North American trees species have evolved to have more vibrant fall colors than European species.
So you're basically proving that British guy's point that yes, they are a different color but no-one believes it because they think they know what fall looks like in temperate climates.
music-library $ du -h -d 0 .
270G .
I am not looking for a compromise. I listen to my high-quality digital library on shuffle most of the time, and am very well aware that my phone allows me to access orders of magnitude more music than even the most compact CD player.
When I do listen to my favorite albums as LPs, the clunkiness and the artifacts are part of an Experience. I can listen to exact copies of the digital masters of those songs any time I want to, but sometimes we do things BECAUSE they are not maximally optimal. Sometimes I want to take a walk alongside the river and get my feet a little bit wet even though I could have worn boots. Feel a little something, you know?
The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it's completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.
With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go "uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you're at it?".
This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency... on Arch Linux. It's rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org's homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.
Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?
Well you hardly have a leg to stand on about "feeling superior" when you're out here being smug about criticizing harmless tastes.
I don't see how listening to vinyls in the privacy of my own home is considered performative, but if that's the only reasoning you're willing to entertain... Well go right ahead, I thought I made a good case for it but I guess I was wrong and I am buying vinyls for the clout.
You've completely missed the point.
You grew up in a world where the quirks of analog formats were nothing but technical limitations to be overcome. It is true that a FLAC is literally superior in every way to a Vinyl if your value function only takes in cost, quality, and convenience.
HOWEVER Gen Z grew up in a world where music was always cheap and convenient to access. We also (mostly) grew up in a world of touchscreens and always-online gadgets and doodads. My generation's first portable music player was often the iPod touch. You know what all of that does to a person? It creates a deep craving for tactile feedback. For technology that doesn't nag with software updates, for music that can't be "unlicensed" and pulled from your library remotely, for a music player that you can touch and feel and interact with in a more meaningful way than tapping on the little square of glass that already runs our lives. For the little rituals that have been stripped away, like flipping a vinyl at the midway point or rewinding a tape.
The entire point of analog is that it's "worse". It's un-clinical, it's raw, it's tactile, it's physical. Listening to my favorite albums on vinyl is such a better experience than through the disembodied shuffle of my phone. I don't crave maximum audio fidelity or convenience because I always could have those things literally whenever I want.
The hard part isn't processing payment... They already basically do that for themselves with the steam wallet.
The problem is getting the ability to withdraw funds from your customers' bank accounts. That requires a commercial relationship with your customer's bank and going through an insane amount of red tape. And there is no standard worldwide protocol for this, you'll be starting from zero in every market by cold-calling major banks.
The only viable approach is to have an army of salespeople, accountants, and project managers to do all those individual negotiations.
The EU has been trying for years to have an indigenous continent-wide payment processor. The first attempt failed, now Wero is poised to succeed in the next few years but that's building off negotiations that started a few years ago with pressure from the EU and buy-in from the financial sector, and still only a handful of European markets have been integrated at this point.
Now imagine all this difficulty but you have to also get active buy-in from every market worldwide. There's a reason Visa/MC have a near monopoly on international payments in the western world, and it's not that no-one else thought to get a piece of that very juicy pie that's making them literally billions in profit every year.
Who cares about the engineers caught in the crossfire or the lost efficiency, when Manager A can tell Manager B to shove it up theirs so they can show their N+1 a Very Important Project Milestone. That's an end-of-year bonus right there (for them, not you).
A good manager protects their team from this bullshit. A successful manager actively sabotages the entire company by making sure they get all the prestigious projects and constantly derail everyone else into serving their personal interests.
I get what you're saying but what I'm trying to get across is that "sexy" and "objectifying" are distinct from "gaze". It's about the translation of the author's desire into the framing of the scene. I doubt that Babish is attracted to himself in that way, he just framed it in a way that makes sense with the constraint of not wanting to show his face.
It's semantics, if you want to use objectification and "male/female gaze" interchangeably that's fine (though I'd prefer not to use a gendered term if we're talking about a phenomenon that's not inherently gendered).
But Shen used "female gaze" correctly in the original sense of the phrase here so I don't see why people are getting mad that he didn't objectify the guy as well, it's obviously not a comic that's meant to be read as "female objectification is cool".
Even though the term has been somewhat bastardized into "sexual objectification" in general, "the male gaze" originally specificallt describes the trope of straight male cinematographers/directors literally framing camera shots differently for women.
The whole point is that the director (traditionally always a man in mainstream movies) views the character/actress as an object of sexual desire, and the camera - and by extension the audience - sees the woman through that lens. Literally forcing the audience to gaze from a straight male POV. This is an inherently sexist and heteronormative, usually subconscious process.
Now I do enjoy seeing Henry Cavill shirtless in a bathtub, but that's not the (fe)male gaze because the director wasn't imposing their personal bias, they were making a conscious statement. It's objectifying fan-service but not sexist nor heteronormative.
I suppose you could argue that the female gaze does exist in media where the authors are overwhelmingly female, such as the boylove genre. But that doesn't apply here because Shen's character here is literally a presumed straight man.
If fascists didn't make up the (near-) majority of politically active citizens like you're insinuating, then maybe your institutions wouldn't have immediately crumpled like wet paper.
