Why do I still have a 32" TV? Because that’s the largest size that’s still readily available as an ordinary, cheap, flat dumb panel with a tuner. (Well, that and I don’t especially need a larger one.)

It has a valid, current Let’s Encrypt cert for the correct domain. Maybe you’ve blocked TLS 1.2? TLS 1.3 is the most current standard, but 1.2 has never been deprecated officially and should be sufficient for a site where no money or personally identifiable information is changing hands.

In addition to the sampling issues others have mentioned, there may be some environmental issues contributing to the stats—some areas likely have higher levels of radon in the soil, and thus higher levels of radon gas exposure, for instance.

Betcha the wings’ll taste good if basted with the right sauce.

At least the department was open. There are some hospitals in Ontario that have to close theirs a couple of times a month because they can’t scrounge up even one doctor to cover a shift.

Is it terrible that I’d like to see an LLM trained exclusively on translated shoujo manga trying to give teen boys advice about this?

Yes, there are parts of Canada that remote that still have roads. I grew up in one of them. Let’s posit an urgent but not-likely-to-be-fatal medical emergency, like the torn and detached retina I had a few years ago. That required an urgent trip to a major city in particularly foul winter weather. Nearest major city to where I grew up was 800+km, and there are other towns further out than that one. Add to that battery loss in the cold, plus loss of battery capacity over time if you’ve had the car for a while, plus the vehicle having maybe already been driven that day without time to recharge completely . . . I can think of places up in that neck of the woods where I would be seriously worried that 1000km of rated range wouldn’t be enough, although it would be more than sufficient for where I’m now living.

So I’m talking about shit that, in my experience, actually happens to actual people. The segment of the population involved is, admittedly, not all that large, but it’s of nonzero size—probably on the order of a few million, worldwide, spread through a number of countries that have large areas of empty nothing.

1000km range is fucking stupid. No one should be driving that far at once

I take it you’ve never had an emergency while living in a remote area. Especially not one with cold winters that will tank your EV’s range.

Took me a while to spot the kitty, even though he’s dead center.

I 3D-printed myself a magnet-equipped guide based on some posting on Instructables that I can no longer find. It has a provision for swapping out fences so that it can be oriented reliably at angles other than 90⁰. On the downside, it has to be clamped to the wood and is too small to work well on sheet goods.

That’s caused (at least in part) by assigning timezones according to politics rather than longitude. Some places have gotten really skewed.

Anyway, most of us just want the government to pick one thing and stick with it. We don’t care whether they pick DST, ST, or create a new half-hour timezone to split the difference so long as the changing back and forth stops.

Trump Is Spoiling for a Fight over Canadian Potash

Let’s be honest here: he’ll take any excuse, and if he can’t find one, he’ll manufacture it.

And really, Belarus doesn’t produce enough potash to cover that 12 million tons even if they sent their entire production to the US.

I have an enduring soft spot for Antique Bakery, although more the manga than the anime. (Isekai Office Worker is probably better, though.)

Only in the US. Other countries will be able to push the prices down.

If I recall correctly, last year’s cacao crop failed pretty hard too, although I don’t remember whether or not the reason was related to climate change.

Does it do anything that isn’t in response to a human’s prompting? No? Then it can’t be conscious. Consciousness requires having a sense of self, which implies having needs and desires that one acts to fulfill without needing prompting. Even a bacterium is more conscious than these things.

I wonder if Japanese art store cats are more judgemental than Western art store cats. (The goods seem to have additional labels in kana, even though I don’t think the paper is of Japanese origin, so it has to be Japan. Also, the cats’ names appear to be Shipoko and Shimako, according to the charms attached to their collars.)

I grew up and learned to drive in one of those parts of the province that are too cold sometimes for salt to be effective (up on the Arctic watershed), and it isn’t quite as simple as you might want to think.

In deep January cold, most roads were sanded rather than salted . . . but that only works if you’re dealing with snow rather than ice. The gravel gets incorporated into the snow as it packs down, resulting in a less-slippery surface (although it still isn’t great), but on ice, it slides right off. When you have to deal with ice during the slightly warmer periods, you need a melter. Guess what the cheapest one is? It also has one of the widest temperature ranges over which it remains effective, so it’s the most likely to work after an abrupt flash-freeze. They use a lot less salt up there than they used to, but the MTO still has to go through many tons of it every year to keep the highways open. Without it, it would be possible for some towns to be isolated for weeks.

Add to that, drivers who aren’t familiar with the conditions. Especially commercial drivers. Highway 11 has been having really awful problems lately with transport trucks being involved in various sorts of accidents. And to be honest, there tends to be a bit of a fender-bender period around November where some of the locals have to regain their winter driving skills.

There should probably be tighter guidelines on where, when, and how to use road salt, but completely eliminating it throughout Ontario is probably Not Practical right now.

(And by the way, that gravel? Also a pollutant of sorts that has to be cleaned up when the thaws come. On the highways it eventually becomes one with the gravel shoulders, but in town it has to be swept up and carted away so that it doesn’t block the storm sewers or anything like that. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.)

Is anyone actually surprised by this? It’s one of those things that any semi-competent programmer could have told you would be the case. The study just formalizes it and adds specifics.

And they just randomly dropped Caster’s name in the middle of all that . . .