And it’s been greatly eroded recently when the powers that be determined some genocides are ok and others are not. A long-standing pattern of selective rules application, ranging from matters of nuclear disarmament, trade sanctions on places for no reason, land seizure for military bases with no permission and indigenous displacement, land seizure for colonization, indiscriminate civilian murder, detention and torture with no trial or accusation, sex crimes against civilians, application of tactics of terrorism and so on.

On the other side, indiscriminate land grab invasions, war crimes, sexual crimes on civilians including children, concentration camps, destruction of civilian infrastructure, genocide and so on.

It feels nobody really needs to follow any rules anymore. Everybody is violating international laws and the conventions that separate us from the worst of the worst evil and it’s disheartening. It’s whoever is the strongest does whatever they feel like with impunity, mostly, and everyone else just shrugs along. We absolutely suck as an intelligent sapient species at a global level and it’s a shame to be what we have become.

Here we go again with Biden investigating and questioning.

I’m sure the outcome of this questioning will be the same as in the previous dozens of times.

Also, those people who go and buy properties in Southern Europe are often older and don’t learn the local language or integrate at all. Instead, they create segregated communities with their own English speaking cafés and restaurants that disrupt the normal fabric of the country.

It is that, but it’s not just that. Whole regions are becoming so dedicated to tourism that investment is going to little else, which doesn’t really create a lot of well paying jobs for the young people. In fact, tourism only pays well to business owners. For everyone else, it’s an incredibly precarious job where you make money sometimes and other times you don’t. Even when you do, tourism is considered unskilled labor for teens and young adults without degrees, mostly. It’s a major cause of low fertility, I’d wager, since poor young people make no kids.

Everything becomes a sort of resort, with businesses catering mostly to tourists, with business owners feeling even apathetic about serving locals, as they pay less and don’t tip. The same is happening in several regions in southern Portugal. A resortification, if you will, of entire regions.

It’s like the whole world designated that country as a holiday country because of the weather and beauty, but the locals also want high paying tech jobs and factories. The government is making too much bank to change it and business owners are making a lot of pressure not to.

Americans better get ready to open up their money bags. This upcoming war ain’t paying itself either.

Money printer goes brrrrrr. How many simultaneous Israeli fronts can the US taxpayer support ? Let’s find out.

Man, some days i just feel second-hand embarrassment for Germany. Get it together guys, goddamn. Germany has been in a pretty sad state of affairs for so long lately.

I’d wager that the investment of paltry sums compared to the cost of raising a child while public preschools are filled to the brim and there’s a lack of teachers and affordable after school facilities for parents to leave their kids probably has something to do with it. Luxemburg, for instance, is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe and parents there have to register kids for preschool when they’re born to even get a chance at a spot.

I mean, sure, there’s tax breaks for parents and if you’re lucky, something like 200€ per child per month, depending on the country. That’s ridiculously low. Salaries keep stagnating, the cost of living keeps increasing, and young adults basically have to work several internships for free to even get a chance at landing a half decent job and afford a one bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, the pandemic saw the richest people get even richer with their tax rebates and deductions upon rebates and deductions.

This is an economic issue, i believe, rooted in the progressive increase of wealth inequality in our society. It’s just that the help being provided to parents is nowhere near enough. I want to be a dad, but i can’t while wealth keeps being redistributed to millionaires while we get, what, a miniscule tax rebate and maybe a couple dozens to hundreds euros to afford ever skyrocketing rents anywhere there’s a half decent paying job? This isn’t the industrial ages where if half your kids didn’t go to school, it’s fine. The population will decrease until salaries that are in line with supporting children in a developed country start being a reality to the majority of the population.

And that Kurzgesagt video says young people prefer to travel and live life. Man, i wish i was traveling and going to concerts. I barely go anywhere since the pandemic and i have nowhere near the wealth required to even move to a 2 bedroom apartment, furnish a baby room and buy all the required knick knacks to raise a newborn child and i have a pretty decent income.

I wasn’t talking about making diesel at home. That’s pretty much the immediate aftermath of a collapse.

In the case of a societal collapse, eventually, new city states will be formed using salvaged technology and eventually technology produced of their own. My argument stands that to restart civilization, you will more quickly go back to fossil fuels, which are simpler to salvage, manufacture and utilize than high tech solar panels and batteries.

