gila

I grew up near gas hubs, where it’s normal to have gas mains at home, have family employed by producers. They’ve been spinning this yarn as long as I can remember. It has not clean energy by any stretch, this is just the basic sales pitch for natural gas unchanged for like 30 years

Meanwhile NASA’s next flyby depends on Elon Musk fixing Starship. I’m sure that won’t get delayed again.

I use Shotcut for more or less any video operations that require re-encoding. It’s great for basic editing but also simple transcoding jobs too

They aren’t concerned with deaths, this legislation positions the most harmful and most physically addictive nicotine option as relatively more accessible.

They aren’t concerned with nicotine addiction, else NRT gum wouldn’t be allowed to stock within reach of children in retail outlets.

They’re just NIMBY’s, there’s nothing else to it.

In Australia our tobacco strategy was to effectively ban vapes and price cigarettes out of existence.

The impact to date has created two totally new black markets: one for vapes after people realised anyone could just hop on AliExpress to buy them in bulk and resell for a 2000% markup. They are banned for import, but nicotine is a colourless odourless liquid and there are no rapid tests for it, no capacity to do expensive GCMS testing on all the random freight entering the country from China (our biggest trading partner by far).

The other new black market is for “chop chop”, the colloquial name for unprocessed tobacco illegally grown and sold by gangs for cheaper than regular cigarettes / RYO tobacco.

There’s also been a big increase in violent robberies at tobacco outlets and even gang turf wars over sales of illegally imported or stolen cigarettes. The excise tax is so high that the gangs can extract enormous sales margin and still undercut the market.

Predictably (and contrary to the rest of the western world) tobacco use has gone up nationally over the past couple of years following a significant downtrend lasting several decades. I’m confident that this strategy, which has been bipartisan amongst our 2 major political parties, will be used as a future case study in why prohibition is fucking moronic. It has continuously demonstrated to be a net detriment to public health, in this case related to a totally preventable yet leading cause of premature death and public health spend.

There is literally no logic to it beyond Lovejoy’s Law, except for some false manufactured statistics parroted by our leaders which blatantly ignore scientific consensus.

Only for citizens of countries part of the visa waiver program, which doesn’t include China. Neither is there any visa waiver program for Australians entering China

Originally, undiagnosed ADHD. The pathway to get licensed was somewhat annoying for me, and I couldn’t be bothered engaging with it. I’ve also always had great access to efficient public transport, which I took to school so was accustomed to using it.

There’s been lots of secondary reasons over the years - for a long time I had fines to clear before I could progress getting licensed. The fines were bullshit, and I wouldn’t pay them out of principle. Now they’ve expired, that roadblock is no longer in my way, but I’m still not licensed.

Sometimes it’s annoying, but only really in the sense that I’m proud of my independence / don’t like the rare occasions that I’m dependent on others for travel. I’m in the US on holiday now, and there is comparatively almost zero public transport - that sucks. When I’ve travelled around Europe, Asia, New Zealand, or at home in Australia - the issues are pretty few. I don’t feel held back enough to care, and it seems like a money pit.

I have learned to drive a car, though. I’m just not licensed to, and don’t. M 33

https://archive.is/96Woj

The company made “more than a dozen technical improvements” to AI Overviews …

… making the feature rely less heavily on user-generated content from sites like Reddit

So it prefers the results that Google normally deprioritizes? I guess we have that in common

They didn’t make that the default. What was discussed was a way to make it default (add https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14 as a custom search engine)

And the comments on those posts said we should actually use DDG instead lol

It dominates the market in vertical tabs IMO. I tried Vivaldi, Firefox extension, the works. The best-feeling alternative was Safari

Under communism, sovereign authority is attributable. If you ask the US president, they’ll say they have little power. If you ask senators, or congresspeople, or local representatives, the media, the bourgeoisie, neither do any of they wield power. Where authoritarianism occurs under capitalism, apparently no one is responsible for it. Under communism, it’s directly attributable to communists.

Both are often authoritarian, but the argument that communists are more authoritarian is simply an easier one to make.

It’s a slightly different use case, I default to Losslesscut and switch to Shotcut when I need a vfilter or if I’m just generally willing to concede to making a lossy cut.

Shotcut is way more flexible but I can make a quick clip in Losslesscut with probably 1/3 the number of user effort/inputs. Let alone trying to remember every ffmpeg parameter under the sun just to get consistent usable output

That’s what I’ve always assumed it does since back when quicktime player barely even ran on my PC yet for timeline operations it was significantly more responsive than WMP/MPC.

For Losslesscut I just get around this by encoding my input from source using keyint=n:scenecut=0 in ffmpeg where n is a manually set keyframe interval.

So e.g. if my expected cut occurs on a frame that occurs at t+10 seconds of footage, n can be the same as the fps and then there’ll always be a keyframe exactly at timestamp 00:00:01, 00:00:02 and so on. I can then open it in losslesscut and easily snap to the frame I want and make the cut losslessly.

Yeah the first encode generally means a lossy transcode by the time I get to my final video but being realistic that’d be a part of my workflow either way and this way it’s less

I couldn’t find it in my comment history, but I saw a thread months ago where someone was lamenting migrating from reddit where they used to just google “episode ### discussion” for the show they’re watching and would find a corresponding reddit thread, but the same thing wasn’t working for them with Lemmy. Someone else pointed out that it might be because Google personalises some of the search results now, so I tried their example query and the top link was to the post I was commenting on. It had already indexed to the most relevant result about an hour after the original post

It’s seen as an investment, yes. Those are important factors for a currency, I agree.

Is there a part where you meant to connect these dots to substantiate the first statement about it being a problem that it’s seen as an investment?

