Anna Sorkin was the woman who pretended to be rich and then a load of US banks just gave her a load of free money. And apparently it's illegal when poor people do that, so she went to prison.
I got it cheaper during an Epic Store sale, but not by much.
Grab it anyway and the DLC, because it's amazing. And listen when it tells you to play with a controller. Really. So many people bounce off it because they can't fly the ship. Mouse and keyboard really is not the way.
I really don't know how we got to a stage where delivery companies can just throw something in the general direction of your house and call it "delivered".
This is why everything should be bought with credit card, because then the contract is between them and the store, and they've certainly got better lawyers than you. Chargebacks scare most shops into just sending another.
I got curious and looked it up. It's called Gristedes. Nobody outside Manhattan will ever have been in one, because they're all there within a few miles of Central Park.
I don't know why he'd close them, because I can't understand how the conservative brain works.
The US may have effectively banned it, but everybody else is buying loads of it.
As far as I can tell it's operating at capacity. China's installing it for the same reason everyone else is. It's cheap as chips. Power stations take a lot of planning and management, while you can take a few acres of fields and effectively turn it into a money generator with no moving parts.
I'd have got some myself, but my house faced the wrong way to get in on the free solar panels boom, and the up front costs mean it won't pay itself back for like 20 years. I was tempted once the prices went through the roof when Russia invaded Ukraine, but I moved to a tariff priced every 30 minutes or so and the benefits vanished. I might as well let a local farmer build it all instead.
(chosen OECD because it makes the numbers easier to compare, and doesn't cherry pick EU countries which are actually better than places like the US)
A lot less coal, which is about twice as bad as gas for CO2 emissions per kWh.
Places like the UK have got rid of coal completely. The last remaining coal power station shut down last year. When you look at the graphs for the UK, we've actually reduced electricity consumption as a whole, despite a growing population and the growth of electric vehicles.
Still plenty to be done about gas. I can see why China still uses enormous amounts of coal. They don't really have any oil, so it's the cheapest fossil fuel they have access to. In fact, cost is mostly why solar is getting popular, because it's become extremely cheap. You can't rely on it completely though, unless we all agree to turn off our power at night. Power storage is not a solved issue by any means.
China also never embraced nuclear power. They really got big on the world stage right around the time Chernobyl happened, and it was already getting too expensive even then.
They were also responsible for 95% of the world's new coal construction (2023). With just 1/5th of the world population.
I'll give them props for solar. They build a lot of it, and thanks to us outsourcing practically everything to China over the last few decades, they build most of our solar as well.
You could certainly have both systems in place, with it always picking the lowest.
But you do want to avoid daft things, like seeing a parked lorry with "I'm speed to limited to 50" written on it, with the 50 in a red circle, and the car goes "50? Brilliant!" and zooms off past a school.
I can definitely believe this on low power machines.
I got a N150 Mini PC the other week, and it comes with Win 11. It thrashed around at 100% CPU doing updates and virus checks and fuck knows what other background tasks Windows considers more essential than whatever I tell it to do. Case was red hot.
So I popped the latest Ubuntu on it. Is it perfect? No. I had to mess around with Firefox "snap" for ages and type arcane commands to make it find the N150's tiny GPU. And it still can't play videos using the hardware. But other than that, it just works, just the bare essentials, and then gets out the way. Sits at about 2% CPU use when idle.
Well look on the bright side. AI is about to become really good at drawing penises under fat bellies.