This includes gas vehicles. It’s just a fact that electric vehicles and semiconductor technology are luxuries of the modern era and not long term post apocalyptic tools of survival due to their manufacturing difficulties, durability and maintenance necessities. Just as an example you have Toyotas from the 60s that can still work just fine and i guarantee you a Tesla made today won’t work in 60 years, unless you replace nearly every electronic component of which it depends.

I’m all for renewables and sustainability and ditching fossel fuels, but from an engineering point of view, i just don’t think I’d be trusting in electrical vehicles and semiconductor tech in a post apocalyptic scenario. The reliability just isn’t there.

And diesel generators/fuel refining is most definitely not more difficult to manufacture than semiconductors. Just to make a simple silicon wafer you need more tech than to make a piston engine. Let alone doping it to produce enough photoelectric effect to power stuff with. There’s a reason we more quickly figured out diesel/gasoline engines than semiconductors. You need clean rooms, high tech engineers and a lot of robotics for things we can’t do with enough precision with our big clunky hands at the nano scale. With piston engines a workshop will do and fuel refining is just basic fractional distillation. As a side note, i could most definitely refine diesel at home. I’ve distilled things more complicated than diesel. But that’s beside the point. I understand you meant the average person with no training wouldn’t be able to do it and i understand and agree.

Yeah, it’s true diesel degrades quickly, but oil does not. Depending on where you live, you could more quickly set up a low scale refinery than a solar panel manufacturing workshop. Most likely, people would use coal in most places without access to oil in short distance since it’s more widely available and simpler to use.

Solar panels and batteries require massive supply chains. They require our rarest minerals and highest tech, with highly educated workers to develop and produce and state of the art clean rooms and factories.

If we stop producing them, the current stock will be useful for like 50 years tops. Then it’s back to fossil fuels, I’m afraid. Diesel generators last for a long time, and they’re easier to maintain and produce.

I remember i read a doomer theory stating we should be stockpiling coal for the humans that remain to rebuild society since there is nothing we can do at this point and fossil fuels is the only thing that will outlast the collapse. I’m not that pessimistic, but i can see what they mean.

I tried looking around but this humble soul doesn’t have much in the way of receiving donations. I suggest contacting him via https://github.com/Catfriend1 to ask for an alternative and if he gets back to you, share it here for other people who dislike paypal.

Fyi the syncthing-fork guy (catfriend1) who’s still updating has a donating button on F-droid via Liberapay. It’s up to you if your financial situation allows you to donate, but the more of us help the remaining developers for their time, in particular those of us that rely so much on their work, the better off we’ll be. Let’s give them a little motivation to keep working on this.

FYI2 syncthing-fork (as written and confirmed in this thread) has an import button for your folders from syncthing Android.

ESA is the European Space Agency. It’s a pretty prominent acronym. They really couldn’t bother researching it before registering their little butthurt group? Imagine making a corporate group and calling it NASA.

They’ll be hit with that “trying to negotiate a ceasefire” and “investigations of allegations” that lead nowhere, sometimes, for sure. Maybe they’ll even have to watch a pier that does nothing being built. I can imagine things like that can be a little annoying and hamper the workflow when you’re trying to carry out a genocide, as opposed to full steam ahead genocide.

I bet they’re really shaking in their boots at the inconvenience a president Harris would be.

The math depends on where you’re living, but what would you mathematically compare here, available required roof area and roof load limits?

Because the SWH, if put in a place like Cyprus, consumes next to no electricity. Pumps and electronics, but even that is pretty nil if the tank is on the upper floors. So let’s assume a mild sunny climate where the electrical heaters of both the heat pump and the solar heater are off. The heat pump requires power and the water heater doesn’t. As for cloudy days, with proper insulation, a SWH can keep the tank piping hot for a few days.

Personally i don’t see how a heat pump could beat a SWH in costs and benefits over time. Off the gate it already starts at a disadvantage on environmental impact and upfront costs. When it’s sunny, it loses to solar heating, as it’s free vs very efficient. It probably regains some ground during inclement weather and very cold winter days. There’s also the degradation of the solar panel, which happens at a faster rate than the degradation of the solar heater. So i guess in the end it boils down to how bad the weather gets where you live and yeah, do the math. There’s probably a graph of bad weather days with a point where the SWH becomes less attractive than solar powered heat pumps. But for Mediterranean climates, no contest I’d say. You require less area on the roof for a SWH.

And this is only considering available roof area/weight limits, because being honest they’re both free sun energy. But you could use the solar power/money/environmental impact elsewhere.

