Skua

Aviation is about a fortieth of the world’s total emissions, so while there are certainly bigger sectors to look at it’s still substantial enough that it’d be extremely helpful to fix it

For sure, I’m not disagreeing with the article. The problems raised by this report are not what the comment I was replying to raised, and I think that we should criticise these things for their actual problems.

The advantage of making fuels from plants isn’t in them burning cleaner, it’s in the fact that growing the plants takes carbon out of the atmosphere. That means that the carbon released upon burning them was carbon that was already recently in the atmosphere, as opposed to being deep underground like it was with fossil fuels

That doesn’t negate the issues of land use changes and similar, but in terms of plain old net carbon emissions they absolutely are better

I’m technically not on lemmy but I will enthusiastically throw my vote behind the TBBT-is-shit cause

To be honest though it’s still just a shit TV show. There are plenty of those around. It’s not woth giving them much thought

I’m still using it. I’ve got nice headphones and speakers that run off of a cable and no interest in top-end phones, so it makes sense to get a phone that fits the more expensive audio stuff rather than a bunch of adapters. Nokia’s cheaper smartphones have served me quite nicely

I don’t think anyone is saying anything happened overnight. We’re talking a fifty-sixty year delay on the events mentioned above. But also, I would want to see some evidence that Africans on average weren’t aware of the legacy of colonialism up until the 2010s, because that seems like an unreasonably low estimation of education on the continent.

Besides that, Russia and China also saw declines throughout the 2010s from peaks in 2009/2010. That would suggest to me that something in the 2010s made Africans on average less approving of the world’s major powers in general

https://news.gallup.com/poll/644222/loses-soft-power-edge-africa.aspx

America was up above 80% in 2009/2010, so this change can’t be because either of those

Poland is one of the larger NATO militaries and would probably be leading the early parts of a NATO-Russia war. Poland will absolutely be targeted either way in the event of a nuclear war

There is a Convention on Cluster Munitions but many of the world’s largest military powers are not signatories to it, including all of the top five by expenditure in America, China, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia. Ukraine is also not a signatory.

Doesn’t Bilbo make actual coffee for the dwarves at the start of the Hobbit?

You might be interested in mixed member proportional voting. It’s not exactly what you described, but similar in philosophy. It has FPTP elections and then a second round of regional electors which compensate for the disproportionality of of the first round. It doesn’t achieve perfect proportionality and is potentially open to abuse by some methods involving puppet parties, but it mitigates a lot of the issues with FPTP

Seeing as you referenced the UK Labour Party you might already know this as the system used in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies

I think you may have missed part of OP’s idea here. They specify multiple-member constituencies in which all candidates get elected and their power is proportional to the number of votes they get. The total power of the constituency is conserved, it’s just divided between multiple electors.

It would probably influence people to vote for the perceived winner instead of their choice.

This is an issue with FPTP regardless, unfortunately

It wasn’t actually originally Sunak’s idea, this one was Johnson and Priti Patel. So probably not. Or at least, that wasn’t the original motivation, I would not be surprised in the slightest to hear that they’re moving to exploit it. Reporting in 2022 had said that other places had either been rejected for being unsuitable or had refused to agree to the deal, so it seems like Rwanda was basically just the one place that said yes. Being far from Britain, landlocked, and poor enough relative to Britain to be cheap to persuade (you know, if your idea of value for money is burning it to be a dickhead to refugees) makes it ideal as far as the creators of this policy see it

The EU has cut its imports of Russian gas down from nearly half of the total supply to about 15% since the war started, so that’s not nearly the threat it once was

Russia isn’t necessarily fine with it just because they started it. After all, they seized Crimea back in 2014 and got away with it without a fight. Russia also made a push to capture Ukraine’s government in a matter of days at the start, which they wouldn’t have done if they didn’t think there was a chance of it succeeding. It’s very possible that Russia expected this to be over quickly and based its decision on that expectation

The thing is, he wouldn’t do it openly. He’d pass the names to an assistant who would make some anonymous posts online and let it go from there. Sure, maybe that can be proven in another trial, but that’s too far away to help the witnesses or to avoid slowing this case

Pffft come on mate, it eats metal. You send a monk and a druid to handle that.

Niger, not Nigeria. Unless there’s another story that o have missed

Given that Iran paid for them years ago and is now in a bit more of a tense situation than usual, I have a feeling Iran is saying to Russia that they’d better deliver or they’ll stop selling stuff to Russia. Iran will be fine if Russia loses to Ukraine, so they can afford to make that threat

It seems odd to me that this article is framing octopodes as a surprising inclusion. Aren’t they generally known to be some of the most intelligent animals of all?