This has got to be the dumbest take on this sorry one could possibly have. Shame on the Guardian for publishing it so uncritically.

There are zero downsides to the public for a healthy school lunch mandate. Pointing out that some kids would rather eat garbage for lunch does not mean that the government should pay for that.

If the government is paying to feed kids, then it should be paying for healthy food. If some parents would rather feed their kids deep fried crap well… you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.

I’d wager that the “concern” these companies (why do we have private companies in charge of feeding school kids again?) is really based on the fact that these meals are more expensive and so it cuts into their margin.

Those are reasons why it’s not being addressed effectively, not why the problem exists in the first place.

• Are these homes bought for investment that can’t sell for the amounts the owners want?
• Were they inherited and being held unsold due to being tied up legally?
• Are they unsuitable for human habitation, either because of neglect or changing regulation?
• Are they simply temporarily empty due to “housing purchase chain” problems?
• Is the market undervalued?
• Has some rich supervillain bought up a few million homes just because he hates poor people that much?

The article proposes a question and then fails to answer it.

An article titled “why are homes left empty…” doesn’t answer the question.

Don’t be that guy.

While he’s right in this case, calling him a “prominent American journalist” is as inaccurate as his usual “reporting”.

While more resuable than concrete, the process is very energy intensive and requires bitumen every time. It also doesn’t last very long.

Not being a solution “everywhere” doesn’t negate its value, but having lived in the Netherlands and visited Copenhagen myself, I can tell you that paving bricks are applied well in both places and that they hold up just fine against frozen weather.

Have a look at Dutch streets. Many of them are paved with bricks. It allows rainwater to be absorbed rather than running off causing flooding.

Not Just Bikes did a great video on it a while back.

I imagine it’d be a case of: “scan this food that I just made by hand, store its structure, and replicate that exactly later”.

So the replicator could make Grandma’s soup for you, but it would always be exactly how Grandma made it that one time.

Yeah I’ve always been frustrated with this trope. Somehow, we’re expected to believe that a technology capable to creating and assembling all the atoms in a chocolate sundae is incapable of modifying the recipe.

In my head cannon I’ve always understood this to mean that the replicated food is “too perfect” and lacks the human imperfection/variation you get with real cooking.

This “1000 words to conversational” sourdough sounds really good to me. Thanks for sharing!

Isn’t this a screen capture from there moment he’s in a labour dispute between humans though?

Agreed. Despite appearances, subsidies like this don’t help the public, they’re just giving cash to energy companies with extra steps. Long-term planning on the other hand makes a lot more sense for the public, while sending less money to the energy companies.

I wonder how many of those companies are involved with that think tank.

Oh I didn’t know this was available in Codeberg! Thanks for sharing.

I know it’s supposed to be a joke how a nerd will spend six hours writing a script to automate a 30second task but… it’s not really funny.

Working with less-experienced developers, I’m amazed at how slow everything is for them:  No keyboard shortcuts, no automated scripts, just slow, plodding mouse-driven tinkering.

Automation, shortcuts, and scripting drive your ability to iterate and therefore learn.

Train your fingers, and spend those hours automating repetitive stuff.  It’s worth it.

Is there a particular reason we need another flag? What’s wrong with this one that’s been around a long time?

It’s true. They’re for-profit, so the motivations are still there. Fragmentation helps a lot though. If a third of us move to one, and another third to the other, that would cripple any party’s ability to enshittify.

That’s a worthy goal, but the problem isn’t so insurmountable that we have to wait for some theoretical new feature to be available and adopted. There are three dominant players out there, one of which has demonstrated a willingness to screw everyone and the “it’s not perfect yet” excuse is getting pretty thin.

Switch to Codeberg today and there’s a good chance that this federated login will be supported there when/if it’s ever available. GitLab could do it too, and moving there will give you a bunch of nice things you don’t even get in GitHub let alone Codeberg.

But it’s long passed time to move. Microsoft has stolen our code to feed into their slop machine and enshittified the platform. Sticking around because a perfect alternative isn’t available only serves to harden the network effect that keeps GitHub dominant.

What is it going to take to push FLOSS software out of GitHub? Everyone here can move their projects literally anywhere else today. I did it for my own (roughly 10 projects) five years ago and it only took about an hour:

1. Create an account with Codeberg, GitLab, or whatever you like.
2. Use their built-in tools to copy your repo over to your new account. In GitLab’s case, this will even migrate over some of the additional features, like issues.
3. Update the places where you publish the project: PyPI, npm, whatever, with the new project home URL.
4. Archive the old project on GitHub, with a pointing link to the new project home.
5. (Optional) announce the above in any of the social spaces where people care about your project.

Oh don’t misunderstand me. I’m an atheist and think the idea of your god is ridiculous. I just think it’s even more ridiculous that a theocracy like the US could get tripped up and torn between its two favourite things: religiosity and property rights.

It points out the absurdity of both.