In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic.
Jesus Christ. I had no idea so many people were buying these things. That's astounding.
If you'd asked me to guess what percentage of households had one, I'd have guessed single digits.
how is me renting a car and fueling it less expensive than a train seat for the literal same route?
Car rental companies operate in a competitive market, as do gas stations. Competitive markets are pretty good at driving prices down.
Trains tend not to.
https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/business_economics/natural_monopolies.html/
Railways as a natural monopoly
Railways are often considered a typical example of a natural monopoly. The very high costs of laying track and building a network, as well as the costs of buying or leasing the trains, would prohibit, or deter, the entry of a competitor.
To society, the costs associated with building and running a rival network would be wasteful.
I can see and feel the headcrab like it's actually there.
At some point in humanity's future, I assume that it will be a thing and be widespread. Just too many potential benefits to having high-bandwidth links to the brain not to eventually do it.
But it's a path with a lot of hurdles along the way, and risks.
The Valve Deckard was a little more ambitious than had been originally anticipated.
I think that this is okay, because this lemmy instance isn't a commercial operation.
I guess that places like PinkNews and similar commercial media outlets might be open to lawsuits, though.
Note that under the Kansas bill, it appears that depictions of homosexuality qualify as also needing to be locked behind an age gate. Like, not "homosexual sex", but homosexuality.
Don’t look, kids! According to Kansas lawmakers, this is pornography.
Images and text depicting gay affection could be swept up by age-verification bill
A same-sex couple exchanges rings at a marriage ceremony. You might think it's a sweet moment. But should we be protecting children from seeing it? (Getty Images)
Take a good look at the photo just above these words. You should see two men exchanging rings at a same-sex marriage ceremony.
You’re also seeing, according to the Kansas Legislature, the kind of pornographic content that should be walled off from those under age 18 with age-verification software. That was the consequence — intended or not — of passing Senate Bill 394. All 40 state senators voted for the legislation, including 11 Democrats. In the House, nine Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill, 92-31.
Max Kautsch, a Lawrence media lawyer, outlined some of the problems.
“The online age-verification bill expressly incorporates the definition of ‘harmful to minors’ that already exists in Kansas statutes, a phrase defined to mean ‘any description, exhibition, presentation or representation, in whatever form, of … acts of … homosexuality,’ ” he told me. “The term ‘homosexuality’ is undefined in the law, but it could include a wide swath of conduct between two persons of the same sex, including kissing, hand-holding, and other activities that would be considered ‘public displays of affection.’ ”
A couple of gentlemen exchanging rings, as shown above, would certainly qualify.
I encourage everyone to study the actual bill. From my perspective, it not only invokes a double standard against the brave Kansas LGBGTQ+ community but actively seeks to chill free expression. The proposed law applies to “any commercial entity” that shares content online, which means it could sweep up individuals trying to make money from a travel blog or small businesses that take wedding photos of same-sex couples. (As a nonprofit, Kansas Reflector appears exempt, which comes as a relief given my columns.)
I don't think that they're obscure. If you asked me to name a major, non-state-run English-language mainland European news source, it'd be in the top three to come to my mind: Euronews, Euractiv, and EU Observer (with the last focusing on stuff in Brussels; maybe a better source for the !EuropeanFederalists@lemmy.world community).
They featured prominently on /r/Europe back when I followed it.
In exchange for key support needed to form a new minority government in 2023, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez entered into an elaborate deal with Catalan separatist lawmakers in which he committed to getting Catalan, Basque and Galician recognized as official languages of the EU.
The move requires unanimous backing of the bloc’s 27 member countries, and Spanish officials spent the past two years lobbying European capitals for support.
My understanding is that each EU member got to choose a single official language, and that the EU was obliged to support that language. Regardless of whether Spain is willing to pay in perpetuity, I have a hard time believing that Spain is going to get unanimous support, since it'd presumably create a can of worms for other governments who would then get political pressure from regional groups to fund their particular favored languages as official EU languages, and who may not want to fund that. I mean, kind of a slap in the face to various regional groups in other countries if Galician gets official EU language status, but a regional language in another EU member that has official status at a national level doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory
There are a lot of official languages at the national level there.
EDIT: Maybe Spain could just commit to internally providing and funding Catalan, Basque, and Galician translations of EU official documents, as that wouldn't require sign-off from other EU members.
EDIT2: Huh. Apparently none of Catalan, Basque, and Galician actually have official language status today at the national level in Spain. If they were to become EU official languages, I think that they might be the only languages that don't have national official status, but do have EU official status.
The stuff there is a heck of a lot easier to input than memorizing numeric Unicode codepoints and using GTK's control-shift-U thing that the parent post was suggesting.
Emacs also can do that (C-\ u c s RET to enter ucs input method, and u 2 0 1 4 with that input method enabled), but it's almost certainly not how you want to input oddball characters unless you've no other choice.
Most people aren’t taking the time to type in ctrl+shift+u+2+0+1+4 when a regular minus-dash would get the point across with a single keystroke.
emacs:
C-x 8 _ m
C-x 8 RET e m SPC d TAB RET
emacs using input methods
C-\ T e X RET to enter TeX input method. - - - to enter an em dash when in that input method.
C-\ s g m l RET to enter sgml input method. & m d a s h ; to enter an em dash when in that input method.
C-\ r f c 1 3 4 5 RET to enter rfc1345 input method. & - M to enter an em dash when in that input method.
For X11 or Wayland, if you have assigned a key to be Compose: Compose and then three hyphens to get an em dash.
Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn't want to ask her parents, though I'm not sure that if I were 9 years old that I'd suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I've asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.