The price of crude oil went up because, worldwide, we presently have less of it to meet the same amount of demand, so suppliers can afford to charge more. That translates into the prices of all products, worldwide, made from crude oil going up (and as a knock-on effect, the price of pretty much everything everywhere going up, because most goods still need gas/diesel/aviation fuel to be transported beyond a small local area).

In other words, it doesn’t matter what specific source a given company is using, because some of what would normally be their oil is being sold at a premium to people who used to get their oil from that war zone.

(And as the rotten cherry on top of all this, add speculators, hoarders, and the commodities market.)

Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it’s a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.

Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .

On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm’s longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with.

On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes

On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes

I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it’s possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results.

My conclusion from that, combined with other people’s searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine’s algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.

Finding damsels in distress to save? There’s an app for that! 🤣

Even worse, you may end up with an apple for a head, completely unable to lead anything resembling a normal life. That’s a horrible tradeoff if I ever heard of one.

Nothing wrong with wooden covers. Wood-with-something-over-it used to be quite a common material for the purpose in the days before mass-produced cardboard covers.

Only thing I’d be concerned about is wear on the string, especially if you didn’t sand inside the drill holes. If it does wear through, after sanding the holes, try putting some beeswax on the replacement string.

Jails don’t hold only people waiting for trial, though—if I recall correctly, people serving short sentences may also be confined in a jail rather than a prison, so the jail space also needs to scale with population (we’ve been having issues with jail and prison overcrowding for a good quarter-century). Therefore, we need more jail space and more prison space and a better-funded, better-staffed court system that can hear cases in a timely manner, but yeah, the court system is the most important part.

In all fairness, most countries didn’t allow dual citizenship until the latter half of the 20th century (this year is the 50th anniversary of Canada allowing dual citizenship without restriction, according to Wikipedia). The revoke-one-to-get-another system used to be standard. Nor is China the only country that disallows dual citizenship—a lot of Asian countries don’t, or restrict it. It’s just that most of them handle the issue more cleanly (although India is starting to get pushy about the behaviour of their current and former citizens abroad in much the same way as China . . .)

I wonder how long they can keep coming up with different artwork/animation styles for each world.

Only if the money circulates back into the economy here rather than being tied up in some exec’s offshore bank account. Plus, “higher” earners doesn’t mean high earners—the burden will disproportionately end up falling on nominally middle-class people who don’t have time to shop around.

Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of.

Depends on how you define “best”. Likely the highest possible short-term energy density, yes, but that isn’t the only thing we might want out of a battery. “Doesn’t catch fire” is one of the areas where the highest-energy lithium battery chemistries are far from the best, for instance.

Since I’m sure it has no authority, why would anyone want to talk to it? About the only reason anyone ever approaches their boss is to get said boss to do something. (That can be something as nebulous as “put more faith in what I say in the future than what this other guy says,” but there always is something.)

The humour didn’t work for me, and the male lead was obnoxious. I’ll be dropping this one.

Well, they’re allowed to make laws about who can hold Chinese citizenship, so it’s within their right to say that no citizen of another country can also be a citizen of China. However, the appropriate way of handling would-be dual citizens under those circumstances would be to strip anyone who obtains citizenship in another country of their Chinese citizenship, not play weird games where they ignore the foreign citizenship.

(I would consider it unsafe to go to China right now regardless of citizenship.)

We all know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, right?

Or do a little more research and find somewhere that the infrastructure was so trashed by war or natural disaster that some records are completely gone. Happened a lot in WWII, and it must have happened in other places since.

Three meetings, mostly informal, this time.

We could turn that into a drinking game.

The greatest sin in anime is the texture of clothing. This is most obvious in the Count of Monte Cristo anime due to the art style.

Gankutsuo, if that’s the one you’re talking about, was also a very early (possibly the first) use of the technique. I can forgive a pioneering show for getting things wrong. Its successors aren’t always as easy to forgive.

Much worse than messed-up clothing textures is the occasional show that puts a texture over the entire picture (the most blatant example I’ve ever seen used a watercolour paper type one, but damned if I can remember the name of the show), but binds it to the viewport rather than the background, so that when the camera pans or zooms, the texture moves with it and completely destroys the impression I think they were aiming for.

Ugh, the main character being honest wouldn’t be a problem if she weren’t also trusting and naïve to the point of ridiculousness. This may end up being my third drop of the season.

If you use Windows, you agreed to the TOS.

If your employer is forcing it on you, chances are you never even saw the TOS.