modulus

Yes please. ¡OTAN no, bases fuera!

There are a few.

WIPO and juridical infra around it like TRIPS.

Energy Charter Conference (and the treaty it's based on, the ECT).

OSCE: European "regional security" org.

UNCITRAL: codification of international trade practices and dispute resolution.

IAEA: it's meant to make nuclear power available to everyone, in practice it does iffy spying for Western powers.

Would have to think a bit harder, there are more.

But probably the ones on this thread are the major ones.

Is the EU deliberately designing an inferior tech stack for itself or something?

Is it me or this plan is just unhinged? Not just politically bad, or imbalanced, or whatever. But actually fantastical, not meant for implementation. In fact I can't think of anyone who'd accept it, not the zionists either. It seems headline-driven policy. It's just intended to make noise.

At least Oslo was shitty but conceivably workable for some values of workable.

This is talking about tariffs and SEZs in the middle of rubble.

Translation sets a certain distance between you and the work, that is inevitable. But so does time, for example. Should you not read anything from earlier than the 1950s because language has changed?

Good news on nuclear, awful news on gas, but considering the German fake energy transition is powered by it, it's perhaps inevitable.

Also this just annoyed me more than it should:

Nuclear power is a carbon-free source of electricity but it is not typically labeled as green energy, like solar, wind and other renewables. Generating power this way requires mining and processing uranium to create nuclear fuel, an energy-intensive process that produces emissions.

Unlike wind turbines and solar panels, which are made from butterfly shine and faery sighs.

My understanding is that Firefox can't generate and store them by itself, it needs some other mechanism.

I'm not very convinced by this article. A lot of the "realities" are not, they're policy choices. Just as an example, the notion of the non-driving elderly adult having to be taken by their child to some office to get an ID is just a consequence of the US choosing not to have compulsory and free or nominal charge ID for all residents. Most of the other objections are equally dependent on specific policy choices, which may apply in some places and not others.

Oddly, I have a friend who's not much into SF but absolutely loved Quicksilver (and the whole Baroque Cycle). She also enjoyed Anathem. But Cryptonomicon or other Stephenson's books left her uninterested.

I suppose it's a matter of taste then. I don't really mind the expository style. Incidentally, Greg Egan is also one of my favourites, and I'd say he does use some amount of exposition, for example in Diaspora, or the Orthogonal Series (amazing work).

I liked Anathem a lot. I think I enjoyed all of Neal Stephenson's books up to (but excluding) Seveneves, whereupon I gave up on him. Anathem is one of my favourite books.

The whole notion of monks in space seems absurd because of how people see monks. But this is both ahistorical and contrary to the way they work in the book. Copernicus and Mendel were monks. And these particular ones were all about learning maths and theorics (physics). They didn't optimise for technology, because they weren't allowed, but they optimised for learning, for extracting information out of tiny details. I think they'd do alright in a scientific(ish) mission.

I get why people say this, but I like his digressions. It's not just a matter of learning something new (though occasionally one does) but of how he uses language to express it.