Posted this to [email protected] yesterday, but just found out this community exists and is much more active.

Going to the Aiel Waste, and presumably Rhuidean, before Rand collects Callandor from the Stone, is a pretty big change to the timeline. I’ve not been a big fan of many of the previous changes, but I don’t think I hate this. The justification in terms of using it to explore Rand’s inner life and acceptance of being the Dragon Reborn in a way the book did through inner monologue (something the TV show didn’t have the luxury of doing) makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t think this should affect the overall story too much in the long run.

Connections
Puzzle #626
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No internet again today, so the boy was unavailable.

Because they’re not actually pro-Communist, they’re anti-West. At least, that’s their primary and most important alignment. They might also be communist, but that always comes second to hating on the west.

Going to the Aiel Waste, and presumably Rhuidean, before Rand collects Callandor from the Stone, is a pretty big change to the timeline. I’ve not been a big fan of many of the previous changes, but I don’t think I hate this. The justification in terms of using it to explore Rand’s inner life and acceptance of being the Dragon Reborn in a way the book did through inner monologue (something the TV show didn’t have the luxury of doing) makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t think this should affect the overall story too much in the long run.

https://youtu.be/Yy-A3CLMunA

I unironically really like the idea of sortition. I’m not convinced it could or should make up the totality of all governance, but for at least broad strokes/high level decisionmaking I think a group of random people given access to a variety of expert opinions and the resources to help consult more broadly could come up with something that is genuinely a good outcome. I’d especially like to see it tried out at the local level, around things like development approvals/zoning laws, street design, locations of parks, libraries, and other public facilities, and the other important work done by councils. I believe the power of local people making decisions about their local community would be a really powerful way to get around NIMBYs.

It’s definitely not a complete scam tech, and it will likely have its place. It’s just not especially feasible at the same scale that battery electrics are.

And mental health.

Which one?

Connections
Puzzle #625
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Skill 73/99
Uniqueness 1 in a Million

I hate blue today.

It is big tech. It’s just less big tech than Xitter and Facebook. And it at least kinda-sorta has some vague federation-like design. And it’s a “public benefit corporation”, which doesn’t mean much because it’s still for-profit, but it at least means they’re allowed to not put profit ahead of public good, unlike normal for-profit companies. Not as good as Mastodon by far, with its true federation and true not-for-profit status in the guiding entity, but it’s not nothing.

If I said the variant of the Altaic hypothesis that includes Korean, can it be classed as a crack theory?

I’m not particularly surprised about China. They’re making big advances in this area. Their continued growth in carbon emissions is alongside growth in renewables because their total energy usage is growing insanely fast.

With cars specifically, think about cars you’ve seen on the road here in Australia. Of the EVs, where have you seen them from? Apart from Teslas, the vast majority I’ve seen have been either Chinese or Korean.

“Is there meat from horses?” he asked in Russian.

Nyet, the waiter replied.

“But is there horse’s meat?” Max went on. “Meat of horse?”

Nyet.

“What is this meat here?” Max indicated the dark oval.

“Konina,” the waiter answered. It was a word Max didn’t know, so he nodded, and then after the waiter left, borrowed my phone to look it up in Google Translate.

“Horse meat,” the phone reported.

I would love to know what was going on here, linguistically. Are they really not thinking of konina as being horse meat? Is it similar to beef vs cow, with a special word for the meat? That latter seems strange, because at least in English, if someone said “is there cow meat in this” and I had served them beef, I’d definitely say yes.

Anyway, thanks for sharing. That was a really beautiful story to read.

As an Australian I don’t find this beautiful at all 😠 We only have a single tiny territory (our equivalent of America’s DC) with any phase out plans. Our government is just so incredibly beholden to fossil fuel interests. It’s incredibly frustrating.

But Japan is one that surprises me, considering how slow their domestic industry has been to adopt electric cars compared to China and Korea. I thought they were going in on hydrogen, despite it not really making serious progress.

(Although an obligatory [email protected] and reminder that even EVs are terrible for the environment and are much worse societally than public transport and bikes.)

The way overhangs are handled is one of the key differences between Germany and New Zealand, as I understand it. New Zealand makes no effort to level its parliament, and simply accepts overhangs as a distortion of the pure proportionality. I like the simplicity of it, but for fairness I think Germany’s system is probably better. The new system is almost like the inverse of how I suggested party seats should work, which I quite like.

One thing I don’t particularly like is the 5% minimum both countries use. It’s not unreasonable to have a minimum I think, but it’s unfortunate for all the voters whose vote is essentially wasted because they didn’t support a popular enough party. It’s a less severe version of the problem FPTP has, IMO. Over 13% of voters had their vote completely wasted in last weekend’s election. It’d be nice if there was, like, a preferential system, where if your first choice of party doesn’t get 5%, it can go to another party of your choice instead. BSW voters, for example, might have chosen to give their vote to Linke, and FDP voters to Union. So the end result would have been:

• Union: 207
• AfD: 131
• SDP: 103 or 104 (depending on rounding)
• Grune: 73
• Linke: 86 or 87
• SSW: 1
• Plus more to whichever of those parties the 28 seats’ worth of “other” voters gave their 2nd preference to

I’ve also often been curious how it would work if the local seats were elected not by FPTP but by IRV. Would that have a positive or negative effect on the representation, or not really have much effect at all? I don’t think any place has done it, and I don’t even know if anyone has seriously sat down and theory-crafted it.

Oh yeah I’ve heard some commentators talking about the debt brake before, and how some are pushing to do away with it. It didn’t occur to me that military spending would specifically be the sticking point there.

I know they sometimes get a bad rap

In terms of their language learning, they proudly make the decision that any time they have to choose between making the app fun and making it better at teaching, they choose fun.

Which sounds bad at first, until you realise…people who aren’t enjoying what they do are more likely to quit. And people who have quit aren’t learning the language at all. Quite a clever bit of thought there, really.

Cor anglais is usually said in French. French horn is usually said in English.