Extra bonus: their vetting process doesn’t involve a willingness to fuck patients over for extra cash.

Funny when here in Belgium, the government put a couple decades ago a cap on the number of doctors who were allowed to graduate medical school (numerus clausus). The goal is to reduce the number of doctors to pay for (with the support of existing doctors who want less competition).

The predictable result of artificial scarcity? I live a major city and if I want an appointment with any specialist it’s a 6+ months delay or a 1-2 months if you can justify a daytrip to Brussels. This is having real tangible impacts on quality of care.

Obviously I would not trade my healthcare system for the American one but let’s not pretend that money and greed aren’t factors.

I am not saying it did not sell. That’s the one thing it did really well. But it’s hardly a hot take to say success is not a measure of quality. Plenty of mainstream slop out there. HP is slop. It’s not offensively bad, but it’s certainly not good.

Over 6+ books it’s really sub-par writing to have a character who does not really grow because they already did not have any internal flaws or conflicts. The upside is that it’s really hard to hate a blank slate MC and you don’t risk writing yourself into a corner. I’m sure this is no small part of why there is so much HP fanfic specifically – it’s hard to write those characters badly as they lack so much depth!

Tons of things did the HP formula better, with well developed characters, good worldbuilding, good plot, good themes, yada yada. e.g. The Magicians (only saw the show) or Misfits&Magic. And in all of those the protags face strong personal hardships and are drastically different people by the end. Yeah, it’s hard, but that’s what storytellers do.

The EPI is not a German governing body. It is a partnership of banks who decided to implement Wero. All of them had to work to support it in addition to their existing systems, though it is not exceptionally hard because it’s just a frontend for SEPA. If Spanish banks want to provide Wero to their customers then they’ll join the EPI and have the same say as everyone else. But again, it’s just fucking QR codes that translate to “make an instant SEPA mandate to send X € to Y IBAN” so I don’t understand what there is to be scared of on a technical level.

I don’t understand the point of fragmenting the Eurozone for the sake of fragmenting the Eurozone. Integration is in the long run more complex, expensive, and less user-friendly than standardization. What is so good about competing solutions that they should not eventually be replaced by a common digital payment system?

Wero is not “something the banks don’t control”. It’s a SEPA-based standard, implemented by the participating banks. It originated with Dutch/Belgian technology and banking markets and Germany and France joined because their sorry asses didn’t have anything better so it’s a pure upgrade for them.

EuroPA is trying to work with fragmented markets, Wero is trying to establish a new standard. I fail to see EuroPA as anything other than a stepping stone to an eventually unified standard. Having a single currency but noeasy and practical way of spending it in a Austrian or Spanish online shop without going through American banks is an absolutely bonkers situation.

I already used it in Belgium though…? “Pushed by Germany” is a bold statement when the technology comes from iDeal/Bancontact which are Dutch and Belgian respectively and France is also a very large economy in the mix. Don’t forget about Luxembourg as well. Benelux+FR+DE is hardly an ignorable market. France is already abandoning its existing solution for Wero. That’s always been the plan.

Do you care to source your claims? My understanding both the EuroPA and EPI are a private agreement between banks, but only the latter has received explicit backing from the European Commission. The EuroPA does not seem nearly as ambitious and only seeks to streamline existing national SEPA-based online payments (unclear to me what that means exactly in practice), which is a nice short-term vision for sovereignty but probably not where the EU will want to be 5 or 10 years from now. The big selling point of Wero is that you can be shown a QR code and use it to pay easily and instantly with extremely low fees, regardless of your bank.

Harry Potter has no true self to discover. From the first to the last page of this pile of rags he is a wizarding Mary Sue with near-infinite privilege and the personality of an oyster. The story opens with “yer a wizard” in the first 50 pages and that’s the end of his character arc. From then on he’s a mere vessel for the reader to experience the world and the author to move the plot along.

… As a matter of fact, what even is the biggest character arc in that story? I don’t remember much, but Neville and Hermione have a glowup and Harry’s uncle dies or something? And the weasleys open a shop? I certainly don’t recall anything that lends credence to the idea that Rowling even believes that either individual people or societies are capable of profound change. The story begins and ends basically in the exact same place except the characters are 10ish years older.

