Bookmarking this, some very helpful answers here.

By your initial definition, the Culture series would certainly qualify!

I’m sure she’s quite smart, but the Ukrainians have severely damaged 7 of the 10 main Russian refineries, and there are massive queues for petrol reported all over Russia.

I’m in the industry, so if you really want me to dig up the stats on gasoline / fuel oil refining in Germany I can get you that. But Germany has been a net importer of refined products for ages and ages, and that alone should tell you something.

Even if that were not morally repugnant, RU has no fuel oil and very little gas to export at the moment. They still have crude, but DE doesn’t have the kind of refining capability that would be able to use it fast enough to make any difference.

Eh that kind of catches the spirit of it, certainly something a Dutch Quirrel would say.

But yeah get the wider point.

Yeah, I’m afraid your understanding of what the “hard” part of hard SciFi is not correct.

Most people who use the term refer to SciFi that does not exceed the bounds of what we know to be physically possible, e.g., no FTL, not sapient AIs, etc.

Although I can see how you might misinterpret it to indicate anything that might be possible.

I love this book and all his stuff, but this is not hard sci-fi at all.

Just so if anyone takes the recommendation they know what they are getting into :)

The Netherlands has removed many departments form shitter and moved them to Mastodon.

Wow ok I have two. The first is long.

I moved to the Netherlands in 1991, and in the spring of 1992 my parents asked me to come home for a visit because my grandmother was dying. Which sucked.

Anyway I think I’m going to be the cool kid and smuggle some of this sweet Dutch weed back to the States. But how? Checked luggage, no control. Something on my person but not obvious? Yeah, that’s the ticket, so I stuffed my longest glove finger full of dank weed and put in my overcoat pocket thinking I could drop it without notice if things looked bad.

I land at Hartsfield and go to get my checked luggage, my weed infested glove in my overcoat pocket thrown over the back of the luggage trolly. There is this cute girl in a uniform with a beagle on a leash. The dogs starts walking toward the luggage trolly, and I’m getting nervous. He has a big old sniff and the cute girl gives him a treat. She walks up to me and says, “Sir, do you have any …fruit?”

I’m trying very hard to play it cool, but I’m sure I was not. My then girlfriend now wife had put a banana in the other overcoat pocket so I’d “eat healthy.” I answered yes, I have a banana and she says, “Then you’ll have to go to Agricultural Customs.”

Which at that time was in the basement of Hartsfield. There is only one counter with two official dudes behind it and my hand to god, two dudes with a fucking goat. These four have a very long back and forth until one of the dudes makes a call, and this other dude comes down and starts speaking French to the Two Men and a Goat. All’s well, the dudes and their goat are free to go.

[The entire time about 50m away there were constant patrols with the actual drug dogs, the german Shepards walking past me while I’m thinking fuck they are going to catch me, put me in a hole and sodomize me.]

I walk up to the two dudes at the counter and they ask me what I have. I pull out the banana which is pretty banged up at this point. They asked if I wanted to eat it, and I said no, so they directed me to a trash can behind them told me to throw it away and be on my way.

The great irony is when I finally got home to SC my mom had scored what turned out to the best weed any of us had ever smoked, and my nearly-failed career as a drug mule was all for naught.

The second one happened recently. I was going to my company’s office party at their HQ in Cyprus, flying out of Schiphol (Amsterdam). My bag goes through the scanner, gets sent down the “we gonna open this son” track. The dude points at my suitcase and asks what is on this side of it. I open it and show him one full half of the suitcase is filled with this https://www.oetker.nl/recepten/r/gevulde-speculaas which are rectangular stuffed pastry things we eat around the feast of St Nicolas (eve).

He pointed at them and looked at me somberly and said, “This is bad, very bad.” I said, Ummm, they are just treats for my coworkers." He looked at me, back down, and said “This is forbidden, you are in trouble.” Then he said nothing and I said nothing and then he busted into laughter.

He said, “I’m just fucking with you man. Under the scanner those look exactly like C-4.”

So for any Dutch traveling around xmas, many don’t bring those with you.

In the “highest(?)” secondary school called, Gymnasium in the Netherlands you still have to take years of both Greek and Latin. My son hated ever second of it, but it’s fun my wife can still read a tiny bit of modern Greek.

Check out Paradisio in Amsterdam.

Hang in there our German brothers and sisters, the heat finally broke in NL last night.

Of course, it’s still 26C and 80% humidity, so YMMV.

Weird thing is, I set up a pan with fresh water and a couple of rocks to stand on on my balcony, and none of the birds used it.

These guys will sit on the balcony railing and watch me (and even my cat) for hours, and they regularly spill nuts on the floor of the balcony and go to get them at their leisure. So it’s not like they are afraid.

How do you water a bird?

But we still miss him. I think at this point we can forgive him.

Not so sure that’s a jackdaw, but the crows and magpies I’ve befriended who light on my balcony waiting for cashews have been doing this the whole heatwave in Europe. So, I think cooling is pretty good guess.

Have a look here, Einstein has you covered: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Einsteins-famous-train-example-a-When-light-is-emitted-from-two-distinct-points_fig3_270830434

If healthcare were decoupled from employment, Americans could protest in much larger number and for a longer period of time.

A general strike would become viable.

I’ve been playing around with chatbots since they arrived in the mid 90s. It was fun.

I tried the first iterations of the new LLMs and decided they too could be fun, but are useless and untrustworthy for real life situation whether personal or business. Definitely not worth the cost to the environment, society, or the nature and wielding of power in the world.

What cemented it was when someone wrote, paraphrasing here, that LLMs are going to be like asbestos. Initially seeming like some kind of wonder solution to all kinds of problems until we realize it creates much worse problems. And like asbestos, the abatement of LLMs will be long, slow, and costly. And will ruin a lot peoples lives in the meantime.

The thing about Ringo is that he more or less invented (or at least popularized) many of the beats that other genres would use, e.g. prog rock (not the crazy time signature stuff obviously) and a lot of pop music at the time.

It’s not always obvious, but you can pick some tracks from say Yesterday and Today through to Abby Road and have a difficult time finding other drummers who used that beat first.

Thanks for the helpful and reasonable explanation.