I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I can summarize," and it's pretty hard to prove it was your recipe it summarized..

I just found the numbers for Germany for November 2025.

• Bestselling Chinese brand is BYD with 1.7% market share.
• Bestselling European brand of Chinese made cars is MG Roewe with 1.0% market share, followed by Tesla with 0.7%.
• Bestselling European brand owned by a Chinese company is Volvo at 1.9% market share.

This flood is often written about, but has not materialized yet. Chinese brands are only 8% of all BEV cares in Europe as of Octoberf 2025, and BEV cars are about 20% of the total car market. And even if we include Chinese made cars for non-Chinese brands (like Tesla sells in Europe), we are at less than 20% of BEVs or 4% of the total car market.

And the main reason for high energy costs in Germany are massive investments into the grid, amounting to a planned total sum of 300 billion euros. If you include local grids, it's 700 billion euros.

The grid investment were planned at a time, when battery storage was not viable, and is by many deemed to be excessive, as the average load of the grid is about 15% of the capacity.

Another quirk is that German regulations are currently paying a renewable energy provider for the potential amount of energy, not for the energy amount actually provided. This means that the provider is notifying the grid about the currently available power, and gets paid for being willing to provide the energy, independently of the grid's capacity to make use of the energy. This disincentivizes the combination of renewables with battery storage, and hence letting available renewable electric energy going to waste, because the surplus energy is not stored, but simply switched off. On the other hand, the amount of battery storage projects applied for is currently 20 times higher than assumed in the energy report from 2023, which means that the money planned for the grid might be freed up when some expansion projects are proven to be unnecessary.

A politician is by definition anyone doing politics. You trying to influence us to agree with you and ideally taking action the way you want it is the very definition of someone doing politics.

You, my friend, are an acting politician.

Zillow is an effective monopoly on internet real-estate listings, that is bad.

Google is an effective monopoly on anything internet search related that it decides to dip its fingers into, that is worse.

That actually was a stipulation Verizon agreed to when they licensed the 700MHz "C Block" LTE spectrum. Then, sometime around 9 years ago, they just started locking their phones anyway. Political leadership changes at the FCC probably had something to do with it.

The carriers' argument is that they want to be able to offer subsidized prepaid phones, and without the SIM locking they'd up with people buying phones to use on competing services (though you'd figure that'd probably end up being a wash, with there only really being 3 major carriers in the US), and/or the phones being shipped overseas by resellers.

The Sam Altman types, and the Thiel/Musk types especially, want technofeudalism with them on top. For some of them the "good of society" factors in but it is always after this.

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, it's obvious they aren't going to be capable of generating anywhere near the same amount of suction as a vacuum powered by the mains. That's even assuming they use suction at all - most of the ones I've seen could more accurately be described as robotic carpet sweepers, where a rotating brush pushes dirt and debris into a little collection bin.

Now, this isn't to say you couldn't design something with a massive battery pack (maybe something in the order of 1kWh) and a real motor, but it'd be extremely expensive and just as loud as a standard vacuum cleaner. Plus, I think the target market for these things necessitated that they be priced more in the realm of impulse buy for a gadget that kind-of-sort-of works, rather than upwards of a grand for something that genuinely replaces the need to use a real vacuum cleaner. As you said, most people don't actually hate vacuuming enough to drop serious money on not having to do it.

I've yet to experience a podcast that wouldn't have been better as a written article. It's such a slog to get through someone droning on for 20 minutes, when I could've just skimmed the same article in a few seconds and gotten the gist of it.

I can only assume some people actually enjoy listening to yammering, and just getting to the fucking point already, is secondary.

Actually, it's crazier than that - X managed to convince some of its users to actually pay for the privilege of de-anonymizing themselves to the platform. That makes it really easy to sue the person who got you sued.

Huh? This is the first I've heard of this and wasn't able to find anything about registration and a fee being required for section 230 protection. ChatGPT said the DMCA safe harbor provisions of the DMCA require registration of an agent who will receive takedown notices, but that's something like a $6 fee (and it's in regard to a totally different law which is really only applicable if you'd be dealing with the possibility of users uploading pirated content).

Or basically the death of online anonymity, as platform operators will demand ID verification and make you agree to a pass-through liability as part of their TOS (if they get sued for something you said, then you'll be sued by them to recover their loss).

Ironically, X actually already charges its users for the privilege of knowing exactly who they are.

I wonder why in 2024, 92% (yes, ninety-two) of all power added to the grid worldwide was Wind and Solar, if it has so many disadvantages. And no, this was not mandated by some government. It was people in countries like Kenya or Pakistan buying some solar panels, loading them on their motorcycles and riding to their villages to mount them on roofs to get power independent from the big utilities. That's something you can't do with nuclear or geothermal.

If you want fast and cheap energy added to the grid, go Solar and Wind.

But cats would not be considered obstacles.