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

Firefox.

EU-based

but I'm looking fore something more Cornish

I'm assuming that this isn't "Cornish" as in "based in Cornwall in the southern UK", but some other use of the term.

Northvolt filed for bankruptcy, and in the text, they claim Northvolt filed for bankruptcy protection. Like idk, there's a huge fucking difference between the two...

Bankruptcy is a legal status that provides protection from creditors when you're out of funds to pay them. Basically, suspends their ability to compel payment of your debts to them while a court addresses the situation.

Might be too wide for your phone screen and font settings; Eternity can scroll the table, though, if you drag.

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/who-has-the-most-to-lose-from-northvolts-failure

#Shareholder fallout

10 largest shareholders in Northvolt

Alluringly alliterative.

Had not heard of this.

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

In June 1950, Mao requested to join the Chinese People's Volunteer Army (PVA) as an officer in the Korean War. PVA commander Peng Dehuai and other high-ranking officers, fearing Mao Zedong's reaction if his favorite son was to be killed in combat, had long opposed allowing Mao to join the PVA and tried to prevent him from entering. Mao Zedong overrode Peng, who allegedly shouted, "He is Mao Zedong's son. Why should it be anything else?" Peng instead had Mao assigned to himself as his secretary and Russian translator, under the pseudonym "Secretary Liu" at the PVA headquarters, located in caves near an old gold mining settlement in Tongchang County. This location offered excellent protection from United Nations (UN) air attacks and was far from the front lines of the war.[4][6] However, the safety was an illusion, as the US Air Force completely controlled the airspace.[7]

On the evening of 24 November, two UN aircraft, P-61s on a photo reconnaissance mission, were seen overhead.[8] According to multiple Chinese eyewitnesses, sometime between 10:00 am and noon on 25 November, four Douglas B-26 Invaders dropped napalm bombs in the area.[9][10] One of the bombs destroyed a makeshift building near the caves, killing Mao and another officer, Gao Ruixin. Several conflicting reasons have been given as to why Mao was in the building, including suggestions that he was cooking food during daylight, in violation of Chinese Army regulations,[1][8][11] fetching documents, or sleeping late due to night duties,[9] which had led to him missing breakfast.[12] Another reason given was that due to the high amount of communications, being the PVA headquarters, the Americans were able to combine aerial reconnaissance with the direction of radio waves, to identify its location.[13]

Peng witnessed the explosion nearby and, realizing Mao was in danger, tried to run towards him but was physically restrained by his guards. Peng screamed, "if you don't let go, I'll kill you!" to which the guard responded, "if you kill me, I still won't let go".[14] Mao's body was reportedly burnt beyond recognition and was only identifiable through a Soviet watch given to him by Joseph Stalin. Peng immediately reported Mao's death to the Central Military Commission, but Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Yang Shangkun ordered the CMC and Politburo not to inform Mao Zedong. Only in January 1951, when Mao Zedong asked his personal secretary Ye Zilong to have Mao transferred back to China, Ye informed him of the news.[citation needed] Mao was buried in Pyongyang, in the Cemetery for the Heroes of the Chinese People's Volunteer Army.

Some Chinese citizens and groups who oppose Mao Zedong commemorate the anniversary of Mao Anying's death by eating egg fried rice. According to some sources, on the morning of 25 November 1950, Mao Anying, alongside staff officers Gao Ruixun and Cheng Pu, cooked egg fried rice for breakfast in the office of Peng Dehuai, despite orders only to cook at night for fear of American air raids. It is alleged that their preparation of that meal drew the attention of American bombers, contributing to the deaths of Mao and Gao.[15][16]

The fried rice story of Anying's death has never been confirmed. The Chinese Academy of History, a state-run historical research institute set up in 2019, had denounced the story as rumors spread by those who aimed to disrespect Mao Anying's sacrifice to his country. The academy, citing declassified documents, stated Mao's position was compromised when the camp's radio transmissions were being intercepted.[17][18]

"Egg fried rice protests" are a form of internet protest used by Chinese users occurring yearly around 24 October, Anying's birthday, or around 25 November, the date of his death. Posting recipes for egg fried rice is meant to mock the death of Anying; such posts are usually blocked or taken down by Chinese officials and can lead to sanctions against those involved.[15]

There are a lot of ways to measure that.

