Yeah, I don't know if you saw it before you commented, but I did update my comment to include a mention of fertilizer.

They aren't, though specifically for groceries, it's somewhat-less relevant for the US than Canada, because we produce a wider variety of food domestically.

There are some important things that we do import, which have been discussed on here, like out-of-season fruits and vegetables.

kagis

These guys highlight several fields:

https://www.eatingwell.com/foods-impacted-by-new-tariffs-11712453

• Tropical Produce --- the US consumes more than it has tropical regions to grow tropical foods in.
• Seafood
• Coffee
• Olive Oil, which we mostly get from Europe. "The U.S. produces only 2% of the olive oil that it consumes"
• Chocolate
• Nuts (though IIRC we're a major producer of some important nuts, like almonds and peanuts).

Also, the foods that we're especially competitive in tend to be bulk, low-value stuff, grains and such, which is the staple stuff that you'd really need if prices went up. We tend to import stuff like luxury food from Europe, which is nice but something that one could live without if one's budget was tight.

One impact will come from fertilizer, which we import a lot of; that'll drive up our cost of production of food.

The fact that we're a major exporter of food is actually a major reason why you'd expect the agriculture industry to be unhappy with Trump, though agricultural states tended to vote for him. American agriculture is, by-and-large, globally-competitive. If it were uncompetitive, then tariffs might benefit it, providing useful protection from competition by forcing American consumers to buy it rather than more-competitive foreign products. And despite the lack of benefit, the agriculture industry likely does get hit by countertariffs.

The industries that will tend to benefit from tariffs are those where America isn't very globally-competitive in 2025, maybe low-skill, labor-intensive manufacturing, and that's where consumers are going to take a price hit from taxation. Clothing prices, for example. We're not very good at hand-producing clothing. Tariffs will cause those industries to be subsidized by transferring money from the industries that we're better at.

I haven’t built a PC in 10 years, I gave no idea where to start.

The only really notable change I remember being surprised by on my last build over the past decade was the shift to NVMe for desktop machines. I thought of it as laptop storage media, hadn't realized that the desktop had shifted as well.

If you're thinking about any used parts, I'd avoid buying any used Intel desktop CPUs from the 13th or 14th generations, since Intel had some serious problems, especially with the high-end models, that led to some of them suffering irreparable damage over time, and I don't know if there's any way to determine whether a CPU that someone's selling has already been damaged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake#Instability_and_degradation_issue

I use org-mode, which is kind of a structured text format, like Markdown but far fancier, in emacs. Can have to-do lists, deadlines, tables, display a weekly/monthly agenda with planned items, etc. I sometimes use it as a sort of mini-spreadsheet, as it can act something like a spreadsheet, with recalculating tables. I don't go in for the "whole life organizing in a tool" thing, so there's a lot of functionality that I don't use, but it's generally a superset of what I want, so it works well. There are various other software packages that support it.

I figured out (while using obsidian) that my brain works better when I dont have to worry about where to put things, but just tag them with topics, by relevance, e.g. So tags and the option to filter them would be nice!

Org-mode supports tagging, though I don't use them.

https://orgmode.org/manual/Tags.html

That being said, while other software packages do have varying degrees of support, and vim has some support it's really an emacs thing at its core, so I think that it's most interesting if you use emacs.

'ang 'em!!!

Might be better to have them plant more trees along Hadrian's Wall, if people enjoy said trees. Turn the affair into a net positive for people who will be eventually walking along the wall in the future.

Now I'm kind of wondering about the etymology there.

kagis

Hmm. Apparently different etymologies:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Scot

Scot

Old English Scottas (plural) "inhabitants of Ireland, Irishmen," from Late Latin Scotti (c. 400), a name of uncertain origin, perhaps from Celtic (but answering to no known tribal name; Irish Scots appears to be a Latin borrowing). The name followed the Irish tribe which invaded Scotland 6c. C.E. after the Romans withdrew from Britain, and after the time of Alfred the Great the Old English word described only the Irish who had settled in the northwest of Britain.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/scot-free

scot-free(adj.)

late Old English scotfreo "exempt from royal tax," from scot (n.) "royal tax" + freo "free" (see free (adj.)).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/Scot

scot(n.)

"royal tax," a term that survived in old law and in scot-free; late Old English, "municipal charges and taxes," also "a royal tax or contribution sometimes levied for support of local officers." This is from Old Norse skot "contribution," etymologically "a shooting, shot; a thing shot, a missile" (from PIE root skeud- "to shoot, chase, throw"). The Old Norse verb form, skjota, has a secondary sense of "transfer to another; pay." It is related to Old English sceotan "to pay, contribute," Middle English scotten "to bear one's share of;" Dutch schot, German Schoß "tax, contribution."

Also via Old French escot "reckoning, payment" (Modern French écot "share"), and via Medieval Latin scotum, scottum, both from Germanic, as is Spanish ecote.