I was thinking of Russia (as I’m European they’re the most immediate threat), but being honest, while China keeps mostly to themselves, i would not like to be subjected to their level of censorship and dissent suppression. Plus there’s allegations that they’re committing a genocide of their own.

But there are bills currently in congress going for approval that will target the EU specifically, such as the one mentioned on my previous comment, where US companies would face fines for joining boycott movements promoted at a EU level. Whether they will succeed or not is still not determined, but there are actors inside the US trying to push this agenda towards the rest of Europe. I do hope the EU does as you say and not fold on the US pressure, because i really don’t want to see our union bundled together with US foreign policy as it has been since the 2000s.

It’s hard for the whole world to do anything when the largest economy on Earth will undo any small step, political statement or protest with large amounts of cash, weapons and strong arming allied countries to agree with them via trade and sanctions, such as via the Anti Israel Boycott act H.R. 6940 which even affects the European Union. The whole world isn’t just standing aside. It’s just hard to stand on the path of the freight train that is the USA.

Nevertheless the ICC is proceeding, protest are occurring in many cities worldwide to embargo Israel and the UN is trying to prevent the US from sweeping this under the rug with constant world affirmations of rights of a Palestinian state and condemnations of Israeli actions, despite the US voting against.

Nobel prize winners are using their time in the spotlight to speak about it, presidents and prime ministers are urging more countries to stop trading with Israel, universities are refusing collaboration with Israel universities and exchange programs, investment capital is refusing to invest in Israeli companies and even Israeli tourists are being shunned abroad in several countries, including mine where they were booed on the streets. All this in the face of potential retaliatory action from the US.

Of course, it’s not what we hoped it would be or as effective as we need it to be for our dying Palestinian and Lebanese brothers and sisters, but it is a far cry from standing aside doing nothing. People are doing things and it would be a hell of a lot easier if the US either stopped helping the enemy or at the very least did nothing. I don’t wanna be writing “America bad” posts, I’ve been trying to make an effort to avoid making sweeping hot take statements about the US in general, but hot damn, in this case, i can’t help it. America very bad on Israel support and this will tarnish US international image for ages to come, even worse than the war on terror did.

The international community sees the US right now as the americans see Harris. It’s better than the alternative, sure, but we’d sure enjoy a whole lot less of genocide right about now.

I still fondly remember my first perma ban. It was 3 months after signing up, commenting on stories on offmychest. The user was talking about her own infidelity and i told her cheating was wrong and she should just break up to prevent causing unnecessary suffering.

Mods banned me for not being supportive enough. Muted me when i asked about it. Looking back i should have stopped using the website then and there, because it only went downhill from there. At one point i was permabanned off a dozen subreddits i wasn’t a part of because i was discussing with anti covid vaxxers about their misinformation and other subreddits said i was participating in subreddits responsible for misinformation and thus, was permabanned from their subreddits now too. The anti vaxxing subreddit didn’t ban me, even though i was against everything they stood for, but they were banned by admins later on.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when i was in a news subreddit and a user posted a story with a clickbaity title. I said the title was clickbaity and i spoiled the bait by answering the clickbait on the title. The mods permabanned me and i mod mailed them and said it was ridiculous to ban me for such a frivolous thing. Mods reported me for harassment and admin gave me a 3 day ban. I deleted my account and just stuck to Lemmy ever since, where i haven’t been banned even once in a year.

That folks is the 4 year long, 10k karma reddit experience nowadays.

From the point of view of efficiency, solar heaters beat pv. With pv you need to convert the sun’s energy into electrical energy, with losses, then convert electrical energy into heat by extracting it from the outside with the heat pump. If you store it in batteries to heat up water later, there’s even more losses. Depending on the outside temperature, there’s a limit to what the heat pump can do, which an internal electric heater inside the water tank takes over to reach usable shower temperature.

With solar heating the sun heats water, that’s it. Not only you can yield energy from the sun more efficiently, this doesn’t need complex electronics or semiconductors, so it’s also better from an environmental impact point of view.

And it doesn’t have to be either/or. In my country, solar heating usually comes as a package deal with pv heating. Some companies are making hybrid pvs. Solar panels become less efficient as they heat up, so a hybrid pv would use coolant to keep them within their most efficient working temperature and extract that heat to be used for space heating, using radiators or floor heating or forced air systems, and/or water heating. Having both just makes sense, since it makes your pv needs (and your upfront investment) smaller and the maintenance on solar heaters is much simpler.