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Great friend of mine, even though we disagree on a lot of (mostly semantic) minutiae. Also, Emilia-Romagna is in the North.

PORTUGUESE

Bom dia, tudo bom? Quero ir a praia hoje, beber água de coco e sentir o mar gelado bater no meu tornozelo.

Depois, vou almoçar ao ar-livre de chinelos. Gosto de comer bacalhau ou outros frutos do mar como camarões; ostras ou lulas.

De noite devo curtir um cinema com os amigos, comendo pipoca e bebendo refrigerante. Não é uma boa ideia?

SPANISH

Buenos días, todo bien? Quiero ir a la playa hoy, beber agua de coco y sentir el frío del mar golpear mi tobillo.

Después almorzaré al ar libre en chancletas. Me gusta comer bacalao o otros frutos del mar como gambas; ostras o calamares.

Por la noche debería disfrutar de una película con amigos, comiendo palomitas y bebiendo refrescos. No es una buena idea?

ITALIAN

Buon giorno, tutto bene? Voglio andare alla spiaggia oggi, bere acqua di cocco e sentire il mare freddo battere sulla mia caviglia.

Dopo pranzerò all'aria aperta in infradito. Mi piace mangiare baccalà [merluzzo] o altri frutti di mare come gamberi; ostriche o calamari.

Di notte dovrei guardarmi un film con degli amici, mangiando popcorn e bevendo delle bibite. Non è una buona idea?

Obviously similar, but not nearly as similar (although context dependent - for instance if you replace your almoço/lunch with a jantar/dinner then suddenly Spanish is a lot more like Italian than Portuguese). However as you pointed out that would be levelled out by differences in pronunciation.

I see my ascent to #4 poster hasn't been commented on at all. This would never have happened in Mr. Morden's days.

ended up forgetting to do this, oops. Part of me wants to wait until the 1st of the month to update it, but eh, may as well do it while I'm thinking about it.

Monthly update:
1) I spent the winter writing songs about getting better  113,382 (+376)
2) Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers  89,842 (+1,193)
3) Filuwaúrdjan 67,867 (+168)
4) Antonio the Sixth 58,323 (+187) [+1]
5) minionofmidas 58,206 (+0) [-1]
6) MASHED POTATOES. VOTE! 57,380 (+0)
7)Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee 54,118 (-5)
8 ) ○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└ 53,859 (+134)
9) Keystone Phil 52,607 (+0)
10) dead0man 46,547 (+233)


11) Torie  46,101 (+26)
12) Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Bodies for Biden  45,451(+172)
13) OSR stands with Israel 45,234 (+493) [+2]
14) Grumpier than Uncle Joe 45,064 (-16) † [-1]
15) Lief 🗽 45,008 (+144) [-1]
16) Eraserhead 44,625 (+240)
17) Mr. Morden 44,066 (-7) †
18) True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자) 42,144 (-12)
19) President Punxsutawney Phil 41,794(+361) [+1]
20) Хahar 🤔 41,708 (-23) [-1]

† : Deceased poster, RIP


No idea which thread was deleted that caused so many old posts to be gone but it did lead to drops in posts for many inactive users.

If the previous month (+a few days)'s pace keeps up, OC will pass BRTD in about 2 and a half years.

OSR likely passes Scott by this time next month. TimTurner will overtake Ernest in about a month.

It'll be a while before we see anyone new enter the top 20, Badger is over 1k posts back of Xahar now.

Gonna disagree with most people here and say that I don’t think it has much to do with the War (it’s kind of incredible how little that colors perceptions of the country itself today all things considered). More broadly, Westerners don’t pay much attention to the politics of non-Western countries (other than Palestine, I guess) unless they’re paid to or have a family connection.

Like even on this forum full of international politics nerds, this is one of the first threads about Vietnam, a 100M+ people, rapidly-developing economy of growing geopolitical import.

Eh, I agree with your first sentence but I am not sure I fully agree with the rest. I think there's something specific about Vietnam where Westerners know less about it than a lot of other non-Western countries (you point out the scarcity of threads even here, which I believe would stand out if you picked a different developing country of 100M+ people in comparison); I would surmise a guess that that's because it has a very stable system of government with no notable conflicts since the one everyone talks about, and in addition it is not an electoral democracy making it uninteresting to us nerds.

one of the largest hurdles to new electrical grid construction is, of course, the Federal govt.  If this does nothing to speed up that process and just throws money at the govt induced problem, then it's very much no bueno.  cite

Indeed, the recent and not-so-recent history of new energy projects tells us that they are in for the long haul before ever generating out into the grid, the Berkeley data shows. Of the projects requesting interconnection in the first 17 years of the 21st century, only 21 percent reached commercial operations by the end of last year, according to the report.

“Completion rates are even lower for wind (20 percent) and solar (14 percent),” the national lab report reads. “The average time projects spent in queues before being built has increased markedly. The typical project built in 2022 took five years from the interconnection request to commercial operations, compared to three years in 2015 and two years in 2008.”

<snip>

Any power system which chooses to interconnect and integrate with the larger grid must file an interconnection request and enter the queue. Once feasibility and system impact studies are done, and if the project isn’t withdrawn (which happens more than not) an agreement is forged and eventually the plant is built and goes into commercial operation.

All of this means that some, if not many, of the major announcements of renewable energy projects will never see the light of day. The investments involved are too large to wait that long for return.

not to mention the subsidies that are screwing with prices  cite2

Christie was joined in his warning by Commissioner James P. Danly, who said that FERC has allowed the “distortion of price signals” and permitted market incentives to be “warped, interfering with price formation and jeopardizing resource adequacy.”