From c. 1300 as "payment for food or drink at a social gathering," also figurative (late 12c.), a sense also in the Old French word. Hence scot-ale (n.) "a drinking party, probably compulsory, held by a sheriff, forester, bailiff, etc., for which a contribution was exacted" [Middle English Compendium], attested from late 12c., with ending as in bridal. "Scot implies a contribution toward some object to which others contributed equally" [Century Dictionary].

Without digging further, if you can do both on Android, there are Android e-ink devices out there. As long as those let you install whatever apps you want, that'd let you use said apps. I assume that both can be viewed on Android. I don't know if the general Android e-Ink experience is going to be quite as optimal or low-power-usage as that of some dedicated e-Ink reader platform like Kobo, may not be animation-free or whatever, but...shrugs

looks

bookshop.org does

Browse and buy on Bookshop.org, and read right in your web browser, or download our iPhone or Android apps for the full reading experience.

Libby does:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overdrive.mobile.android.libby&hl=en_US

kagis

https://www.bookrunch.com/overview/android_e-readers/

Top 10: Android e-Ink e-readers

F/A-18E

That's not a young jet, but apparently we still have the production line active for a while longer. I suppose if the Navy wants another one, they can still get them.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/04/boeing-to-shutter-super-hornet-line-in-2027-after-final-navy-order-boeing-vp/

Boeing to shutter Super Hornet line in 2027 after final Navy order: Boeing VP

Now experts fear a further escalation: following the introduction of new US tariffs on Chinese goods , even more cheap goods could be diverted to Switzerland.

“Shipments from China are often inadequately declared, which makes handling extremely difficult,” criticizes Tom Odermatt from the Spedlogsuisse association to theSonntagszeitungnewspaper.

Hmm.

Would this, perchance, coincide with a dramatic increase in the import of Swiss goods by the US?

tree destroyed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sycamore_Gap_tree

The stump has thrown up seedlings and is still alive, albeit severely coppiced, but is expected to take more than 150 years to recover.

May or may not wind up quite as photogenic, but with apologies to Mark Twain, the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/sycamore-gap-tree-newcastle-crown-court-b2737600.html

Saplings from the tree are being grown and will be planted at sites across the UK, with the first already gifted to King Charles for planting in Windsor Great Park this winter. Shoots have also emerged from the base of the Sycamore Gap tree.

Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we'd have never-ending amazing video game series. I don't think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.

Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game's development time and so forth isn't a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that's not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.

Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they're doing at least something that hasn't been done before, and doing so again --- especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well --- may not be enough.

Some of it is that most resources don't always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don't do well at that new scope.

Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.

You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that "more resources don't always help", "luck", and "engine rewrite" were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don't care all that much about graphics; I've played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world's prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn't a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they'd dug themselves deeply into a hole.

Sometimes it's a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I'd call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful --- while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn't the only problem --- the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games --- lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that they controlled and could change and an immersive environment that didn't have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn't necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it's not so much that the developers don't have a winning formula as that they've decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that's as successful.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-penny-treasury-mint-192e3b9ad9891d50e7014997653051ba

Trump says he has directed US Treasury to stop minting new pennies, citing rising cost

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482

It looks like they're mostly back now.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8xrvd9t

Overnight into Tuesday, about 90% of power has been restored to Spain's national grid and lights have come back on in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon

The 1965 failure resulted from the transmission capacity into the region being near exhausted, and then a failure on one transmission line triggering a series of other problems that blacked out the region. I'm just trying to give an example of where a failure of the sort that one might expect to potentially happen in Iberia -- having little spare transmission capacity, and then hitting some sort of problem that increases stress -- might result in internal blackouts in the region.

Librewolf is a build of Firefox. If Firefox goes away, so does Librewolf.

Trump's managed to, in his first 100 days, reach overall public disapproval for pretty much everything other than immigration, so you figure that he's gonna double down on this, since it's his only really winning topic of discussion right now.

Posting this here because the metal community seems to be entirely links to tracks and I'm not sure how well received this would be there.

All the users refrained from posting anything but links to tracks because the only users posting were just posting links to tracks and nobody wanted to make the first move.

Everything on F-Droid is open source. Someone will just fork an app if the current maintainer starts pushing negative stuff into the app.

I'd also note that Spain and Portugal have very limited interconnection to the rest of Europe --- this is known as the "Iberian energy island" --- and addressing this has been the topic of some past European news coverage that I've read.

There are only three, limited-capacity electricity transmission links between them and France. In the past, they have been completely cut off from the rest of Europe's electricity grid when all three links were down for unrelated reasons at the same time.

I'd guess that this is probably a relatively weak point in terms of reliability in Europe's electricity grid.

Back in 1965, in the US, we had the Northeast go dark for a while after a failure on one transmission line into the region shut down, caused electricity to be shunted onto others, triggering them to also shut down; a series of cascading protection systems triggered to bring the system to a "safe" state and avoid damage and ultimately brought power transmission into the region and then other systems down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965