Edit: I get it, you’re saying it’s a problem with the idea that Bitcoin should be used as a currency in everyday transactions. I don’t think that’s a popular use case for Bitcoin, though. I wouldn’t use “digital gold” for everyday transactions, similarly to how I wouldn’t use real gold. That’s not really a problem with Bitcoin though, more of a misunderstanding of it

It’s sad, but as a crypto user I’d be sketched out enough about using a centralised hot wallet app like Exodus in an official capacity, let alone entering my private key in something installed via a 3rd party app store. This probably happens on the Play Store a few times a week, and that’s on a bigger platform with a full security review process. It’s ultimately unavoidable.

Am noob on debian, it’s great. Watched some videos to help introduce me, and it seems like the onboarding experience since 12 is way better than previously.

It’s the website that’s shitty, not the installer. And you’re not stupid OP, the bootable live image installer should be the default download. Make sure you link directly to it in your post, if you do. I should be able to go to the Debian website, hit download and get the best option like I can on the Ubuntu site. I got the normal installer instead, but that was fine for me.

I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m representative of the average newbie, as I had brief forays with using Linux many years ago. But it’s been painless. It took like an hour to setup, try a couple of DE’s, add Flatpack sources and then I was away, back to being immersed in my apps.

Wayland by default, inclusion of nonfree firmware sources, GNOME 43 are highlights for me and reasons why it deserves some focus. New users are coming from Windows, not Fedora. I’ve tried GNOME 2, that was a problem for me as a windows user. GNOME 43 is not a problem for Windows users, it is literally much more performant and stable. To the point I just realised now that it’s an older version when you pointed that out. Could’ve fooled me.

The reason I tried Debian first is because I wanted a blank slate, especially coming from Win11. That’s what I got after minimal and easy configuration. I’m satisfied with it and don’t feel curious about trying other distros, at least not right now.

mkvtoolnix-gui

Then why is there no sufficient demand for there to be a place in the market for RNT cigarettes currently, if people are willing to smoke separate from the universally accepted purpose of a cigarette as a nicotine delivery device? We aren’t talking about the difference between blues and reds - we’re talking about the difference between an effective nicotine delivery system and an ineffective one. Specifically in a market where effective smokeless nicotine delivery systems are available (and as accessible as cigarettes). If one just stops to think about how things would actually function in that sort of environment, your argument falls apart for me.

I can’t show you long-term data on the health impact of using RNT cigarettes when they aren’t available in the wild. But sure, here’s a review on shorter-term RCT’s & cohort studies.

A review of the evidence on cigarettes with reduced addictiveness potential - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8785120/

As mentioned, nicotine reinforcement and dependence is a key underlying cause of chronic cigarette use. They have a function, whether or not smokers are cognizant of it. When the nicotine is reduced, the cigarette no longer performs this function - no reinforcement, high chance for cessation.

It suggests this benefit extends to important subpopulations whom have disproportionately high smoking rates. In NZ there is a whole ethnic group that could be described this way: tāngata whenua, Māori people.

The review also mentioned the potential for adverse effects, including fostering a black market, or product manipulation. These issues are also presented by outright prohibition. Indeed the RNT strategy itself is intended as a mitigation against these problems, and the review shows they are far from a perfect solution. But taking the same behavioural science approach, it is entirely expected that people would seek alternative black market supply when the decision about availability is made for them.

Even if you consider other positions like the civil liberties argument, what do they want the freedom to do? It sounds like they want the freedom to participate in the act of smoking, more than specifically wanting the freedom to use cigarettes to effectively ingest nicotine. It is understood even among this crowd that nicotine is associated with addiction, which no one desires. At least, RNT’s would sort of reduce their position to “I’m fighting for the freedom to have chronic health problems”. Anyway, they’d still be free to grow their own tobacco legally for personal use, as far as I’m aware.

I’m still not sure if you meant that you think people would be caused to smoke more generally, or just a few. Either way, I wasn’t being facetious when I asked what the reasons were. I can’t imagine what basis you have for it. Like, the fact we don’t cultivate tomato plants for smoking and regulate them as an 18+ product and have a bunch of complicated strategies to address the harm it causes isn’t because there’s no nicotine in the tomato plant, or because the plant leaves are especially caustic and unpleasant to smoke, or anything like that. It’s because the nicotine concentration and bioavailability isn’t high enough to make that an effective delivery device. That’s why tomato smoking never proliferated in Mayan culture and eventually spread throughout the world following colonisation of the Americas, and that’s the same reason why people won’t continue to smoke cigarettes when they are rendered ineffective.

It even seems like what you want: prohibition, but in a more roundabout way. How is that possibly worse than the roundabout way they’re cost prohibitive via excessive taxation?

Sure, in a perfect world we could just ban them, so why have a roundabout? Because the roundabout has specific potential to have a direct impact toward beneficial longterm health outcomes and the elimination of tobacco harm over time, which a more direct approach does not.

The perfect solution would be to go back and somehow stop tobacco use from ever proliferating, but in lieu of that, it’s here, it’s entrenched in every country and culture and things like “outright prohibition” and “complete elimination” are simply unrealistic. On balance, the doubts about RNT’s are unreasonable because of the stakes involved. Statistically several NZers have died prematurely of tobacco-related illness since our conversation began. We need realistic solutions that don’t exist in a vacuum. RNT’s were one prong of a multi-pronged approach which together constituted our generation’s best shot. The UK, Australia, will have been looking at NZ as a test market for RNT’s and other cessation strategies as they have for many other unproven/disruptive technologies, see these decisions made by the Nats, and use it as additional justification to succumb to tobacco industry whims there as well.

It reinforces the effect of the nicotine. That’s literally why tobacco companies were adding acetone to cigarettes back when they were publicly denying it was even addictive.