It makes sense to increase taxes or something if a city has more tourism than is desired and wants to reduce it — some cities in Europe have imposed various forms of taxes on tourists recently, when they’ve had more tourism than the locals are willing to put up with. Makes sense then, since it’s a finite resource being consumed.

I kind of doubt that Los Angeles is in that position, but I dunno what the politics are behind that, and I guess it could be the case.

In Europe’s case, my guess is that one could restructure the cities for more tourism throughout — Orlando, Florida, does more people a year than even the much-more-populous Paris, which is the top destination in Europe.

https://www.visitorlando.org/media/press-releases/post/orlando-welcomed-753-million-visitors-in-2024/

Orlando Welcomed 75.3 Million Visitors in 2024

https://roadgenius.com/statistics/tourism/france/paris/

The 2024 forecast expects a return to the 50 million visitor mark, boosted by the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

But Orlando was also designed around being a tourist destination, and a lot of the cities in Europe upset about tourism load weren’t and I’d guess don’t want to redesign around it.

EDIT: I’d also add that Los Angeles County has been shrinking in population for a while, so I’d be hesitant to impose more costs in their specific case. Let me go find a graph.

kagis

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescountycalifornia/PST120224#PST120224

Yeah, lower than it was in 2010, even.

Derives from ricing cars. Ricing cars derives from “rice burner”, where it was common to take an inexpensive, Asian-made car for modding. The pejorative nature kind of got lost somewhere along the way.

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

Rice burner is a pejorative term originally applied to Japanese motorcycles and which later expanded to include Japanese cars or any East Asian-made vehicles.[2][3][4][5] Variations include rice rocket, referring most often to Japanese superbikes, rice machine, rice grinder or simply ricer.[3][6][7]

T-Mobile’s 1985 Corolla Sport GT-S coupé “Poser Mobile” advertisements exploited ethnic stereotypes and stereotypes of customized East Asian cars as failed imitations of “authentic” car culture

Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, “usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments”.[8] Rice boy is a US derogatory term for the driver or builder of an import-car hot rod.[4] The terms may disparage cars or car enthusiasts as imposters or wanna-bes, using cheap modifications to imitate the appearance of high performance.

My desktop background has been the same shade of dark blue for the past roughly quarter century.

At first, it was because I didn’t want anything making visual recognition of stuff slower, when I was using a stacking windowing environment. Now I use a tiling windowing system and rarely see the desktop.

On my Android phone, for some inane reason, there’s no option to just use a fixed color background, so I’ve never bothered changing it from whatever the vendor shipped, don’t care enough to make a custom one-color image. I’d probably use black on the Android devices I have with OLED screens on general principle, but again, it doesn’t spend much time being visible.

All that being said, if you’re looking at screenshots of people ricing out their desktop on a community devoted to that, the whole point is to give them an interesting thematic look. They’re gonna have a background.

If you took a screenshot of my desktop, it’d be one blue rectangle. No persistently-visible taskbar. The vast majority of time, if there’s a window up, I have only a single, fullscreen window. That’s not really interesting to look at, and I doubt that anyone doing that is going to put it on a “rice your desktop” community, in the same sort of way that nobody is going to go to a “rice your car” community and post images of a vanilla Camry.

kagis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg4rn0z1r6o

Valeria Marquez was killed when a man entered her beauty salon in the city of Guadalajara “and apparently fired a gun at her”, according to the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office.

Well, it’s happened before.

kagis

https://www.thoughtco.com/losing-presidential-candidates-nominated-again-3368135

Here’s a list. For nine candidates before (this article predates Trump’s third primary victory, so only lists eight) a Presidential candidate has lost in the general election and made it to a second general election. Five of those times, the candidate managed to win in the general election.

• Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, lost to Biden in 2020, and defeated Harris in 2024.

• Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960, but defeated Humphrey in 1968.

• Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and lost to Eisenhower again in 1956.

• Dewey lost to FDR in 1944 and lost to Truman in 1948.

• Bryan lost to McKinley in 1896, to McKinley again in 1900, and to Taft in 1908.

• Clay lost to John Quincy Adams in 1824, to Jackson in 1832, and to Polk in 1832.

• Harrison lost to Van Buren in 1836, but defeated him in 1840.

• Jackson lost to John Quincy Adams in 1824, and then defeated him in 1828 and defeated Clay in 1832.

• Jefferson lost to Adams in 1796, but defeated him in 1800.