There are ways to do good, approachable, clickable science communication without resorting to lies, ommission, or exaggeration which is futurism.com’s whole schtick. There’s so much happening in science that doesn’t get covered by these low-quality sensationalist outlets because a misleading headline about petri dish cancer or mouse Alzheimer’s gets more clicks and requires far less research than an article about whatever interesting advancements actually happened in science this week.

Except the Trials where that precedent was supposedly established actually allowed a great many people to escape conviction using that exact defense, then the prosecution subsequently gave up on the trials altogether. The Nuremberg trials were a travesty of justice, not because the Allies set up kangaroo courts, but because in an attempt to avoid such accusations and through unbelievable prosecutorial incompetence they let almost every Nazi who was still alive run free.

What I’m getting at is, don’t expect justice to magically administer itself.

Americans loooooooooooooooove pointing out at their population density as a thought-terminating cliché although it’s very rarely relevant to any discussion.

The size of your continent does not influence the size of your metro areas, dipshits. LA isn’t the way it is because Wyoming is empty, LA is the way it is because a bunch of dumbasses decided that local mass transit and terraced housing should be outlawed and bulldozed in order to fuck over African-Americans communities.

What you’re saying is true, and when riding in those conditions I choose to wear a high-vis and helmet.

Nonetheless it is victim-blaming to make it mandatory (nevermind doing that in broad daylight). There’s always more that could be done ; clown hat, flashing lights, police escort, machine guns, F-35s. We have to draw the line somewhere, and if headlights are good enough for cars, they’re good enough for cyclists. Cars would also see fewer accidents if they were covered in high-vis paint, yet curiously no-one is arguing for mandating it.

Can’t easily prove a negative but here’s an example.

On 19 April 1943, the twentieth transport left Mechelen transit camp carrying 1,631 Jewish men, women, and children

Three young students and members of the Belgian resistance including a Jewish doctor, Youra Livchitz and his two non-Jewish friends Robert Maistriau[a] and Jean Franklemon [fr], armed with one pistol, a lantern, and red paper to create a makeshift red lantern (to use as a danger signal), were able to stop the train on the track Mechelen-Leuven, between the municipalities of Boortmeerbeek and Haacht.[1] The twentieth convoy was guarded by one officer and fifteen men from the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo-SD), who came from Germany. Despite these security measures, Maistriau was able to open one wagon and liberate 17 people.[1]

Other prisoners escaped from the convoy without any connection with the attack. The train driver, Albert Dumon, did all he could to keep the slowest pace between Tienen and Tongeren, stopping whenever it was possible and justifiable, and so allow that more people could jump without killing themselves. In all, 233 people succeeded in escaping from the train.[1] 89 were eventually recaptured and put on later convoys.[1] 26 others were killed, either by shooting or by the fall, and 118 who succeeded in escaping.[1] The youngest, Simon Gronowski, was only 11 years old.[1] Régine Krochmal [fr], an eighteen-year-old nurse with the resistance, also escaped after she cut the wooden bars put in front of the train air inlet with a bread knife and jumped from the train near Haacht. Both survived the war.

Emphasis mine. Albert Dumon “did his job” (the French version of the article goes a bit more in-depth). He didn’t overtly defy the orders given to him under the threat of immediate execution (!). He didn’t quit his job knowing that if he didn’t drive the trains a German train driver would take his place. He followed the regulations to the letter of the law, as incompetently as he could afford. And his malicious compliance saved 118 lives.

Well obviously a thermonuclear war is not good for business. However do not make the grievous mistake of thinking that Trump is a mere pawn in the oligarch’s game who can be relied on to act rationally in their self-interest. He’s done their bidding aplenty, but he’s also doing a lot of stuff that weakens him, his buddies, and his country, just because he’s so fucking dumb and vain. Like invading Greenland, a country he already had full access to for military purposes and that US companies were always welcome to exploit for minerals. His generals are literally using every trick in the book to try to redirect his attention away from Greenland because the US has literally no interest – military, financial, or geopolitical – in it. Literally the only explanation for this fixation of his is that Greenland looks big on a Mercator projection and that makes his tiny dick hard.

M.A.D. only works when all actors:

1. Have reliable information (certainly not always true, see Stanislav Petrov)
2. Can be assumed to be acting in their own self-interest

Number 1 is in doubt with Trump because he and his cult spend a lot of time in a made-up reality. I can totally see some war hawks explaining to him that the UK and France don’t have the nuclear capacity to glass the entire continental US outright, and Trump interpreting it as “we’re untouchable” because he’s not into concepts such as “nuance”. To a degree the same is true of a dictator like Putin or Xi Xinping who are also surrounded by yes men who purposefully feed an enabling narrative (see also: Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine because he thought he could get away with it).

