I think it has become common, but I never heard it until a few years ago. Now it's seemingly everywhere. When I was a kid, it was just "Here kitty kitty" or making a clicking noise with your tongue or something.
> making a clicking noise with your tongue or something
I still do that today, and it works better than pspspspsps. When I was young, if my cat was outside on the porch I could click my tongue and he'd come running from a half block away. What a good kitty he was.
What I find interesting is that while the actions of the US have been incredibly foolish and poorly thought through, Iran’s ability to make things hurt is very much a sword that cuts both ways.
There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate.
Americans have proven passive enough that I don’t expect political/military change unless the democrats pull their head out of their ass long enough to win the 2026 November elections and start impeaching and prosecuting the trump regime.
"There is now very strong incentive to develop alternatives that bypass what Iran can effect, which is exactly what’s happening. It will take a while for the infrastructure to come online, but as the months and eventually years go by, Iran will find its biggest lever for control rapidly diminishing even if the war was stopped now. Likewise, the move to EV’s will likely accelerate."
I am old enough to have lived through the oil shocks in New Zealand. It got so bad the government rolled out an alternative fuel system network of compressed natural gas. Many fuel stations had installed the tanks and pumps and many cars were converted to it. NZ has gas deposits enough to meet all its own demands.
As soon as the oil shock was over it was all ripped out and we all went back to oil.
It will take _many_ years for alternatives to come online in the US and most other places. So much of the west is unable to execute on any kind of large project. In addition, in the US, the current administration has an irrational opposition to the main cost-effective alternatives.
What if I told you that manipulating the oil futures market was a foolproof way to make themselves filthy rich? Would you still think that opposition was irrational?
It's not that poorly thought out if you look at it from the right perspective. Iran is the biggest enemy of Israel, and Iran has been significantly weakened. Israel was wiling to roll the dice on regime change in Iran as long as someone else was doing most of the fighting.
The U.S. was a power in decline before the Iran war, and the U.S. population was turning against Israel anyhow, so it made sense to get America to give it one last hurrah before they became useless to Israel.
I visited Papua among some other places ~20 years ago. The steep elevation changes and extreme rain and infinitely deep mud means roads to many areas aren’t viable, will rapidly degrade if built, or there simply isn’t anything worth building a road to. You can see on Google Maps areas void of settlements. So I rode a twin engine Aztec into fuck knows where anymore, hiked barefoot through muddy rainforest, and met some Korowai. Treehouses, sago grubs and all.
From what I learned from groups that work with the Korowai, the cannibalism stuff was very real at one point, but wasn’t really something they liked to do. It was a matter of fear, superstition and ritual, rather than a method of substance.
My poorly remembered summary (take with a grain of salt): if someone got sick, it was because of a witch doctor or someone possessed by an evil spirit putting a curse on them. Only way to deal with the curse/evil spirit) was the find the caster (through torture of course) and kill and eat them. If you just kill them the evil spirit will keep being a problem, ritually eating them is what actually disperses the evil. Naturally, intertribal violence also gets mixed into that to blur lines.
At some point long prior to my arrival, the Indonesian government managed to get consistent enough access to the area to start governing the area to a degree. One of it’s first priorities was convincing them to stop the practice, which sometimes involved the ever classic “gather them around, shoot one of their pigs and let them consider it carefully” method of persuasion when some were persistent about continuing.
So while cannibalism wasn’t completely gone at that time, in practice it was then mostly a story to tell curious and generous visitors. The Korowai greatly prefer instant ramen packets in any case.
Beautiful and interesting area if you have a naturalist bent, though otherwise not a place to go if you have a normal idea of “fun”.
I’m not generally a tropical/heat guy, but Indonesia is a country that I sometimes think of returning to.
When I wash kiwis I rub the hairs off, and then cut them into thick slices, leaving the skin on. Trying to skin or eat them with a spoon is just a pain, and I don’t find the skin unpleasant.
I’ve seen a lot of people also just wash/rub the hairs off and bite straight into them, though I find this can make a mess if they are too soft.
On page 52 (57 of the PDF), there’s a letter dated December 18th 1978 (Carter administration, not Reagan) from the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing adopting 8.5”x11”, effective January 1st 1980 so departments & agencies could use up their 8.5”x10.5” stock.
The government adopted 8.5”x10.5” to save money back in 1921 vs what was already the industry standard of 8.5”x11”, but this ended up backfiring and a General Services Administration report in 1972 recommended switching to 8.5”x11” would reduce by 5% the amount of times a secretary would need a second page. The Joint Committee of Printing estimated this change would save several million dollars.
> On hearing the news, one straight-faced bureaucrat in the Government Printing Office said of his colleagues' reaction to the news: "Some people think that this issue has been inadequately studied."
Apparently the American Forest & Paper Association is under the impression that it was the Reagan administration’s proclamation:
> Oddly enough, the United States used two different sizes - the 8" x 10.5" and the 8.5" x 11". Separate committees came up with separate standards, the 8" x 10.5" for the government and the 8.5" x 11" for the rest of us. Once these committees found out about each other a couple years later, they agreed to disagree until the early 1980's when Reagan finally proclaimed that the 8.5" x 11" was the official standard sized paper.
There are also “free living” bacteria that are capable of nitrogen fixing (diazotrophic), but are not as strictly root dwelling like Rhizobia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paenibacillus
Compared to the more well known legume colonizing Rhizobia bacteria, they can host on a wide variety of plant families. Our Paenibacillus Azotofixans can be applied to soil even before a crop is planted and does not need to be directly inoculate seed (though you can do so).
They also don’t seem to have their nitrogen fixing ability suppressed by nitrogen presence, so you can apply both them and fertilizer.
I’m told that under ideal conditions, their presence can behave like adding up to 0.5 pounds of nitrogen an acre per day. While they can’t certainly can’t replace fertilizer applications, that is an impressive amount, especially since it’s a constant source rather than whenever a grower can get around to putting something out.
Under question is the "survivability" of such bacteria in a range of various soils under various moisture regimes ... and most published research shows that when/if fertilizers are applied, these beneficial organisms tend to diminish.
In case you (or others aren’t aware) the FRAG value ZFS shows, is an arbitrary calculation to help give a value to free space fragmentation.
The purpose is to have a sense of when ZFS may developing trouble quickly finding contiguous blocks of free space to dump new data into. Mostly only a concern for high active and highly full pools. When you start watching the number climb past double digits, you may start finding performance issues but it’s a very contextual thing, rather than “at x value it’s bad”.
Basically it has nothing to do with written file fragmentation, or potential read speed.
Because ZFS is a copy on write filsystem, attempts at defragmentation an active pool are generally not effective. An exception would be a pool that is full of large files that was written in a non contiguous way (like torrents), in which case copying the data to a new dataset and deleting the old roughly achieves the purpose. Or you could use something like https://github.com/salesforce/zfs_defrag
On the context of ethics, oysters are probably the safest thing from the animal kingdom to eat. They’re really the closest thing we have to a meat based plant.
Many who consider themselves vegan have no issues wasting them.
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