Eh.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Echo_Base

The Echo Base was the facility established by the Rebel Alliance on the frigid planet of Hoth

The interior of Echo Base extended seven levels below the surface, with the lower levels for barracks, rec rooms, maintenance hangars and fuel stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake#History

Record high water levels in the 1980s caused a large amount of property damage for owners on the eastern side of the Great Salt Lake, and the water started to erode the base of Interstate 80. In response, the State of Utah built the West Desert Pumping Project on the western side of the lake. It began operation on April 10, 1987. This project consists of a pumping station (41°15′9.28″N 113°4′53.31″W) at Hogup Ridge, containing three pumps with a combined capacity of moving 1,500,000 US gallons per minute (95 m3/s), an inlet canal, and an outlet canal. Also, there are 25 miles (40 km) of dikes and a 10-mile (16 km) access road between the town of Lakeside and the pumping station.[17]

This pumping project was designed to increase the surface area of the Great Salt Lake and thus increase the rate of water evaporation. The pumps drove some of the water of the Great Salt Lake into the 320,000 acres (1,300 km2) Newfoundland Evaporation Basin in the desert west of the lake. A weir in the dike at the southern end of the Newfoundland Mountains regulated the level of water in the basin and it sometimes returned salty water from the evaporation basin into the main body of the Great Salt Lake.[17]

At the end of their first year of operation, the pumps had removed about 500,000 acre-feet (620,000,000 m3) of water from the Great Salt Lake. The project was shut down in June 1989, as the level of the lake had dropped by nearly six feet (1.8 meters) since reaching its peak levels during June 1986 and March 1987. The Utah Division of Water Resources credits the project with “over one-third of that decline”.[17] In total, the pumps removed 2,730,000 acre-feet (3.37 km3) of water while they operated.[18]

Although the pumps are no longer in use, they have been kept in place in case the level of the Great Salt Lake ever rises that high again.[19]

Victory!

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

Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a type of a Linux installation and the name of a book written by Gerard Beekmans, and as of May 2021, mainly maintained by Bruce Dubbs. The book gives readers instructions on how to build a Linux system from source. The book is available freely from the Linux From Scratch site.

LWN.net reviewed LFS in 2004:[19]

Linux From Scratch is a wonderful project. It should become a compulsory reading material for all Linux training courses, and something that every Linux enthusiast should complete at least once. This would also create another interesting side effect: people who tend to be quick in expressing dissatisfaction on the distributions’ mailing lists and forums would probably show a lot more respect for the developers. Installing a ready-made distribution is a trivial task. Building up a set of 4 CDs containing a stable, secure and reliable operating system, plus thousands of applications, is most definitely not.

Also, Europe is shifting towards having more cars.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240117-1

In 2022, the average number of passenger cars per 1 000 inhabitants in the EU was 560. During the decade 2012-2022, the average number increased by 14.3% (from 490 to 560 passenger cars per 1 000 inhabitants).

Italy had the highest number with 684 passenger cars per 1 000 inhabitants and it was followed by Luxembourg (678), Finland (661), and Cyprus (658). Meanwhile, Latvia had the lowest rate with 414 passenger cars per 1 000 inhabitants, followed by Romania (417), and Hungary (424).

Data show that central and eastern EU countries recorded high growth rates between 2012 and 2022. Among the EU countries, Romania registered the highest growth of passenger cars per 1 000 inhabitants (+86.2%; +193), followed by Croatia (+44.8%; +152), Hungary (+40.9%; +123), Slovakia (+40.1%; +135) and Estonia (+39.7%; +181).

Most of Europe’s city road networks were built before the automobile was common. If you look at some of the older cities in the US on the East Coast, you’ll also see narrower streets and less visibility at corners. But most of the roads in US cities are pretty young.

Once you have a layout oriented towards horse and foot traffic, it’s not easy to retrofit it in the way that it is say, with adding electricity to a city when that came along. Can’t just go through and expand the city roads without smacking into buildings.

Using mass transit along a select set of roads and then walking the last mile is less-disruptive to the existing layout, so it’s a reasonable way to deal with older road layouts.

Too many don’t get involved with their children’s activities at all these days.

For any change, AI or no, why would you take out part of your existing company before confirming that the new thing works for the new role?

They’re my favorite widespread chain pizzeria.

There are some mom-and-pops or small chains that I’ve found that I like better, but I’m not gonna complain about Papa John’s.

Little Caesar’s…now there’s a chain pizzeria that I’m disappointed with.

Oh…I guess I like Uno’s more — I really like their pizza skins appetizer — and they’re a widespread chain, but they do Chicago-style pizza and are really a different type of establishment.

Undocumented cellular radios also found in Chinese batteries

Ugh. This is going to become an increasing problem with electronic devices. It’s too damn easy to link systems to the Internet now without users knowing about it.

You can. You can get evaporative coolers (in the US, sometimes called swamp coolers). I have one. They use much less power per unit of cooling than air conditioners, but come with some drawbacks:

• You can only cool so far (well, you can build multi-stage systems to cool further, but then power efficiency drops off). Air conditioners don’t have such a limitation — throw more power at them, and they’ll make air colder.