Number 2 is simply completely incorrect. Trump is so unpredictable even his own administration can’t guess his next move – they’re constantly acting on his latest rant and doing a poor job of pretending it was part of the plan all along. I’d love to believe that he can be deterred by the thread of M.A.D, but I’m unfortunately too acutely aware of the news to lie to myself like that. That’s the main difference between him and Putin – I can actually believe that Putin will only act in what he believes to be his self-interest, and he knows a nuclear exchange ain’t it.

Well, yeah, that’s what Scrum is. From the guide which takes maybe 10 minutes to read

Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.

That’s not a throwaway sentence - it is fundamental to how scrum works and that is reinforced throughout the scrum guide.

Every conversation about Agile and/or Scrum being “the worst”, after some prodding it turns out that their company has refused to read or implement one or several of the fundamental principles, often without even being aware that was an essential requirement. You’re baking a cake and you decided to not use any butter, that’s on you champ, don’t blame the fucking recipe.

The biggest valid criticism of scrum is that the thing that makes it so great - its structural empowerment of individual teams - is also what makes it structurally incompatible with any traditional top-down management style. The company must fundamentally be (re-)organized to have a flat corporate structure within its R&D department - most are simply incapable of mustering the necessary changes, if only because too many middle managers’ jobs are at stake. So they call their middle managers “POs” or “Scrum Masters” and wonder why their version of Scrum sucks.

As someone who lives relatively near a “strategic target” that would be targeted by one to several ICBMs should Trump happen to have a particularly bad (but certainly not unthinkable) outburst one of these days, please know that I am saying this with as much restraint as I can muster:

I do not care what happens to MAGA, they must must stopped at any cost.

None of this shit is about looking good in the history books anymore. Trump is diving head first down a path that leads to WWIII. This is not a joke, this is not hyberbole. He’s literally doing everything that Hitler did but with thousands of nukes at his absolute unchecked disposal. This is about the survival of human civilization, and any action that helps bring about the downfall of the Trump regime is a legitimate one. Unfortunately no-one is willing to admit it until billions die in a nuclear winter because a demented turd couldn’t handle someone telling him no for once in his fucking life.

Here is my favorite video essay of 2025: Fantasies of Nuremberg.

A bit of a heads-up: do not watch this video if you want to retain any hint of a fantasy that such a reckoning even did happen in the first place. Do watch if you want a fantastically well written essay about one of the most mythologized and relevant events in history.

A weak dollar will work great for you when you bring back all those manufacturing jobs from overseas and start exporting the surplus production. Any day know. Any day.

He’s a child of apartheid and, according to his own daughter, was always an awful person in private.

There’s lots of precedent for white supremacists keeping a low(-ish) profile when it suits them. Just look at famous card-holding Nazi and prolific mass-murderer Werner Von Braun and his public perception in the US. If he could cultivate the image of America’s Dearest Scientist, literally anyone could.

The last thing I want is merge conflicts in my issue tracker. The git data model is simply not right for conversational histories.

ActivityPub is the obvious solution to decentralize public communication. We’re using it right now and AFAIK Forgejo is working to implement it for their issue tracker.

Love the technosolutionist mindset, but the parties trying to made that happen lost BIG TIME in the 2024 elections and neither you nor I are in charge of the energy policy. Feel free to found a startup to explore all your big ideas but our problem is neither a lack of ways to decarbonize our energy nor a lack of reasons to go off of fossil fuels.

What I’m not hearing is a solution to the problem that the European far-right is now directly funded and supported by Putin, Musk, Thiel, Zuck, that the parties currently in power have no interest in curbing this obvious foreign interference, and all that is all but guaranteeing that the far right will take full control of the region within the next few years in exchange for a few favors like – among other things – handing out to the oil barrons a blank check. That’s not a technical issue to be engineered out, that’s a political landmine the size of a continent that we’re barreling towards. Well, if we don’t get dragged into WW3 before that, at any rate.

I agree fossil fuels are bad and renewables are good, but electric heat pumps aren’t going to be deployed in every house over the summer no matter how violent the price shock. To go green we need industrial capacity, lots of it, and a ton of political will that the far-right simply does not possess because they’d rather buy Russian gas in exchange for campaign financing.