engine noise, large fans, stuff like that.

ANC basically has microphones in your headphones, picks up on what sounds are showing up at your ear, and then tries to compute and play back a sound that produces destructive interference at your ear. That is, if you look at the sound waves, where the environmental sound is low pressure, it plays back high pressure signal, and when the environmental sound is high pressure, it plays back low pressure signal. It's not perfect, or it could make environmental sound totally inaudible. But high-end ANC headphones are pretty impressive these days. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones

good, though not the best ANC out there in 2025, and I don't personally recommend these for other reasons

and when they kick on, the headphones are designed to have the ANC fade in; same thing happens in reverse, fades out when you flip the ANC off. It sounds almost as if fans and the like around you are powering up and down when that happens, very eerie if you've never experienced it before. Even the sounds that it doesn't do so well on, like people talking, it significantly reduces in volume.

And ANC does best with the other side of the spectrum, the side that passive sound absorption doesn't

the low-frequency stuff, especially regular sounds like fans. So having both a lot of passive sound absorption and ANC on a given pair of headphones let the two work well together.

People often use cell phones in noisy environments, with a lot of people around, and ANC makes it a lot easier to hear music or whatever without background sound interfering. I think that it's very likely that people will, long term, mostly wind up using headphones with ANC (short of moving to something more elaborate like a direct brain interface or something). It's not really all that important if you're in a quiet environment, and I don't bother using ANC headphones on my desktop at home. But if you're in random environments

waiting a grocery store line, in a restaurant with music playing over the restaurant's speakers, on an airplane with the drone of the airplane engines, whatever

it really helps to reduce that background sound. ANC isn't that new. I think that I remember it mostly being billed as useful for airplane engine noise back when, which they're a good fit for. But it's gotten considerably better over the years. For me, in 2025, good ANC is something that I really want to have for smartphone use.

The problem is that in order to do ANC, you need at least a microphone, preferably an array, and somewhere you need to have a model of the sound transmission through the headphones and be running signal processing on the input sound to generate that output sound. In theory, you could do it on an attached computer if you had a fast data interface, but in practice, ANC-capable headphones are sold as self-contained units that handle all that themselves. So you gotta power the little computer in the headphones. That means that you probably have batteries and at least for full size headphones (rather than earbuds) you might as well stick a USB interface on them to charge them, even if the user is using Bluetooth for wireless connectivity. And if you've done that, it isn't much more circuitry to just let the headphones act as USB headphones, so in general, ANC headphones tend to also be USB-capable. My Momentum 4 headphones have all of Bluetooth, USB-C, and a traditional headphones interface, but...I just haven't really wound up using the headphones interface if I have the other options available on a given device. Might be convenient if I were using some device that only had headphones output. shrugs