I guess one reasonable metric is how long I probably played it. Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far and an old computer pinball game, Loony Labyrinth probably rank pretty highly.

Another might be how long after its development it's still considered reasonably playable. I'd guess that maybe something like Tetris or Pac-Man might rate well there.

Another might be how influential the game is. I think that "genre-defining" games like Wolfenstein 3D would probably win there.

Another might be how impressed I was with a game at the time of release. Games that made major technical or gameplay leaps would rank well there. Maybe Wolfenstein 3D or Myst.

Another might be what the games I play today are -- at least once having played them sufficiently to become familiar with them -- since presumably I could play pretty much any game out there, and so my choice, if made rationally, should identify the best options for me that I'm aware of. That won't work for every sort of genre, as it requires replayability -- an adventure game where experiencing the story one time through is kind of the point would fall down here -- but I think that it's a decent test of the library of games out there. Recently I've played Steel Division II singleplayer, Carrier Command 2 singleplayer, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, and Shattered Pixel Dungeon. RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included tend to be in the recurring cycle.

Automating jobs away is a good thing

I remember seeing someone post this comic a while back, thought it was a pithy explanation.

https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TheWealthofDragons.png

If you’d ask an average American to name a European tech company

You're probably right for the typical American, but I could do Skype (Estonia), Spotify (Sweden), and SAP (Germany).

Many business-to-consumer tech companies -- like, online services and such -- have relatively high fixed costs and low variable costs. That is, you pay about the same to develop software whether you have one customer or a billion customers, and the cost of adding servers to add capacity for more customers isn't all that high.

But your revenue grows linearly with the number of customers that you have.

As a result, it is really, really bad to be small if you are in that category. So it is very important to scale up quickly, so that you get as far away from that "one customer" area as quickly as possible. Lose money while you're small, okay, but become large as soon as possible.

It's easier to scale if there are few barriers to expansion.

My bet is that the major issue here is that compared to the US internal market, the EU's internal market is relatively-fragmented. There are different languages -- yeah, there are some interchange languages, but not everyone can speak them and certainly not everyone prefers them. There are greater legal differences among member states. I would give good odds that there are larger cultural preference differences, which will affect things like branding. So for a B2C company trying to rapidly expand from Finland to Germany and Greece and Ireland and Spain, you've got a lot of hurdles that a similar company trying to expand from California to Texas and New York and Virginia and Florida don't face. And that tends to keep them small longer, which is really bad for companies with that high-fixed-cost, low-variable-cost structure. If you're an investor, safer to invest in a US company that will probably grow and get big easily. Of course, you could start an Estonian company and then grow in something like the US market...but then you have to deal with the complexities of spanning markets from the get-go. I'd expect that the barriers there are substantial, or you'd expect to see things like companies starting up in, say, Uruguay and then growing in the US domestic market, and we don't see that.

There are tech companies that originated in the EU. But it's rare for them to be the big business-to-consumer sort. So I don't think the issue is -- for example -- excessive regulation or some other things I've seen blamed (I mean, it might not help, but I don't think that that's the dominant factor). That should affect all tech companies, not just the big business-to-consumer variety. I think that market fragmentation is the big factor here.

Brussels is working on some of that, like legal differences across member states. Some will just naturally tend to smooth out. But some are just not going to go away in the near future; French consumers are probably going to want stuff in French, for example, and Italians in Italian.

There was some recent report I remember seeing from Mario Draghi floating around on either here or !EuropeanFederalists@lemmy.world that spent some time talking about market fragmentation as an issue for competitiveness.

EDIT: Oh, and OnlyFans (UK).

1. when it’s an airplane we call it speed tape and its used all over the aircraft, mostly by maintenance, to keep the plane together. Don’t worry about it.

...prior to this comment, I hadn't.

I don't hate it. It's technically interesting.

