Ertebolle

It’s about ads. The great thing about putting videos on YouTube is that Google does the work of selling ad slots for you, the not-so-great thing is that because those advertisers are actually Google’s customers, if they think they might be upset to see their ad running in your video, they’ll err on the side of pulling it.

But I daresay if Russell Brand had advertisers working with him directly, most of them would also be suspending their relationships with him right now; nobody wants anything to do with this sort of allegation.

For games, my suggestion is that you try a whole bunch of them; get Google Play Pass and, if you have a Netflix subscription, browse through the list of Neflix Games and try anything that looks remotely appealing. None of these are gambling or freemium - they have no way to make money from you except for your continued subscription - and there’s something for pretty much every conceivable genre.

If you can give any guidance about the specific sorts of things you like from games (action, story, puzzles, building stuff) I’m sure people can recommend some specific titles.

This - a lot of people don’t know this, but the beginner method for solving Rubik’s cubes is pretty straightforward algorithm that anyone can memorize; competitive speed cubers use a much more complicated one, but even with the beginner method, with enough practice you can get your times down to under a minute.

Yes. And even before the Russia mess they were going to replace nuclear with LNG, which is still pretty bad.

No. Among other things it remains the linchpin of energy security for industrial countries like China and Germany that lack adequate domestic oil or natural gas reserves to power their economies with those.

It’s not as useful for day-to-day budgeting as a more granular one, but people generally only look at their finances closely once a year at tax time and so it’s a good point of comparison for that; get a sense of how your financial life is evolving.

It’s also the number you’re asked for on tax forms, other financial forms (loans, financial aid, bank accounts), questionnaires (though you can lie or ‘prefer not to say’ on those)… comes up a lot, basically.

a) Good for them

b) How long before NVIDIA throws up their hands at the whole thing and does their own Linux distro + pushes all their cloud AI customers to use it? (it doesn’t seem like they’re ever going to be shamed / coerced into actually open-sourcing their driver)

Sure, but after years of fucking one can eventually find oneself feeling a biological urge to procreate as well.

It’s not a blood superiority thing, dude - we’re instinctually driven to procreate. If for whatever reason you can’t or don’t want to do that, you can adopt a kid and love them exactly as much and in exactly the same way as you would your biological offspring, but the idea of conceiving and bearing a child appeals to a very basic part of human nature for a lot of us.

Yeah, everyone I know who adopted did so as a last resort and had a long expensive miserable slog of it; once you get through that experience it’s just as satisfying as having a biological kid, but it’s no picnic.

There are a couple sneaky ways states are trying to get around this.

The biggest one is the NPVIC - basically, states representing a majority of electoral votes (considerably fewer than the 3/4 required to ratify a constitutional amendment) would enter into an interstate compact agreeing to award all of their electoral votes - and hence the presidency - to whoever wins the national popular vote.

It might be struck down as unconstitutional, but it also might not - states have a lot of power over how to allocate their electoral votes. But even getting to the needed 270 electoral votes is a stretch; we’re currently at 205, but that includes most of the low-hanging fruit, because populous hard-right states like Texas tend to view the current system as favoring Republicans (and indeed the 4 presidents in the last 150 years elected despite losing the popular vote were all Republicans) and so even if a popular vote would bolster their national influence they’re still against it. And the non-Republican-dominated states that haven’t entered it yet - MI/WI/PA/AZ/NV/GA/NC/NH - are all presidential swing states that enjoy outsized influence under the current system and have no incentive to disrupt it.

So realistically, the only way to eliminate the electoral college would be for a Democrat to win the electoral vote while losing the popular vote, thus gaining support from hard-right state legislatures eager to delegitimize the election winner.

kan(arckan(sauce)) = sauce

At the risk of wading into a millennium-old international grudge fest, the Greeks do skewered meat way better than the Turks do.

No bowl, stick! stick!

Urban dictionary’s got it:

beach

a verb; meaning to do “EVERYTHING BUT” with someone. has developed from people carrying out this practice on holiday, on beaches. particularly with people whose names are unknown. the sand also makes it interesting.

girl one: so what did you do when you went to tenerife ?
girl two: i beached
girl one: niiiice

In fairness, for much of history it was perfectly normal for two people of the same gender to live together and eat together and sleep in the same bed and write affectionate letters to each other without that necessarily implying that they were lovers.

Nah, bikes are way too neatly organized

Digg doesn’t deserve weird special capitalization anymore than Reddit does.

He was also responsible for the whole simple hacker-y design / vibe that helped lure people from decadent beveled-everything Digg.

Interesting. But the difference is 4 days over a 400-year cycle, i.e., in a typical human lifespan you’ll maybe experience one more Thursday the 20th than Friday the 20th.