He said that most of these market-distorting forces originate with subsidies—both state and federal—and from public policies designed to promote the deployment of non-dispatchable wind and solar generators or to “drive fossil-fuel generators out of business as quickly as possible.”

Subsidies available to renewable generators are so lucrative that, when participating in procurement auctions, “they are able to offer at a price of zero instead of their actual cost.”  The market signal is that these new resources can be built for free, and thus the cost of power is also free.

“This, of course, is untrue,” he said, “and the inevitable consequence is market-wide price suppression.”

Danly said that price suppression deprives other market participants of revenue, leading to the premature retirement of the dispatchable generators which have to offer into the market at their true costs in order to remain economically viable.

“FERC has seemingly done everything in its power to ensure that our markets will fail,” he said.

[It is the government's burden to prove that its actions satisfy strict scrutiny. If these ID laws are held constitutional, free speech rights will have been thoroughly gutted from the Constitution.]

That said, I don't know why parents can't just parent their own kids. If they're so young where you'd be terrified of them watching porn then don't get them a smart phone or a computer in their room.

This is not practical in 2024.

How is it unpractical? Is someone with a gun forcing these parents to let their kids spend eight hours a day online? Stop watching reality TV, stop listening to podcasts, and start parenting your goddamn kids. These jerks want the convenience of the free babysitting that the internet provides, and then they want to government to make sure that nothing offensive is on there.

They want the government to be parent, but only sometimes and at the expense of everyone else. It is not impractical for parents to act as parents in 2024. And it is certainly not impractical to not have a smartphone in 2024. (I would argue that starting kindergarten is old enough for a cell phone, but only a limited basic flip phone that can only call or receive certain numbers and call emergency services. I think high school is a reasonable time for one to get a smartphone.)

I don't defend California anymore. I give up. The state has massive problems and this is what the Legislature decides to spend its time on. If Gavin Newsom wants to get in my good graces again, he will veto this if it reaches his desk. The margin of the vote is irrelevant as the California Legislature hasn't overridden a veto since 1979.

For those bringing up Brown v. EMA, I don't think that's particularly relevant here (and, btw, the name is only due to the year the case was decided, as the law in question in that case was signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2005). The relevant cases are Reno v. ACLU and its progeny. Government regulation over obscenity often fails because it is overbroad and infringes upon established rights. (Personally, I agree with Justices Black and Douglas and others that the obscenity exception has no textual basis in the Constitution.) It is the government's burden to prove that its actions satisfy strict scrutiny. If these ID laws are held constitutional, free speech rights will have been thoroughly gutted from the Constitution.

I think the goal here is to flip it the other way around. They want it to be the people's burden to prove that any particular piece of media is not obscene. If the government censors you, then you have to spend millions of dollars in litigation costs and hope that Amy Coney Barrett thinks Americans shouldn't have to upload pictures of their social security cards in order to legally see your film.

I'm not really sure how this Court will rule once this issue gets there (and with impending circuit splits, it will soon). If these laws fail, I think it'll be because they are overly broad and not narrowly tailored. While I haven't read the California bill, I know other states set a threshold at over 1/3 sexual material (so as to avoid the ire of big tech companies like Twitter/X and others). The problem is that a narrowly tailored law might actually require parents to do something.

Two things here- if Biden is winning Indies by 6 & 10, he's winning MI. He won them by 6 in 2020.

Another LOL at the white voter swing - Trump +3 with white voters (he was +11 in 2020), while Biden is +60 with black voters (+85 in 2020)

A lot of the swing however comes from their "non-whites who aren't black" sample which has Trump +40, despite Biden winning Latinos in 2020 lol

Thank you for always diving through the numbers and pointing this out. Although nobody can predict the election, this makes it better to put the polls in context.

No problem - some will accuse me of crosstab diving for a narrative but I think we just need to pause and take stock of things like this. No, White voters are not going to shift nearly 10% to Biden, and black voters are not going to swing 25% towards Trump. Some will say these things balance out but that's not necessarily true.

There's no reason to believe Biden will suddenly have this huge left swing with white voters while simultaneously having a huge right swing among black voters.

The Trump +40 among other non-whites is probably just bc of low sampling, but much like the ridiculous IA polls in 2020, there's no way you should be getting 40-50% swings bc of a low size sample. That's just a bad sample.

It seems like every poll that has 'other' has janky crosstabs for it. Michigan doesn't really have a big enough Hispanic population to have stable crosstabs, so pollsters should simplify and make two categories: Non Hispanic-White and non-NH-White. As it is, other just seems to collect a lot of right wing White people who don't want to say White for whatever reason.

A similar thing happens in canadian polling. Any polling firm which includes a gender other than male or female (such as non-binary) will typically see the third gender be overtaken by right wingers trying to troll it. Mainstreet is a victim of this.

I live in Italy and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "frociaggine", and I have known people using "frocio" as an insult in the literal sense and also (gay) people using "frocio" as a sort-of-reclaimed generic insult for annoying people. Rather weird if true.

Zynn does not meet the legal requirements for sale in Canada, but Zonnic (a Swedish product) is mostly the same thing and is available here in Canada. It's fairly popular since late 2023 or early 2024.

I quit smoking and (mostly) avoid nicotine like the plague.

[That's not that interesting!]

The thing that's always irritated me about the whole lab leak discourse is that it's talked about as if it was equivalent to some villainous international act of sabotage (I think it's obvious why that wouldn't be the case). If Covid-19 did come from a lab leak, it would have been a catastrophic mistake by some airhead scientist who disposed of samples incorrectly, or more likely, an institution with bad safety procedures. That's not that interesting!

Uh, what? I think most people, unless they're obfuscating for political purposes, would find bad safety procedures causing a global pandemic that killed millions of people to be 'interesting,' particularly if the people responsible then lied and covered up the truth to the rest of the world