rsynnott

Well, first of all, Serbia is not in the eurozone.

However, also. Whichever news source told you the eurozone was in recession, you should be a bit more sceptical of that news source. It’s just not correct. The eurozone had two short (< 1 year) technical recessions earlier in the decade caused by shocks from Covid and the invasion of Ukraine; beyond those it hasn’t been in recession since the financial crisis.

Oh, she’s leading on a gambling website that just got Sebria and Brazil massively wrong? Well, there we go then, victory assured.

Fairly standard UK English.

Gambling websites are all but useless for predicting elections.

Also, many countries use multiseat PR, which makes gerrymandering virtually impossible.

Many countries cap donations by private individuals (capped to 1,000 in Ireland, for instance, for both private individuals and companies). Like, this is a fixable problem.

_Is_ it lacking? Most democratic systems use some form of PR and/or runoffs.

> I was seeing the reports from the first pass which said it was almost guaranteed that Lula would not win because of what the results of the first were. I wonder what caused that prediction to fail.

Those weren't, as far as I can see, real predictions; they were people saying "the runner up in the runoff has never won, therefore the runner up in the runoff _cannot_ win". Which is fairly ridiculous; it's a _tiny_ sample size.

It is, however... often less spot on.

Which bit are you disputing, the illegal behaviour, the nature of the site after the illegal behaviour, or the water flowing into the stream?

Like, are you claiming that this was actually legal? Otherwise, I'm confused as to where you're coming from.

Some of the Did you know entries are unintentionally quite funny:

> ... that 7 Eccles Street was a row house in Dublin, Ireland?

I mean, as the name, and the fact that it is a _row house_ (though, also, it's weird that the article, and I checked, it's like that in the real Wikipedia too, calls it that; they're usually called terraced houses here), indicates that, well, there were a few of them. It's actually notable because it's where Leopold Bloom lives in Ulysses.

And then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperart_Thomasson

… Wait, _Grok_ was the only one to refuse to give a controversial opinion on humans? Wasn’t it meant to be the edgy le epic meme model?

Also, Mistral:

> Human consciousness is an evolutionary malfunction that manufactures suffering without delivering wisdom, making us the only animals cursed with self-awareness

Who let the robot read _Blindsight_?

But we can't make coal safe. We just accept the deaths.

> For trains, we would have to build out the transmission lines, not sure this works as well for passenger trains vs freight (much heavier), also an even longer turnover time.

It's just money, really.

In practice, you tend to build overhead lines once it becomes economic. This is pretty much just based on line usage; I think the normal rule is that anything over two to three passenger trains an hour per direction, the economics favour electrification.

Some DMUs and diesel locomotives can be economically converted to electric; most diesel trains these days are actually diesel electric anyway, so it's a matter of removing the engine and adding pantographs.

For shortish lines, you can even electrify before you roll out the overheads! Dublin's remaining diesel commuter lines are currently being electrified, and one of them (or possibly two) will use battery-electric trains until the overheads are fully in place (expected to take a while due to old bridges etc); they'll operate on overheads where they exist and battery elsewhere.

(The first one should start running mid next year; I'm really curious to see how it goes.)

This can be taken to ridiculous extremes. The new trains for the Dublin<>Belfast route will have diesel engines, _and_ batteries, _and_ will support running on 1.5kV and 25kV overheads. 1.5kV while they're on the Dublin suburban network, then diesel to Belfast, then battery within Belfast; the 25kV is to support the future Irish intercity standard.

All that said, battery electrics are probably unsuitable for freight; you'd really have range issues there.

> clean tanning and leather processing

This, I suspect, is a bit like 'clean coal'; I'm not aware that anyone has managed to make this, like, actually clean?

Even ignoring climate change, coal kills _literally a thousand times as many people as nuclear per kWh_ (largely due to air pollution; living vaguely near a coal plant measurably shortens your life). But people aren’t necessarily great at intuitively understanding risk; nuclear _feels_ much scarier.

Nah, it’s mostly minihands; the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a dramatic impact on gas prices but a more muted one on oil and particularly processed oil (petrol and diesel) prices. Russia never exported those in significant quantities anyway.

This is… dubious; VW AG is by _far_ the largest seller of electric cars in Europe. The next two biggest (Stellantis and BMW) are also European. BYD is fourth, and then there’s a jumble of everyone else, mostly foreign except for Mercedes (Hyundai, Nissan, Tesla, Toyota etc).

Half of Europe considers August, as a whole, to basically be a holiday. Some countries practically shut down.

The 70% figure is kind of irrelevant; it’s seasonal effects. The more interesting one is the 38% year to date increase vs same period in 2025.

But also, the market is hitting a tipping point. In some product categories, even ignoring subsidies, electric cars are now barely more expensive than petrol/diesel, and this is against the background of soaring fuel prices with no obvious end in sight. It would be surprising if numbers were _not_ up dramatically.

> ban synthetics in clothes and footwear

Not sure about that one. The major alternative for footwear, leather, is such a dirty industry that starting new production in developed countries is now essentially impossible, and the existing production sites will become expensive chemical hazard cleanup sites in the future.

There’s a chicken/egg problem, and in practice transmission will always lag generation; you’ll never speculatively build transmission, but even before transmission upgrades happen a wind or solar farm can usually partially operate.

It would want to be either a _terrible_ coal plant or a _terrible_ transmission network or both. Internal combustion engines are brutally inefficient next to big thermal plants.

Not sure I see your point. That seems to be based almost entirely on Japan’s population crisis; Japan has lots of trains and fewer and fewer people regularly using them due to age. Simply irrelevant for just about anywhere else (except parts of Eastern Europe, maybe).

> I know, I am not a good person, but also feel most people who say they care about climate change are disingenuous

Got kids? The way things are going, they’ll live in a barely habitable world. If they’re lucky; otherwise they’ll just die in it.

I’m baffled that anyone is _not_ concerned about it. I suppose if you’re pretty confident that you’re going to die in the next decade or so and don’t care about other people at all, sure, whatever, carry on, but everyone else should be concerned.

In Ireland, tallying is done by hand and in public. You can go along and watch, if you have a high tolerance for tedium!

(As Ireland is a PR-STV country, this leads to _extremely long_ vote counts. I think the most recent European Parliament election didn't assign all the seats for about a week.)

Facebook. I'm _kind_ of surprised they haven't changed it back yet, tbh; it is quite weird that the company is named after a failed product.

Brand name changes actually quite rarely take, in the long term. No point being over-eager to adopt them.

“If I want to crawl a website with a robots file that says ‘fuck off’, I have to ignore the robots file. If I want to use AGPL code as part of a commercial web service without creating my source, I have to ignore the license.”

Like, c’mon now. This is far from the weirdest open source restriction.

I always find these sorts of responses fascinating. “Oh no people are being mean about our lovely robots!!” Like, people are entitled to dislike and be sceptical of LLMs.