I heard* that the Romans used salt as currency but the soldiers blew it all on a bizarre Himalayan pyramid scheme and that is why air-dried (unsalted) cod was a staple for most of the middle-ages. And now Grok et al have heard that too, I guess.
At my big age of peak masculine maturity I am uncomfortably aware that I am not actually *good* good at anything where that is a meaningful possible level of accomplishment, but I switched to bass guitar a decade ago and play in contexts where "barely mediocre" is good enough and have a good time
But isn't Orban normally the key mover in this stuff? In terms of logistics and (especially) providing definitely very legitimate funding? If the cheques aren't cashing anymore, who's going to bother?
Starmer trusted his first-choice chief of staff, Sue Gray, to have prepared an oven-ready plan for power, which Labour would roll out the day after winning the election. It turned out no such plan existed. Starmer then replaced Gray with his election mastermind McSweeney, who had been serving in a political director role. McSweeney was given the power to provide political input on Starmer's behalf into a huge swathe of policy decisions across government and, for a time, things improved. https://www.politico.eu/article/keir-starmer-dangerous-leadership-style-uk-peter-mandelson/
“Starmer assumed Gray had a super-secret plan for governing but she didn’t so they did nothing” is such a wild line, and the hacks seem so uninterested in learning more about this astonishing, farcical setup
(Disclaimer: I do not deserve nice things; my guitars are Squiers and my cameras are an elderly Canon Rebel Digital Something and a fun new to me Canon Rebel Something Analog and I suck at guitar and photography but I have fun)
Contrariwise, I occasionally wonder if (say) Leica would even be a viable company if they only sold cameras to people who in any sense other than financial means deserved them
One of the great pleasures of living in the Netherlands (and Utrecht in particular) is watching the positive transformation of the city's infrastructure over the past few years.
Better bike paths and parking, new public spaces, more street trees, and a huge boom in new housing construction.
Good debut by Gary Cooper, mind you
There's a brand of socks here called "Happy Socks" which specialises in brightly colored "wacky" hosiery for people (like me) whose socks are the highlight of their personality.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_S...
I don't think I ever owned a Sarah record (I don't think they were often in shops) but I do have a treasured Shop Assistants long-player, which I uh treasure
Without revealing my age I was like "that sounds exactly like a tweepop band that would have been on Sarah records in the late 80s", and I must admit I have a soft spot for that sort of thing. (I am also a bassist and a dad but not that one.)
Someone remarked, apropos M Goodwin, that they don't like to fund *competent* scholarship: there's too much risk of the scholar getting notions of their own
I mentioned this to a passing swift or swallow and they said "Wtf? You're down there too!"
This is Avignon Papacy *slander* and absolutely ignores the fact that a) the Romans had been doing it for centuries before that and b) Rome was on fire and you too would want to light out for the south of France. The worst sin of this administration is it's poor grasp of late medieval history.
An in-house accounting (&c) system was implemented for us by consultants and it is uh not very good and we can't do anything about it and I occasionally weep bitter tears at how much better we could have done it in-house.)
(Dull geeky aside: My organisation doesn't implement a SQL dbms, because we are not completely mad, but we *do* define our own schemas; we have ported them from MySQL to MariaDB in the past and we occasionally ponder moving to PostgreSQL if we need to.
So, as a Dutchperson, I would on balance prefer this to be settled in US&A while freely granting that that isn't looking especially likely right now
The so-called Hague Invasion Act "would allow the president to order military action in The Hague, the seat of the ICC, to prevent U.S. or allied officials and military personnel from being prosecuted or detained by the ICC."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America...
I for one would really enjoy an Elseworlds police procedural set in the FBI's Forensic Astrology Department. (The Elsewordliness would not extend to astrology actually working, that would ruin the fun.)
You* can literally steal momentum from a moon or planet, it's a key technique in space flight
Wait, they put primates on weather satellites?!
Between the end of the Apollo missions and now I mostly took the view that sending primates into space was not a well-motivated use of resources, but everyone is having so much fun with this stuff (and they aren't actuallly *my* resources in any useful sense) that I have dialled back the curmudging
Woah, are warcrimes illegal in Australia now?
A dramatically lit photo of Artemis II launching from the pad with rich, saturated colors. Erik Kuna described on Xitter how he set up the remote shot several days in advance, with a plastic cover on his camera and the hope it didn't get damaged by bad weather or bird poop, then gave further technical info in the comments: "RAW file is a must here. You need the range of the raw file for the post to bring down highlights and boost shadows. This was shot on a 13 year old Canon 1DX with a Canon 24-105mm EF lens at about 70mm. The settings were setup to adjust with the changing light during the two hour windows. In aperture priority, at f/8 since its was a wider shot and not technically exposing for the engines but rather the whole rocket, then a minimum shutter speed of 1/1000th at an auto iso setting (which ended up at iso 100 a few frames in as soon as the SRBs emerged). It’s using a negative two stop exposure value and a center weighted metering since most of the light will be emitted from near the center of the images from the rocket and to avoid clipping too much in the highlights. That’s about it… if it was a daytime or a nighttime launch it’s slightly different but about the same setting. For the record, the hardest launches are from sunset, twilight to night windows like this one!"
One of the most stunning launch photos I've ever seen. I'm including the photographer's full technical description in the alt text, just to clarify that this isn't shop or slop.
📸 Erik Kuna for SuperclusterHQ
- Artemis II pad remote | ~1,000 ft from Pad 39B | Kennedy Space Center
The volume on the radio broadcasts of the beisból randomly turns itself up and down. This seems to be well-known among listeners but I have so far failed to uncover any trace of an acknowledgement from the perpetrators. Honestly not that great!
www.reddit.com/r/mets/comme...
Still desperatly trying to reach my goal. My bank continues to fight me for my life savings and to make matters worse I'm now dealing with Covid recovery and a debilitating back injury. Please, it mean everything 🖤
CA: $helpmarghoul
V: @marghoul
P Highsmith--whomst I had never even met!--murdered me on a train once and I've been a bit wary about creators ever since
Look could we please hold off on laughing this guy to richly-deserved scorn until *after* my Luxembourg Autarky Project is lavishly funded?
Many such cases, including me
why dae folk ask babies stupid shite lit ur getting big arent ye as if the wee cunts gony be like aye moira
missing the scots around here