TIL Greenland sharks can live up to 500 years, take 150 years to reach sexual maturity and have a gestation period of up to 18 years. And apparently it takes a year in the back yard to prepare as well.

"Demsoc" is just a shorthand for "democratic socialist". Similar to how "ancap" is "anarcho-capitalist" and "nazbol" is "national-bolshevik".

It's not that useful for them. This is for calculating the shortest path from a single source to all other vertices in the graph, but for route finding you only need to know a single path.

Districts by their very nature represent voters.

I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.

It's really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that's not a required thing.

Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It's why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.

Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own "district" of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.

We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.

It is true. Valve does not enforce price parity for non Steam keys. Here is an example where the dev says that they are offering a better price on EGS because of the better cut:

https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/

Pretty clear example of the same game having a lower base price on Epic than on Steam.

Wolfire claiming Valve does this is something different from Valve actually doing it, and that's where the dispute lies. According to Valve, Wolfire's explanation of the price parity policy is incorrect.

Here's the policy itself: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. **It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers. **

The policy is pretty leanient regarding the "worse deal" aspect. You're allowed to have a sale on one platform but not on Steam, as long as you offer "something similar" at a different moment to Steam users too.

It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

Even if you violate this policy, Valve will still sell your game, they may just stop providing you with Steam keys to sell.

I don't see Wolfire winning this tbh.

So you're using an uncommon calendar, and then made a unique variation on it? How does that help communicate what you mean?

Yeh his origins are all over the place and combine in a pretty terrible way. Changing it is for the better.

Sinterklaas supposedly lives in Spain, and some origins suggest Piet is modelled off of Moorish slaves there. But the outfit doesn't match; it's based on traditional Moorish outfits as they wore in Venice, and those Moors were free. The bright colours are also reminiscent of the southern Dutch as well as the Venetian carnival.

Decades ago, Piet would announce himself with the clanking of chains. That makes people think of slavery, but they're not chains as used to bind slaves. Rather, it appears to be coming from the German Krampus, which is more of a boogeyman that scares kids. Piet then changed to make him a friendly and non-scary alternative to Krampus.

Piet has always been described as a "knecht", which some people interpret as "slave" but that's a bad translation of the world. A knecht is just someone who helps with some task, and who does just get paid for it like with any other job. A farmhand for example could be a type of knecht, and they aren't slaves either.

Combined together, it's the perfect cocktail of "it looks terrible, but does seem coincidental". Refusing to change it because of "tradition" when people who are uncomfortable kindly ask to do so, that does appear to be the most racist thing about him.

Georgia and Moldova both are struggling against Russian influences in their elections.

Is it? The original artwork was fairly clickbaity imo.

What happens if a mistake was made and an NFT is erroneously issued (for example to the wrong person)?

What happens if the owner dies? How is the NFT transferred then?

Who checks that the original NFT was issued correctly?

What about properties that are split? What happens if the split isn't represented in the NFT correctly (e.g. due to an error)?

The whole non-fungible part can be a problem, not a solution. It very, very rarely happens that ownership of a property is contested. It happens quite often that a mistake is made during a property transfer/sale that needs to be corrected. How do NFTs deal with this, and are they a solution to a non-issue?

A bar can reliably verify the customer's age, a website can't do that.

The internet is not a safe space for children. It's absolutely the parents' responsibility to monitor their children's internet consumption.

Speed limits don't just serve for driver safety. Noise concerns might also be an issue, and then the speed limit is entirely justified.