Oh, that’s a good point – missed that in the article. They did say that it started in 2015.

I don’t know anything about the specifics here, but here’s a 5 year graph of futures for live cattle versus beef:

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/live-cattle

If there’s collusion to engage in price-fixing by meat packers, I’d expect to see beef prices rising without a corresponding increase in cattle prices.

Beef prices did indeed recently start rising rapidly without a corresponding increase in live cattle prices.

But on the other hand, beef prices are also a lot lower relative to live cattle prices than they were during roughly COVID-19.

Two of the renewables are intermittent: solar and wind.

They only provide energy some of the time.

That means that you need to have something else to step in when they aren’t providing energy.

We don’t have the capacity to just store all that energy when they are outputting power to fill in those gaps. Batteries aren’t even remotely-feasible. Pumped hydrostorage is our best option, but you can only do that in places with favorable geography.

What it generally means today, in practice, is that if someone is using solar or wind, they used to use coal and now use natural gas to fill in those gaps. If you use solar or wind, you’re also tying yourself to natural gas.

For a number of places, if you’re using natural gas, you cannot pipe it in. Like, take Guam. They’re a little island out the middle of nowhere. They can’t pipe in natural gas, need to have it converted to LNG so that it can be shipped in. Europe has some natural gas, but less than the US, and unfortunately two of the convenient neighboring places to get it that might pipe it in are Russia, which promptly started using said pipelines as leverage, and Africa, which has countries that would like to sell it to Europe but suffer from political instability.

If your natural gas pipeline gets too long, then LNG becomes more-efficient. LNG has something like an IIRC 30% overhead to liquify it, but once you do that, you’re mostly done. With a pipeline, you have to keep pumping it to keep the gas moving. There’s a break-even point where LNG becomes more-efficient if you have to move it further. I looked that up at one point, and IIRC, even security and practicality issues aside, it wouldn’t be economically-viable to run a trans-Atlantic pipeline: LNG is more-energy efficient, because the distance is so far.

Hydroelectricity is renewable and doesn’t have that problem (well, barring extreme, extended droughts, but it comes with a lot of flexibility in generation), but it’s limited by geography; you can only put hydroelectric dams in some places. Also, there are some people who get upset about the ecological impact on rivers, since it changes whether fish can go up and down the river and when and how much water flows.

Geothermal power is renewable and also doesn’t have that problem, but is also limited by geography.

With nuclear, you’ve got a raging anti-nuclear crowd.

EDIT: One point in LNG’s favor – I went reading about current LNG systems a while back. They’re…presently not very efficient, and it’d be possible to do engineering work on them to improve efficiency. Basically, if you’re liquifying LNG in the US and shipping it to Germany and then regassifying it, you’re running what amounts to a gargantuan air conditioner compressor. You’re making the gas very hot in the US, then producing very cold output decompressing LNG in Germany. Right now, the heat and coolness on each end are “thrown out”, not used for other processes, which is why there’s overhead. So, IIRC Germany is (or was during the crisis, dunno what’s going on now) using floating LNG regassification plants, things that are basically converted LNG tankers. Those things deal with all the coolness they’re generating by having their LNG regassified by dumping it into the water. So we’re spending a lot of money and energy to heat up water or air or something in the US and then chill German port waters (in fact, I was reading some article a while back that people were a bit worried about the ecological impacts of the chilling). It’d be possible, if you were going to use LNG, to reuse some of that energy, which would avoid that waste.

In California, part of the California State Water Project involves pumping water up over the mountains to where it’s needed. That costs energy. But it’s set up to recover some of the expended energy by having the descending water drive hydroelectric power plants. Same kind of idea – you can refine the process to eliminate overhead.

If you really want to do so, you can go set up your own well and water purification system. Some people have to do so, because they’re off in the sticks somewhere that can’t get water service.

My expectation is that you’ll find that it’s not cost-effective to do so.

