And Russia invading Ukraine wasn’t an attempt to extract wealth by conquering a neighboring sovereign nation?

Russian diplomat opens mouth -> shit falls out, news at 11.

It turns out that road design has significantly more impact on speeds and safety than posting cops everywhere. Who’d of thought that?

… Except everyone who does actual research on the topic, of course.

Bitte, nein! So dumm.

Because it’s an artificial monopoly with a captive audience? Because the government demands all kinds of extra overheads with sometimes dubious need beyond justifying government agency work?

It’s not a huge mystery.

No one who survived the attempt to require others to use it.

The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.

I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.

It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.

These are the same people ranting about falling birthrates and demanding women become baby making machines. Wasn’t all of that in aid of having more humans around, which is exactly the opposite of this effort to murder people?

These are psychos in nice clothes.

I’m on a Discworld kick. Finished The Truth and am now in Going Postal.

Any time I’m reading Discworld it’s because I’m stressed and tired. It’s my penultimate easy reading choice.

Awesome follow through. Thank you.

Got a source on how they hid the body? It’s very not cool if that’s what was done. I know the Nazis are trying to turn him into a martyr, and having the body both to hide from the investigation and to make it mysterious so they can tell any lies they like is classic.

It’s from the Q Anon cult in the US. It’s the crew who push a ton of antisemitic and conspiracy theories designed to push it’s followers into Nazism.

That’s a reason our family fled the US. Once the Conservatives really started going mask off of just how little empathy they had for anyone, it was time to go. In the end, they’re okay with my family dying for their twisted vision of reality and they have held power in the US too long.

They’re running the French monarchy’s playbook of 1830 that led to the 3rd French Revolution. That once ended relatively peacefully, but history doesn’t repeat, it only rhymes.

MILES (often a small edit leaves it MILFS) is everywhere in Berlin. Cars share with some vans if you truly need a big trip.

I moved to a major European city. Seeing people (and now doing it myself) bringing home furniture on the bus or train is great. I don’t own a car anymore. Between a small wheelie cart and larger stuff coming via delivery with the order, we’ve been furnishing our apartment without trouble.

The percentage of days we needed a big vehicle was always low. Buying and maintaining a car when there’s actual modern public transit is only for extreme edge cases.

American society is 99% in on it, but many other places are trying to go there too.

Classic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE

The Katy cost a mere $7 billion and it’s still often a glorified parking lot. It’s got less throughput than a single train for moving people, but I’m sure adding another lane will fix it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-F-7Yc-A8U

Mostly at the radio chipset sucks for range. It’ll work fine, but don’t expect the kind of physical capability without better antennas.

It wasn’t supposed to be a pre-future documentary, people!

Paris keeps rocking it on making the city better for its people.

I’m pretty cool with being forgotten most of the time, especially in general “stir the pot to make people fight over stupid shit instead of building guillotines for the real problem” kinds of stuff.

But yes, I drank (and do sometimes drink) from garden hoses. It’s just tap water delivered with more volume and outdoors.