But I do see a lot of people applying it to things that really don't need it. I think a lot of people saw Bitcoin and decided "I'm going to go make something that uses blockchains". That's a solution-in-search-of-a-problem, whereas you probably want to start with a problem and then look for technology that solves the problem.

I don't think that blockchains are a very practical solution for all that many problems.

IIRC from /r/Europe discussion, propane is also not uncommon as a fuel in Turkey.

kagis

Yeah:

https://auto-gas.net/mediaroom/turkey-leads-autogas-consumption-in-europe/

Turkey leads Autogas consumption in Europe, while ranks second in the world. 80% of all LPG consumed throughout the country is used as Autogas. In addition, Turkey is the only country that has more LPG vehicles more than gasoline-powered vehicles.

In Turkey, the number of LPG vehicles in operation is close to 5 million.

Ah, that'd do it then. Thanks.

My understanding from past reading is that there's a history of diesel trucks pulling off emissions control hardware to increase their MPG somewhat, so they save money on fuel. First ran into it when reading about the practice in Europe, but also happens here in North America.

I don't know whether it's possible to tweak the computer-controlled system to achieve a similar effect, but it'd make sense.

kagis

It sounds like he would have the authority to require in-office work.

https://www.opm.gov/frequently-asked-questions/telework-faq/remote-work/

Does an employee have a right to engage in remote work?

No. Remote work is not a universal employee benefit or an employee right.

Can a manager deny a request for remote work?

Yes. Because of the policy and potential costs implications of remote work arrangements, agencies should evaluate and consider such requests (especially those submitted primarily for the convenience of the employee), on a case-by-case basis, highlighting the cost effectiveness and business benefits to the agency or organization.

Can a manager terminate an existing remote work arrangement?

Yes. An agency may determine that a remote work arrangement no longer meets the business needs of the organization or that the arrangement negatively impacts the employee's performance. However, terminating a remote work arrangement, particularly if the employee resides outside the local commuting area of the agency worksite, may require additional considerations. If the decision is made to terminate the remote work arrangement for business reasons, there may be costs implications for the agency to consider.

That being said, my guess is that at least some federal employees probably pretty much have to work outside of the office, just because of the nature of the job -- like, it may be travel-intensive. I guess they could end work-from-home stuff.

If you're interested in home automation, I think that there's a reasonable argument for running it on separate hardware. Not much by way of hardware requirements, but you don't want to take it down, especially if it's doing things like lighting control.

Same sort of idea for some data-logging systems, like weather stations or ADS-B receivers.

Other than that, though, I'd probably avoid running an extra system just because I have hardware. More power usage, heat, and maintenance.

EDIT: Maybe hook it up to a power management device, if you don't have that set up, so that you can power-cycle your other hardware remotely.

I mean, some of those EOLed nearly a decade ago.

You can argue over what a reasonable EOL is, but all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn't going to keep getting updates.

Throw enough money at a vendor, and I'm sure that you can get extended support contracts that will keep it going for however long people are willing to keep chucking money at a vendor -- some businesses pay for support on truly ancient hardware -- but this is a consumer broadband router. It's unlikely to make a lot of sense to do so on this -- the hardware isn't worth much, nor is it going to be terribly expensive to replace, and especially if you're using the wireless functionality, you probably want support for newer WiFi standards anyway that updated hardware will bring.

I do think that there's maybe a good argument that EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way. Like, maybe hardware should ship with an EOL sticker, so that someone can glance at hardware and see if it's "expired". Or maybe network hardware should have some sort of way of reporting EOL in response to a network query, so that someone can audit a network for EOLed hardware.

But EOLing hardware is gonna happen.

The price of lumber never really went back to where it was before covid.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/lumber

The price in at the start of 2020 was ~$377.55 per thousand board feet.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

$377.55 in January 2020 is $460.34 in July 2024 dollars.

The price of lumber in July 2024 was $423.27.

So it's gotten back down to and fallen below pre-COVID-19 prices in real terms.

It does look like the price has risen from July 2024 to November 2024, so it's presently higher, but it has not stayed above pre-COVID prices since the end of COVID-19.