To put it another way, when I first joined, it was to kbin.social. Kbin has a feature to help people discover new communities where it will suggest random comments. This leads to…rather dramatic cross-pollination. So, for example, I remember looking at a technology community on pawb.social. Some other random kbin.social user also showed up there, I’m sure via random comment, and was complaining that everyone in the forum was a furry. I mean…yeah, you just hopped right into the middle of their den. Same thing with yiffit.net and probably a number of other instances. Does that mean that the Threadiverse is all furries? Well, no. I’d say that it’s disproportionately so compared to Reddit, but it’s more that it’s got special-interest instances.

Or transexual users on lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Or porn enthusiasts on lemmynsfw.com.

Or underage anime porn fans on burggit.moe.

Or science enthusiasts on mander.xyz.

Or Star Trek fans on startrek.website.

Hop onto any of those or communities on those, and you’re likely to find a lot of content of the sort that the instance focuses on. But if your instance doesn’t federate with them, you may not see that material at all, nor the users on those instances.

I’ve seen multiple videos of barn owls “dancing” to music.

I have no idea what’s going on in their heads, but it’s something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fUIx_cmqM4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKU_PRt9rpg

I see a lot of handwringing in society over kids not being able to handle themselves online.

I’d be more worried about senior citizens.

I don’t think anyone has polls. There is a much higher far-left proportion than on Reddit, as things stand.

Note that Reddit is one unified world, albeit with division by subreddit.

The Threadiverse is not. Some instances have very different communities – some only permit certain types of users. And not all instances federate with each other, and if your instance doesn’t federate with another, you won’t see content from those instances.

So, for example, lemmygrad.ml and to a lesser degree lemmy.ml has a bunch of people – including the lead Lemmy dev – who are enthusiastic about Stalin and the Soviet Union, pro-authoritarian-left. Hexbear.net is kinda out there too.

Then you’ve got exploding-heads.com, which I believe is far-right.

Lemmy.world is more-mainstream, but I’d certainly place it left of Reddit on average. It doesn’t federate with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net or exploding-heads.com.

Beehaw.org is what I’d call far-left, but less in the authoritarian camp, but they’ve defederated from lemmy.world.

You can see defederations on an instance under “Blocked instances” at /instances. So for example:

https://lemmy.world/instances

Most instances also say something about their policies in the right-hand sidebar.

I think that some of it is also that some people are very vocal about their political views, and I think that some of those are disproportionately in the far-left camp. Like, if someone wants to vent that they think that society would be better off as an anarchy or that private ownership of industry or money or whatever shouldn’t exist, I think that those people are gonna be more likely to have strong feelings about and repeatedly post about their point of disagreement than someone saying “I think that things are going pretty well, but I’d like Tweak X and Y”.

One other potential: it looks like these days – I seem to vaguely recall a bookmarks.txt years back – Firefox stores bookmarks in an sqlite database in your profile directory, “places.sqlite”.

It also looks like people have constructed scripts to convert an SQL table to text, edit it in vim, and then reconstruct the table:

https://github.com/BnMcGn/vibase

You might be able to just use something like that to edit the database directly.

That being said, it might be okay if you need one major piece of work offline, but it looks like Firefox establishes an exclusive lock on places.sqlite when it’s running, so unless offline editing is sufficient or there’s a way to request that Firefox not use exclusive access, I don’t know if this would work for you.

I’m an emacs person, so I don’t have a good frame of reference for what you want, but does Vimium C do what you want?

https://github.com/gdh1995/vimium-c

EDIT: Or the original Vimium, not familiar with the differences:

https://github.com/philc/vimium

He has assault with a dangerous weapon charges in there (which I assume is Minnesota’s term for what is “deadly weapon” here), so I’d guess that he was using a gun or maybe a knife against someone in at least one of his prior incidents, so I’d give reasonable odds that if he was using a weapon in the attempted carjacking, it wasn’t a Nerf gun.