The rule of law is literally dead in the US. Trump's team has repeatedly brazenly broken the constitution and showed that no-one is willing to stop him. It literally couldn't matter any less what the constitution says, because the opposition is too chickenshit to do even the bare minimum to defend it, because there is no meaningful popular support for active pro-democratic action in the US and that's a hard fact.
Overwhelming popular apathy is Putin and Xinping's key to power, and Americans are even worse because these inbred morons really unironically thought that the second amendment was meant to prevent tyranny.
You're mixing up feet and meters. The death zone is at 8 km, i.e. 26k ft.
2100m is barely mountaineering, you can bring grandma and the newborn hiking there and at most you'll notice a mild shortness of breath.
In fact normal cabin pressure at cruising altitude is equivalent to 7000 ft. Besides a lot of ear popping most people don't even notice it, though mild altitude sickness (i.e. a small headache) is possible, but ultimately harmless.
Weird, either there's some backroom drama with Interac or now might be the time for you to ask their support about it.
They already support local payment processing schemes such as Bancontact, iDEAL, JCB, Pix, etc. A good chunk of their international customer base already isn't dependent on the big American payment processors.
The way towards undermining Visa/MC's power is for more governments/Central Banks to push for indigenous alternatives which abide by local regulations rather than foreign puritanism. This is already a desirable goal for most both from a geopolitical POV (reduce American control over world finance) and a financial one (VISA/MasterCard charge outrageous transaction fees).
American consumers are fucked whichever way things go though, it's not like the regime is going to make a move to break up the monopoly nor to push for less censorship in media. If Valve somehow goes through with this and makes deal with all major American banks, they'll be done just in time for the Save The Children From Pedostanic Video Games Act or whatever the fuck that will force them to purge all thought crime from their platform.
Did you even read the article? Even under the VERY GENEROUS interpretation of contract law that contracts can't be predatory (which is not a particularly popular philosophical stance outside of cyberpunk fiction), AWS MENA fell short of even their typical termination procedures because they accidentally nuked it while doing a dry-run.
I don't know where you work but if we did that to a paying customer, even IF there was a technicality through which we could deny responsibility, we would be trying to make it right.
The author put it well:
What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup? What happens when that backup contains HIPAA-protected information or client data? The whole promise of cloud computing collapses into complexity.
Multi-region cloud computing is already difficult and expensive enough, multi-cloud is not only technically complex but financially and legally fraught with uncertainties. At that point you're giving up so much of the promise of cloud computing that you might as well rent rack space somewhere, install bare-metal infra, and pay someone to drive there to manually backup to tape every 3 months.
This level of technical purity is economically unfeasible for virtually everyone, that's the whole point of paying a vendor to deal with it for us. And you know who doesn't need to put up with the insane overhead of multi-cloud setups? That's right, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, who will be getting paid for hosting everyone else's multi-cloud setups while they get to run their huge infra on their own cloud without fear. The last thing GAFAM competitors - especially OSS projects - need is even fewer economies of scale.
Stop with the victim-blaming, this blunder is squarely on AWS.
Infighting
Ranked-choice voting is a decent choice for uninominal elections.
Proportional elections are a popular alternative, and they are arguably fairer than even RCV because they are not susceptible to gerrymandering or votes otherwise being weighted by geography (i.e. your vote still matters just as much as anyone's if you live in Redneckville, Mississippi). They do have other downsides though.
Unfortunately here in Belgium we do proportional voting and the Prime Minister is nonetheless a far-right separatist in charge of a right-wing coalition so, uh, maybe FPTP is not the only thing that stands between the citizenry and a communist utopia lol
A computer-generated "Van Gogh" is not art any more than a mass-produced coffee mug is artisanal, no matter how "realistic".
This has all happened before. Take photography. People thought it was the end of visual art. If anyone can take a photograph, why would anyone spend years learning to paint?
Artists answered by pushing the medium beyond the limits of realism. Impressionism. This did not make photographs go away. But when I see a picture of someone's cat, I don't usually go "art!" – even though 200 years ago the mere existence of a photorealistic picture would have implied very impressive artistry.
The work that clankers are very quickly taking over is that which does not require art. Visual filler. Lorem ipsum. Corporate communications. Out with artisans, in with industrial machinery. This is the same story that has already happened to almost every artisanal trade, from scribery to pottery to smithing. Visual artists and writers thought themselves exempt from the industrial revolution; they aren't. It will be a worsening socio-economic crisis. But it won't "end" art. Clankers definitionally cannot, and will never do art. Not until they gain a conscience of their own.
I don't trust the US government to do literally anything right with this, and I'm kinda surprised Google didn't already gift an underage child to Trump so he'd make the problem go away.
However a perfectly viable option that I'm sure the previous government looked into would be to entrust Chromium (which is Open-Source though not copyleft) to a new, independent nonprofit made of Google's former chromium team led and paid for by a consortium of the major commercial chromium users (Google, Microsoft, etc.). It would be in everyone's best interest to share the relatively small financial burden so that Chromium can remain decent and competitive.
This wouldn't be anything revolutionary. This approach of financing an independent open-source project as a "common good" is basically how the Linux kernel has been developed for many years now, most Linux code is written by corporate sponsors.