Yeah, that’s fair. They certainly don’t make it easy to vote in USA, which is deliberate to a large extent. Easy to forget.

I think it was the votes of less than a third of eligible voters that made Trump 2.0 a reality, roughly another third just behind it, with the remainder not bothering to vote at all. I would say the often fantasized silent majority is actually not pro Trump.

That means that a third didn’t bother, though, despite Trump very much being a known quantity. The exact reason why they didn’t vote is up to debate and it’s probably several reasons at once (these people are not a monolith), but it doesn’t say any good things about them or the political system.

Anti-intellectualism has a certain tradition in the USA, it’s kind of well-known.

A German perspective: I think Germans have always been this stupid, they’re mostly just more willing to say the quiet part out loud than they were between 1970 and 2014 (rough estimate). The difference is that the far right extremists have a popular platform now, and the mainstream parties refuse to ban either the far right party or all the media (X, Facebook, local tabloid press etc.) that’s pushing them. If this party had been around in 1960, it would definitely have been banned.

So far, nuclear deterrence has worked without fail. The soviets had their first successful nuclear weapon test in 1949, Stalin died in 1953 - neither he no his successors ever fired a nuclear weapon at an enemy, despite being in a cold war the entire time until the end of the USSR.

And frankly, if the German faschists were dumb enough to use nuclear weapons offensively against enemies, I’d assume they would be bombed into oblivion instead of invaded.

We’re REnazifying. The future is looking dark …

AfD sagt “geil”, aber wenn wir ehrlich sind sieht es in den anderen Ländern, unter deren nuklearen Schutzschirm wir uns stellen könnten, nicht viel besser aus. Was ist schlimmer, eine AfD-Regierung mit Atombombe oder eine russische oder vielleicht amerikanische Invasion? Pest oder Cholera …

AfD says “hell yeah”, but to be honest it’s not looking much better in other countries who might extend their nuclear shield (is that even a thing in English?) to Germany. What’s worse, a German far-right government with nuclear bombs or Germany being invaded by Russia or maybe the USA? Lesser of two evils …

edit: whoops, wrong language. I hope this manual translation gets the point across.

Steel can be done reasonably well with hydrogen.

It depends on the availability of hydrogen. We don’t really have hydrogen in the required amounts right now, especially not green hydrogen as opposed to hydrogen that is made from fossil fuels. Maybe the recent discovery of geological hydrogen in France will play out positively, that would be a big stroke of luck.

Nah, fuck that. I want them (Orban and his cronies in this case) to not live on this planet anymore. Let’s shoot them to Mars!

I’m not entirely opposed to high electricity prices, since it incentivizes people to lower their electricity consumption (should be complemented with a flat sum that’s paid out to everyone for financial balancing; i.e. the German “Klimageld” idea). Though that doesn’t really work when manufacturing moves to other countries with lower electricity prices (and probably dirtier electricity in most cases) like China.

Steel and other materials don’t grow on trees and we can’t become carbon neutral if demand for materials and energy keeps rising. At least until we’re able to fully electrify ore mining and metal smelting, but we’re very far from that.

Ever heard of cheese analogue?

And now I’ve eaten all of it slowly over the coarse of 2 months. Just fistfulls of late night cheese.

See, that’s exactly why I don’t do that! Also I don’t think my local supermarkets actually sell 3 lbs of mozzarella for $7.

In that case, the ingredients must be so cheap that the food coloring actually makes a significant price difference for them.

Yellow cheese (assuming it doesn’t use food coloring) typically takes a lot more time to make than white cheese, so yeah. Though mozzarella is also just the standard pizza cheese, it seems like most people in the know prefer mozzarella’s properties (e.g. stretchiness) over other types of cheese.

It would be dangerous to assume that the underfunded infrastructure is an accident, though.

I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the EU and its members don’t fumble this opportunity (both for themselves and for the scientists). Many EU countries are having a resurgence of anti-immigration sentiments and e.g. in Germany the immigration bureaucracy was already extremely awful before the recent shift to the right - it’s one thing to be shitty and stupid about refugees, but by what I hear from friends who have personal experiences it’s pretty bad for highly qualified people, too.

The Bundesrat acts a a check to the Bundestag, as it has to approve laws proposed by the Bundestag before they can take effect.

Only specific laws, they don’t have a say for most day-to-day politics.

And will they do something about it?

It’s usually a good idea to gather hard data (as “hard” as a survey can be, anyway) even if the results seem obvious, sometimes it brings surprising results. It can also serve as a base measurement for whether the issue is worsening or improving if you repeat the survey.

Not a fan of these anti-science takes I’m reading here TBH.

That was rather insightful. And I definitely need a primer on writing good commit messages, and possibly on what a good version control commit is in the first place.

And TIL you can actually use some kind of markdown in git commit messages!

It’s usually a good idea to gather hard data (as “hard” as a survey can be, anyway) even if the results seem obvious, sometimes it brings surprising results. It can also serve as a base measurement for whether the issue is worsening or improving if you repeat the survey.