EDIT: Yeah. Minnesota criminal code:

https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/609.02

Subd. 6.Dangerous weapon.

“Dangerous weapon” means any firearm, whether loaded or unloaded, or any device designed as a weapon and capable of producing death or great bodily harm, any combustible or flammable liquid or other device or instrumentality that, in the manner it is used or intended to be used, is calculated or likely to produce death or great bodily harm, or any fire that is used to produce death or great bodily harm.

And if he has assault charges, he would have been using on someone, not just carrying it.

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that this isn’t the nicest neighborhood in the world, and there are probably other kids on the playground getting up to their own shennanigans.

kagis for North Minneapolis

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/25/us/minneapolis-crime-defund-invs/index.html

A feeling of lawlessness, a sense of neglect

Residents of the north side describe a landscape that can feel lawless. Indeed, about 60% of police calls for shots fired this year have come from the area, even though it makes up just 15% of the population, according to city data.

Paul Johnson, 56, said young men openly sell drugs during the day in public places, such as a gas station on Broadway Avenue that has been dubbed the “murder station” due to all of the fatal shootings there. (It is near the one where Blair was killed.)

“You pull up to get gas – they try to sell you drugs,” he said. “And not just three or four, but it’s a bulk of people.”

The perception among many residents is that the police ignore the area.

“They just let it go on,” said Johnson’s friend, Brian Bogan, 42, who said he moved from north Minneapolis to relatively safer St. Paul due to his kids growing up in an area where they don’t know if “it’s fireworks or gunshots.”

https://www.fox9.com/news/are-crime-maps-holding-back-north-minneapolis

Red all over

CoreLogic’s map for North Minneapolis shows an enormous swath of red from Golden Valley Road to the south, spanning the length of seven neighborhoods: Near North, Willard-Hay, Jordan, Hawthorne, Folwell, McKinley, and Camden.

Nearly the entire northwest side of the city is saturated in crimson red.

CoreLogic says the red zone means the area has up to five times the national average for property and violent crime.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/mpd-chief-hennepin-county-attorney-spar-over-referral-of-juvenile-crime-cases/

MPD chief, Hennepin County attorney spar over referral of juvenile crime cases

One day after a drive-by shooting injured four kids in north Minneapolis, the Hennepin County attorney and Minneapolis police chief are sparring over strategies to stop the cycle of juvenile crime.

Police said the four victims were inside a stolen Kia around 1 a.m. Sunday when automatic gunfire erupted from a vehicle following them on West Broadway Avenue.

Two boys and two girls between the ages of 11 and 14 were injured, and one girl who was shot in the head was brought to the hospital in critical condition. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Monday that all of the victims were expected to survive.

“I think, in a lot of ways, we are failing to deter this activity,” O’Hara said the night of the shooting. “Two of the five juveniles involved in this incident were arrested not even two weeks ago for being in a stolen car.”

Yeah.

I’m trying to imagine getting car-jacked by a 10 year old and it just keeps getting funnier.

Well, he’s 10 now, but it sounds like that was a prior incident, so I suppose he could have been younger at that point.

I mean, you can probably build a house that can reliably survive the conditions there. It’s just gonna be really expensive and may not look all that pretty.

It’s gonna have to handle water up to a certain height and wind-blown debris smashing into it.

Like, think of a lighthouse or flak tower or something.

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

Sometimes a lighthouse needs to be constructed in the water itself. Wave-washed lighthouses are masonry structures constructed to withstand water impact, such as Eddystone Lighthouse in Britain and the St. George Reef Light of California. In shallower bays, Screw-pile lighthouse ironwork structures are screwed into the seabed and a low wooden structure is placed above the open framework, such as Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse. As screw piles can be disrupted by ice, steel caisson lighthouses such as Orient Point Light are used in cold climates. Orient Long Beach Bar Light (Bug Light) is a blend of a screw pile light that was converted to a caisson light because of the threat of ice damage. Skeletal iron towers with screw-pile foundations were built on the Florida Reef along the Florida Keys, beginning with the Carysfort Reef Light in 1852.

