Fascinating. And thankyou for explaining some complex problems so clearly.

Surprising to hear that solid fuel rockets were the successor to liquid fuel in this particular use case. I always thought that liquid was superior, and worth the added complexity.

You may not like tiktok or use it but a lot of people do. And now it’s in the hands of a bunch of nasty bastards.

Amen. You have to stay away from that toxic commercialisation. It messes with your brain and stalls your progress in any hobby.

I think one of the best things about arts, crafts, sports, music and the like is that it has a built in resistance to that kind of commercial takeover. Having good pens will not make you better at art, good shoes won’t make you better at soccer, a fancier gym won’t give you bigger muscles. These things come from hard work, perseverance, dedication. You can’t buy skill no matter goes much money you have, I love that.

Any art or craft or sport is pretty much free when you weigh up the hours vs the outlay required.

Except skiing and motorsports. That eats money.

Every time I see the names of the Xbox lineup my brain just feels tired and kinda shuts down.

I am never going to remember it.

Tutorials where they are going through stuff you 90% understand already and you just need to find that juicy remaining 10%.

When you add sugar to a dish you do it by the cupful or spoonful but when you add salt you do it by the pinch. It’s definitely true.

I think that was potassium-permanganate and sugar. It was one of the saner recipes ( who really wants to blow their face off or smoke banana skins ) with somewhat easily available ingredients.

It was legit. But the temperature window between melting the ingredients together and igniting it was very narrow. We did what your friend did, we made the smoke bomb and also set it off in one go.

Your friend must’ve been in a while ton of shit.

Yes. Seriously. And if x wants to operate in the EU then it has to follow EU law.

Consumer protection still exists and what x is doing with it’s ‘verified’ badges is just straight up deception. The only thing it verifies is that that account has paid x money.

Second, relating to transparency in advertising. Hybrid warfare is a major threat to the stability of Europe’s society, institutions and democracy. A major vector for that is propaganda carried out through Facebook and X. Both through fake users and adverts.

The EU should very much take this seriously and I’m glad that they are.

100%. Constant sane washing.

The charges are clear. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2934

Duplicating the data many times over isn’t progress.

The guy explained the rational he didn’t say it was his personal view that it should be done.

And even if was his view we shouldn’t be down voting things based on whether you agree or not. We should do it on whether it adds to the discussion.

The quality of discourse on lemmy is fucking dire.

Perfect! You just summed up the problem more clearly and concisely than I have seen in any mainstream media.

But I see this kind of coffee shop maths everywhere going completely unchallenged. Company statements just printed wholesale.

I keep reading this, I don’t think it adds up in the way that coffee shops are claiming.

Nikki Bravo, the co-owner of Momentum Coffee in Chicago, raised prices by about 15% last week for lattes, cappuccinos and other drinks at her four locations.

Bravo said she is paying 15% more for coffee beans compared to a year ago and has started roasting more beans in-house to save money. She gets most of her beans from Africa.

When you a buy a coffee you’re paying for beans, sure. But mainly the expenditure of a coffee place is it’s staff, premises, taxes, equipment, water, electric and all the other overheads.

The average U.S. price of a pound of ground coffee hit $9.14 in September, a 3% increase from the August average of $8.87 and 41% higher than in September 2024

40% in a year is massive, but what does a lb make? 50 cups of coffee?

So the cost of the beans went up 8c and she puts her prices up 50c and says it’s the beans.

100% they’ve started gaming the algorithm to reduce artist payouts. Ambient music is rife with ai generated tracks taking negotiated rates, other genres will surely follow.

http://web.archive.org/web/20241221144306/https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

I switched to tidal from Spotify last year and am very happy. It just does music - no audio books, videos, podcasts - but to my mind that’s a feature. Music quality is far far better. The algorithm for recommendations I think is good.

I found streaming on the move less reliable until I dropped the audio quality and now it’s solid.

I used https://www.tunemymusic.com/ to move from Spotify to tidal. I had a lot of saves and playlists so had to use a paid plan but it was $5 or something and it worked well.

and none of it is indeed by search engines. No one else will ever be able to Google their problem and find the answer. All the useful knowledge put into a box and buried. It’s just awful.

Same as if you let go of a kite. It’ll just tumble back down to Earth over some distance.