• You must have low humidity, so that the water can evaporate. At 100% relative humidity, they’re totally inoperative. Air conditioners don’t have this requirement.

• If using them indoors, you have to ventilate to the outside, usually by keeping some windows open, or you’ll just drive humidity up to the max and then they’ll stop functioning. This does have the benefit of keeping air fresh, having a high turnover, but caps how cool they can make a structure. Air conditioners don’t require this.

• More maintenance. You occasionally need to replace the membrane and put something in the water to kill algae, same as a swimming pool. Don’t do that, and algae will build up and it’ll get a dank smell. Air conditioners just require cleaning or replacing an air filter occasionally, and if you don’t do that, just become less efficient.

• An evaporative cooler requires a water feed and for forced air, power. Air conditioners only require power.

• They will exacerbate any humidity problems, like mold.

There are also some benefits:

• For direct systems (the simplest and cheapest), where the humidified air blows at you, you get the benefits of a humidifier, like not getting chapped lips or becoming dehydrated easily. In arid and semi-arid environments where evaporative coolers work well, this is pleasant.

• You can reasonably use them outdoors and in non-sealed environments like a garage. Air conditioners would be really inefficient for this.

• You can easily throw essential oils in the water to get a scent diffuser.

• They actually cool the air, rather than just dumping the heat somewhere else, as air conditioners do (which in cities, heats up the area around buildings).

I understand that there are also some hybrid “evaporative-assisted” air conditioners that have the air conditioner dumping heat into what amounts to an evaporative cooler. That’d get some of the efficiency benefits of an evaporative cooler without the humidity constraints.

You can find them in the hot, arid American West, where the conditions work well for them.

https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/evaporative-coolers-work-best-dry-areas-us-area-a

I dunno, but it looks like they’ve been selling it on Steam for years, so I assume that Valve is fine with them.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mesa_(video_game)

Black Mesa is a 2020 first-person shooter video game developed and published by Crowbar Collective. It is a fan-made remake of Half-Life (1998) made in the Source game engine. Originally published as a free mod in September 2012, Black Mesa was approved for commercial release by Valve, the developers of Half-Life. The first commercial version was published as an early-access release in May 2015, followed by a full release in March 2020, for Windows and Linux.

Yeah, came to some sort of arrangement.

Oh, cute.

I commented before that one can get 5 gallon bottled fluoridated water, and would like to again point that out. The fluoride may not be as concentrated as in these prescription-level things, but it’s available. Can throw it on a water cooler.

Brick-and-mortar pickup:

https://www.arrowheadwater.com/products/where-to-buy

Delivery:

https://www.readyrefresh.com/en/products/arrowhead-spring-water-delivery/arrowhead-5-gallon-water-with-fluoride/p/1311

It looks like there are also some other brands, like Ozarka, but Arrowhead’s what I’ve used.

but as I said it’s all browser 2D animations

Right, but there are different ways that it could display it.

I don’t do much Web dev, but looking at that page in Firefox’s Inspector, it looks like a canvas element is covering the whole thing, so I expect that it’s using HTML5 Canvas.

Just visually, without benchmarking, it seems smooth to me on Firefox 128.10.0esr at 2560x1440 at 165 Hz (AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX, 7950X3D CPU).

considers

When I go to about:support in Firefox, “ACCELERATED_CANVAS2D” is listed as" default" and “available”, which from some skimming online, seems to indicate whether hardware acceleration is available for HTML Canvas. Do you see the same?

EDIT: Based on:

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/dlknks/why_is_firefoxs_gpuhardware_acceleration_still/

It sounds like WebRender is disabled by default on Firefox on Linux. Some user there is saying that it works fine for him if he switches it on. It sounds like it relates to some sort of 2D hardware acceleration, though I’ve no prior experience with it.

For me, if I go to about:config in Firefox, gfx.webrender.all is false. It’s smooth here with it false, but maybe I’m just throwing a lot of hardware at the thing. I haven’t read deeply into it, but it might be worth toggling it and reopening Firefox and seeing if the problem disappears for you, as I doubt that it’d cause much harm if it doesn’t work (well, I guess it might crash Firefox or something…) Might also do nothing, as it sounds like all platforms have been using it for some time, and so maybe it’s active regardless of whether this setting is on. <shrugs>

Do you have a test case game and resolution that you’re running it at? I mean, it’s kind of hard to say much or do comparisons without any idea of what the thing is using. HTML5 Canvas?

The extraordinary intervention, outlined Tuesday by Swain in a 77-page order, comes nearly a decade after the city’s jail system was placed under federal oversight as part of a class-action lawsuit brought by detainees.

This predates even Trump’s first term, so I doubt that he has much to do with it.

You could definitely sell those for more than $0. The batteries alone aren’t cheap.