Well, millers are historically thought of as corrupt. Can’t make ol’ Geoff Chaucer look like a liar.

Voyager has been working well for me.

It says Radio Liechtenstein had an average 11,400 daily listeners in the country in 2021, the last year for which figures are available. Liechtenstein is a principality of about 39,000 people that borders Switzerland and Austria.

I’m honestly kinda impressed they’re getting almost 30% of the country’s population to tune in.

For everyone elese who didn’t know, the current “Waka Jumping” law in NZ allows the leader of a political party to demand the resignation of a member of Parliament who leaves their party. Sounds like the Greens are wary of the law in general, so they require an internal 75% vote for their leader to request the ejection.

The ejected member will be replaced via a new election, if they represent a district, or by the next person on the party list if they were from the proportional vote.

I would like one industrial replicator, please.

I have no idea if this is a clever bypass around expensive commercial offerings, a clever waste of time that barely improves over doing it by hand, or somewhere in between, but it sure looks like a nice design and print.

I suppose if a given machine can work in LAN or sneakernet mode, then it’s not THAT bad, but I was referring more to their heavy reliance on Cloud, closed source (possibly in violation of other projects’ licensing), and proprietary parts. If any 3D printer maker is going to start hiding features behind a paywall someday, it’s them.

I was thinking the Neptune 4 plus looked pretty good. If I can get my print capacity to 300mm in X and Y, options for my other hobbies (keyboard building in particular) open up. Then, I’ve never really tried TPU, so direct drive also seems nice.

A big Core XY for under $600 seems nice. Have to consider it.

The only other disadvantage I can think of is smaller dimensions in X and Y. At a minimum, I’d like to be able to keep printing 200+ mm squares. The inherent speed and stability seem nice, though.

Well Labour wanted a leader who could appeal to Tory voters…

“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.

I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.

While imprisoning an old lady for “corruption” is pretty rich coming from a coup-loving military junta, there’s a pretty good reason that calls for her release have been lower on the priority list.

Play authoritarian games, win authoritarian prizes.

In that case, I would recommend starting with FreeCAD (get a 1.0 release candidate from the weekly builds github) and make sure to watch a couple of intro tutorials. There are tons of CAD packages with pluses and minuses (and that’s exaggerated in their free tiers), but if you can start with FreeCAD and have it as your baseline, you can avoid a lot of cost and annoying business practices, though as I mentioned elsewhere, Plasticity is not a bad choice if you go in knowing its limitations.

I’ve done the trial, and included it in my stickied writeup at [email protected]

It’s not parametric, and for amateur single-part designers the biggest thing there is just that it sucks to realize you screwed up a a height or distance somewhere, and now you have to go back and Boolean on some shape or adjust a bunch of screwholes manually. Constraining drawings and using variables is all very nice if you start making more sophisticated parts or really need to churn them out quickly, but the History is the beautiful part for this use case.

Other than that, I actually liked it quite a bit. The workflow is pretty intuitive, it works smoothly (on Win10 at least), and it has literally the nicest and most ambitious fillet/chamfer heuristics of anything I tried. It will try its best to fillet things right into oblivion.

My only other real concern is that it’s a one-man shop, but if it works mostly bug-free for you, that is not necessarily a huge deal, especially at the price point. I think it’s probably a pretty good value, but I already have a non-parametric app I can use well enough, so I went with Alibre Design on a payment plan, so it feels like a slightly expensive subscription, but then I own the license. I’m still hoping FreeCAD 1.0 will be good enough to make me regret the decision to go with Alibre, but we’ll see.

I think this is the second time this has happened in recent months. I am wondering if the UK bureaucracy has some sort of training about not violating trademarks generally, or some sort of software filter to avoid trademarked terms. Regardless, it seems like a fairly petty annoyance that affects a tiny number of people and can be worked around.

Or hell, maybe it’s the same clerk and Gareth from Slough is sticking to his guns.

Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.

I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.

1. The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.

2. The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.

Yup, and even apart from that they say it like it’s not a health risk to carry and deliver a baby, a professional risk to even be pregnant, and that separation is lifelong trauma for all involved. It’s perfectly possible to raise an adopted kid well enough that it’s a not a major component of their personality, but it’s a challenge that must be handled.

And that’s best case. I’m super pleased to have been born, but honestly I’m not sure my birth mother thrived how she might have if she’d made a different choice with her own body. She’s a sweet, sensitive lady and the couple of times I’ve met her I can tell it weighed on her for decades.