This garbage article is a great example of why NPR taxpayer funding should never be restored. Ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim here. No evidence whatsoever of any link to climate change is presented. These mosquitoes came via ship and are thus like any other invasive species. Mosquitoes flourish in Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and the northernmost parts of Alaska, all places hundreds of miles north of the Arctic circle.
If you read the source article, it mentions in passing at the end that Iceland in general has seen more insects lately, partly due to climate change. It doesn't connect the mosquitos themselves to climate change. But the NPR article does indeed incorrectly connect the two. "taxpayer funding should never be restored" seems a bit of a histrionic reaction to this sloppy reporting, however.
There’s probably been a constant flow of mosquitoes to Iceland via trade for decades, but they weren’t able to establish before. You’re right though, the article could have done better showing the link.
They're just reporting what the institute said. You sound very angry.
>The institute noted that the mosquitoes were one of a number of new insect species discovered in Iceland in recent years due to a warming climate and the growth of international transportation.
Not sure what to read out of your comment, hence the question. You just appear super-angry at "lies and propaganda", which the linked article is neither/nor.
When the media or even scientists stretch out facts to support a thesis they don't actually support, they directly undermine the believability of that thesis to the general public. In a world cooking itself, that's probably not the greatest strategy. They do it so often it sometimes makes me wonder if that's not the true intent.
Well obviously they didn’t spontaneously manifest there and were imported somehow. But perhaps they are gaining a foothold know when they might lot have 100 years ago?
What’s more saddening is seeing intellectually curious people who can’t recognize their own biases.
It’s troubling how many accept this half-baked story without questioning the shaky correlations it draws.
It’s similar to what happened when the Maui wildfire started, many people,
and more worryingly, journalists, were quick to blame climate change in their initial reports. That narrative turned out to be inaccurate.
In fact, scientific studies (including those published in the International Journal of Wildland Fire) show that most wildfires are actually caused by human activity. But people love sharing headlines that reinforce their existing biases, even when the facts tell a different story.
There were similar such comments during Covid where people were saddened that people were still debating whether it was a lab-leak or not. Dogmatism, on which ever side, unless maybe in a field like mathematics which is entirely deductive, is not good.
The best thing I did for my homelab is unplug the raspberry pis and throw them into the crate of no-longer-used-but-wont-throw-away electronics. Switching to an ancient tower PC with on paper poorer specs significantly improved performance and reliability across the board and no more weird issues due to SD cards and flaky network. No worries about causing a house fire with sketchy power supplies. No having to make compromises to make it work like a regular PC with using external drives and no difficulty finding compatible software. Pis are amazing little devices, but my experience from the first gen to v4 is that they are temporary solutions or for use cases that don't have high reliability needs. Just buy a cheap mini PC for the same price and you have so many more options and benefits from the get go.
YMMV. it's never worked well for me. works great for the first week, then it stops connecting or i suddenly have several zombie bravia devices, all of which aren't connected.
best thing i ever did with my bravia was install a custom launcher via adb to finally rid myself of the endless ads, upsetting news, and terrible suggestions constantly shoved in my face without my consent. nice to be able to uninstall the misc bloat that you can't get to with the gui and just have a simple interface. all i want is to access jellyfin and maybe one or two other apps. much better all around experience now.
here's a nice reference for a lot of the stuff installed on bravia that you can elect to remove via adb:
OMG! thank you! I was unaware this was possible. I can't stand the fact that my expensive TV came with ads built-in. I use it in "only apps mode" so at least the only ad id showed is the top third of the screen one, but not the "recommended" content tiles. I'll do this instead once I go back home
Assuming the API was properly documented as returning signed int, that’s not my problem. Abuse of the API or
misunderstanding of the API doesn’t trump running out of space.
Exactly. I mean, if the end solution is to convert to a big int, who’s to say that some customer didn’t assume it would always be 32 bits and blow up then, too.
This does highlight the fact that 32 bit is just a small number these days. Personally, I prefer UUIDs instead of incrementing integers for primary keys since they also scale out without having to have global coordination, but at least choose a 64-bit number.
Yes. It's just so much easier to create a UUID client-side, use that to identify data in temporary UI state and commit without having to worry about getting the incremented identifier.
I find this significantly reduces decision fatigue. Deciding which hack to use for temporary identifiers is not much fun.
The picture on Amazon says 10Ah. Not interested until there is independent verification. The Haribo licensing lends some legitimacy, but way too many fly by night companies selling a fraction of what they advertise.
Not so much a planned standard, but Airsonic is about the closest thing. Many servers, clients, and third party tools are airsonic compatible. Navidrome, the current server I'm using is compatible for instance.
It's not a self-contained TPN compounder in a hospital cleanroom. It's a machine that has many parts that get wet with sugary water. It has parts that need to be cleaned that seldom are, and judging by the average fast food employee, would probably be better off left alone than further contaminated by them attempting to clean it. Google "soda fountain mold" and you will be stunned to see how nasty these can get. I don't eat fast food often, but I skip the drink unless it's from a meticulously clean place.
This doesn't help when every useless chinese widget on Amazon with a RNG created brand name has literally thousands or even tens of thousands of fake reviews. Yeah like 10,000+ were so enamored with this {insert useless item here} that they felt compelled to leave a 5 star review. Amazon has totally sold out like eBay. I don't shop on either anymore because it's hard to find real brands and feedback and reviews are fake. Not to mention the blatant fakes of major products ...
Unfortunately some of the weird things I need I can't figure out who else sells them. I can search amazon or ebay and find someone but they don't have a presence elsewhere (at least not that I can find)
This is the kind of take that is all too dismissive of China's textile industry.