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

With concrete walls up to 3.5 m (11 ft) thick, their designers considered the towers to be invulnerable to attack by the standard ordnance carried by RAF heavy bombers at the time of their construction.

The Soviets, in their assault on Berlin, found it difficult to inflict significant damage on the flak towers, even with some of the largest Soviet guns, such as the 203 mm M1931 howitzers.

After the war, the demolition of the towers was often considered not feasible and many remain to this day, with some having been converted for alternative use.

Police booked the 10-year-old into the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center Thursday. According to the department, this is at least his third arrest and he is a suspect in a dozen cases ranging from “auto theft to robbery to assault with a dangerous weapon.”

O’Hara said charges were also approved against the boy in an August attempted carjacking.

Precocious little urchin.

Multivitamins

There was that cat in the news a few years back who drove off that dog that was attacking and dragging a little boy in that family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEa6jZv-Khc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)

On May 13, 2014, Jeremy Triantafilo, a four-year-old boy, was riding his bicycle in his family’s driveway in Bakersfield, California when Scrappy, a neighbor’s eight-month-old Labrador-Chow mix cross, came from behind and bit his leg.[9] As the dog began dragging Jeremy down his driveway, Tara, who the family states was very attached to Jeremy, tackled the dog and chased him away before returning to Jeremy’s side to check on him.

Jeremy needed ten stitches in his left calf following the attack. He quickly recovered and was thankful for Tara’s actions calling her “my hero”.[10]

If mean, if I were a cat – smaller than the dog in question, and physically less-able to take on larger animals than a dog anyway – and the dog was already doing a number on a human, that’s not a fight I’d casually jump into. And while there are a few social cat species, like lions, I don’t think that the wildcat ancestor of the housecat is a social animal, so it’s probably not really geared up to be helping out other members of a pride or anything.

kagis

Yeah, it’s solitary:

https://synapsida.blogspot.com/2020/03/small-cats-domestic-cats-closest.html

Among these three species, the one thought to be closest of all to the domestic animal is the sand cat (Felis margarita). This split off from the line leading to the wildcats and the Chinese mountain cat around 2.5 million years ago, just before the Ice Ages got going, while the other species (or their immediate ancestors) seem to have been around since the Late Pliocene 3 to 3.5 million years ago.

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

The sand cat is solitary, except during the mating season and when a female has kittens.

Another poignant note that some other news sources have pointed out: it looks like she was a rescue dog. That is, in getting her, her elderly owner probably saved her from being euthanized.

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/rescue-dog-stevens-county-returns-favor-saving-elderly-owner-who-fell/E54BZZERANB4FI2BN2ES7OUS2M/

Rescue dog in Stevens County returns favor, saving elderly owner who fell

Honestly, given a canine’s physical capabilities, I’m not sure that I could have done as well as she did in that situation.

And for a dog, what had to have gone into that…

• Assess that her owner was in trouble.

• Assess that another human could help. I’m not sure that that’s an obvious conclusion for a dog to come to from an evolutionary standpoint. My guess is that most cases, in a pack of wild dogs, for most problems short of being attacked by something, there’s not a whole lot that bringing another dog to help is going to do, if one gets hurt.

• She had to plan out in advance a way to get a human to do what she needed them to do.

• Assess that disrupting traffic would be a way to get attention. That is, she had to have a model of the mental state of other humans sufficient to predict how they’d act in a situation that I doubt that she’d seen before.

• Evade capture when someone tried to capture her.

• And keep them interested enough to follow her to the cabin.

I’ve always been able to tell until now…

How would you be able to tell if you could tell?

Man, now I kinda wonder if there should be an “AI-generated or not” website. Someone’s probably done one.