Would you accuse the Seattle coffee industry that can roast and drop ship a custom bag of coffee in under 3 days of running on slave labor? Would you accuse the California software industry that can produce an MVP web app over the weekend of slave labor? No, of course you wouldn't. But we do that for China because we assume that it's still the world's sweat shop rather than the world's most sophisticated manufacturing hub.
China is the Silicon Valley of textiles (and it's the Silicon Valley of many other manufacturing industries). Chinese factories that generally pay better wages that afford much better conditions than other textile hubs and can pump out high quality products very quickly. Luxury clothing brands depend on China and generally not a lot of other textile-producing countries for their best quality items.
What Shein, Temu, and AliExpress are actually doing in the market is streamlining the overseas shipping process to cut down delivery times that used to be unreliable and take months with poor tracking and changing that to a generally reliable 8-12 business day shipping infrastructure.
Making the assumption that these websites only sell landfill-bound junk is an assumption that a competing business will make at their own peril. The way I see it, canceling my Amazon Prime subscription and moving most of those purchases to AliExpress has resulted in lower costs with equal quality.
I'm not saying that Shein's quality specifically is any good, but if you haven't been paying attention, clothing quality at mainstream Western stores like Walmart, Target, TJ Maxx, Ross, Zara, H&M, etc, isn't really much if any better than the low end no-brand stuff you find from China.
No, I'm pointing out how you misunderstood their comment as an attack on all Chinese industry, when it was criticism of specific firms in a specific sector.
I didn’t take it that way because there was nothing about the criticism specific to one firm. I might be wrong there but that’s how I choose to interpret it.
To me it seems odd that the statement “they have free slave labor” would be considered to be specific to one firm.
Thank you for providing something concrete. The original comment seemed like hyperbole to me, and now I’m leaving here better informed.
I do think this senate report is a little bit butthurt that their own regulations and trade agreements have enabled the business model.
It seems like it would be trivial to block out platforms in violation of US law via pressure by payment networks. That’s where I’m confused at the level of inaction given that this report includes a screenshot of a product page in violation. Visa and Mastercard can get Pornhub to vet their “suppliers” but they can’t do the same for Temu? They don’t even need a court order to do this.
The Western media has made it a constant meme is the problem.
The reality is the next generation of hard-tech and pretty much everything innovative in materials and manufacturing is coming out of China.
Like we are hearing a whole bunch of nonsense now about rare-earths and how China is nearly 100% of the supply of several along with processed graphene etc.
But what that story is missing is the less sophisticated stuff they were able to massively revolutionize also.
For instance most Western media declare the Belt and Road program a massive failure without looking at it's impact on things like nickel. Indonesia is now one of the worlds biggest suppliers because they a) banned export of unprocessed nickel and then lent hard into the BRI borrowing from China and allowing Chinese operated mines to setup their own processing there. As a result more of the value add is captured in Indonesia (the whole goal of all of this) and now Indonesia is one of the biggest supplies of nickle pig iron and stainless steel.
How is this possible when giant (and heavily experienced) Western mining companies in places like Australia (which also have vast nickle reserves) were both established and ready to expand? Well that comes down to tech and expertise. China was able to design and build a new class of nickle smelters that were 2-3x as capital efficient as the Western equivalent plants in Australia.
What impact did that have? Well a giant reduction in the price of nickel of course as Indonesia went from nearly no output to over 1.8M tons.
There are tons of other examples, especially in anything related to the next generation of energy. Solar, batteries, nukes, all the inputs for the above like polysilicon etc.
The Chinese are fucking good at this stuff and pretending they just copy and do stuff cheap is not only a massive disservice to the Chinese engineers that make this happen but also a dangerous mistake if you want to go into business competing with them.
That's exactly what I am thinking about, thanks for the insights. I am sure there are hundreds if not thousands examples like this with probably as much impact. See their massive investments in nearly any underdeveloped region of the world.
100% of everything on my body right now and ~80% of everything in my wardrobe is made of the highest quality materials I can afford by US or EU labor, often by a unionized workforce.
The only non-US things I own tend to be shoes (Italy, Spain) and jackets (UK). Or gifts.
YES it does cost more. But here's the thing: I have fewer, nicer, things that last longer and I almost certainly spend way less annually than someone buying $7 shirts from Shein or Walmart clothes.
So, buying trash made of the worst possible materials by slave labor is a choice unless you are the poorest of the poor in which case you, and only you, get a pass.
If everyone who didn't make minimum wage spent more consciously instead of just gulping down cheap Chinese goods like a hungry hungry hippo eats marbles and shopped locally economies of scale would make higher quality products available to everyone.
Even relative to other manufacturers in the same areas, Shein's quality (I don't pretend to be specifically informed re labor) of materials is "utter garbage".
This isn't really true tho. Shein ads over 10k of items every day, appearantly, and other than most shops they have many reviews on most popular items. It's kinda easy to pick the exact quality you are looking for as you have more or less unlimited choice.
That feels like a rude stereotyping that is dismissive of the buyers. Maybe not your thing but no need to get judgy about it. The buyers know what they are getting.
They choose to buy Shein for their own reasons - a good practice is to assume people have good reasons (maybe other reasons than the quality or reasons that you don't understand).
Oh! That was actually not intended to be dismissive of the buyers. It isn't my thing, as it happens, but I more mean that "even relative to other textile companies in China, Shein has a reputation for the lowest quality raw material/workmanship".
As you say, "people know what they are getting", and that's fine.
… it's nearly $300. Pants on that site are $400–$500. That's expensive.
A cheap Temu hoodie, by comparison, would need to make it a single year, maybe only 6–8 months, to have equivalent lifespan / $. (If priced at $25, or like $15.)
part of the reason that shein and temu is gaining is that some manufactures are moving away from China. This leaves huge capacity in manufacture to be filled, which means it is cheaper and faster for shein and temu.
