fivefifty's comments

The local producers did reduce output for those reasons, supermarkets etc instead went to source replacement produce from overseas, but those overseas suppliers also had a poor season and couldn't supply enough.

The Harrys Farm youtube channel explains it fairly basically in this video, I'll try and link direct to about where he talks about it specifically (although whole thing might be worth watching if you're interested in how farming works in the UK) https://youtu.be/b6m29rSSmCM?t=552

For those who can't watch the video, basically the gist is most of the food in shortage (lettuce, tomato, cucumbers etc) is normally grown in the UK in large greenhouses from local producers, but energy prices got too high last year making it uneconomical to grow in a greenhouse as obviously it's energy intensive to do so. The govt refused any support and supermarkets rejected the potential higher prices and instead decided they could just source product overseas instead. The greenhouse producers therefore didn't plant much for this season, but the foreign sourced produce also had a poor harvest which resulted in no excess available for export to the UK and therefore some stores now can't stock some fresh produce. Energy prices have come down and so local UK produce growers are now growing again and should be back to normal supply in a couple of months. Although he mentions earlier in the video that this years wheat crop is doing poorly and that is normally used as animal feed which could mean potential future shortages for things like meat and eggs.

While you are mostly correct there have been some infamous ones such as the 1983 Negev incident where an F-15 and A-4 Skyhawk collided and the F-15 landed without a wing https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/that-time-an-f-15-landed-withou...

or that time a couple of F/A-18 Hornets collided and both managed to land with substantial damage https://theaviationgeekclub.com/u-s-naval-aviator-explains-h...

I don't think the F-15 would be the first to accelerate vertically, the English Electric Lightning was also known for incredible climb performance even in the vertical and it's a much older design of aircraft.

Certainly in my area they seem to just wear dark plain hoodies and face masks and don't care much about cameras as at 4am no-one is likely monitoring any alerts that come up and once people see the footage in the morning there isn't anything distinctive to ID them.

I have seen some cases of just using spray paint or even some kind of oil or whatever else to mess up the lens (mainly for doorbells or otherwise where the camera is easy to reach and see) or if it's too far out of reach they just throw rocks or hit it with a long stick or similar until it's out of action.

Not exactly the same but there has been consideration given to store ICBMs in lakes amongst other things: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/air-force-considered-f...

Not exactly what you are describing but there are some sites like runrepeat.com that are basically a database of running shoes that let you compare stats and check aggregated reviews on whether they fit true to size etc along with reviews for some of them. Before I found that site it's was basically a crap shoot to figure out the subtle differences between seemingly 50 different models of slightly different shoe from each manufacturer but that site really helps me narrow it down and find similar shoes to stuff I already like.

>Where do we land when people are not allowed to pick the partner they actually want? We land in reality.

There tends to be a bit of a gap between what people 'want' and what they can actually 'get' and I think this is where a lot of online dating falls down as the illusion of endless choice means people keep looking for perfection when in reality that person doesn't exist or if they do, they aren't going to be interested in the other person.

Most people throughout history pretty much had to look in their fairly narrow social circle or village/town etc and pick whoever they could get who would also like them. Most people knew more or less where they stood amongst everyone else and had a general idea of whether you stood a chance or not and didn't bother if you knew you had no chance.

These days you are basically competing with essentially the entire world and it's hard to know who your competition is or where you stand, does this person I swiped right on already have 5000 other matches in their inbox and how do I compare? Even if I'm the best option they will ever have, do they know that or will they keep in swiping in the hope that someone absolutely perfect might come along?

Most dating apps are now optimising entirely for the superficial things like looks, which is one of the least useful metrics of a long term successful relationship and almost everyone now manipulates their photos and is deceptive or outright lies about negative factors (usually height for men and age for women) to the point everyone is basically a catfish now and all you're swiping on is more or less how someone wants to portray themselves, which means you are going to mostly match with those who are best at deception and lies which is probably not ideal in most relationships.

This is correct, you don't need animal products specifically to get the height increase it's more about just getting a decent amount of protein along with associated vitamins and minerals for the mother during pregnancy and through the childs early life up to early adulthood.

With animal products it's basically just easier to reach this nutritional point at least when compared with more traditional plant based diets. Of course with modern plant based supplements and nutritional knowledge and food availability etc. you can more or less narrow the gap these days at least in a technical sense, but sometimes in the real world the problem can be getting the kids to actually eat enough protein if they are fussy eaters who decide they don't like a particular protein source (whether animal or plant based) or are filling up on nutritionally sparse junk food first.

That's really not how it worked, the conquered people mostly obeyed the Roman rule not because they were won over with hearts and minds but because otherwise the Romans were absolutely brutal and cruel in their punishment against any kind of uprising or disobedience. Rebellions and insurgencies broke out all over the place and were usually brutally crushed typically with great bloodshed on both sides and any survivors and their families typically suffering one of the many cruel and unusual punishments the Romans favoured.

Experience/training does seem to matter more as distance increases, distance runners tend to peak older than you'd think.

Also for sprinting, height matters somewhat, in particular the longer your legs the better you will be to a certain point. Being short and light tends to be better for quick off the mark acceleration, but after that it's more about having long legs and fast twitch muscle fibres to keep the acceleration and speed going for longer. For distance running having more muscle mass is somewhat of a disadvantage as it means you will likely develop more lactic acid and will probably gas out sooner, it's preferably to be lightweight develop a strong lung capacity/VO2 max so you can run fast for longer.

If the boys were taller and relatively muscular, they would naturally have an advantage at sprinting, but over distance wouldn't have as much of a natural advantage. Things like running technique, VO2 max, lactate threshold even just the mental aspects of distance running tend to take longer to develop.

I'm fairly sure the Ghost of Kyiv came from a DCS (digital combat simulator) player originally and is actually based on this short DCS movie called 'The Ghost' which has very similar core details. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM8tXUz2q0c

Also some of the original footage uploaded that was purported to be of the Ghost of Kyiv was from DCS and I believe was even admitted as such by the uploader but like most rumours it has since taken a life of it's own and the exploits become increasingly more exaggerated over time.

Like most of these ridiculous intergenerational conflict articles lately, it doesn't even get the generations right! The rants about 'Millennials' are really about 'Gen Z' who are the current 25 and younger generation. Millennials are actually between about 26 and 41 at the moment.

I remember Web 3.0 was first a thing maybe 15 years ago when talking about the 'Semantic web', i.e. interchangeable meta data standards etc. That was mostly boring data stuff to 'normal people', so never really took off into the mainstream like 'Web 2.0' did when referencing social media/user generated content.

Then several years later I heard about 'Web 3.0' again, but this time most referring more to the 'internet of things', which seemed to get a bit more traction for a short time, usually around mundane household devices like internet connected fridges and toasters before also disappearing as most of those things never really took off with consumers.

Now for whatever reason it's come back again, but this time rebranded as 'web3' probably to sound more contemporary as web 3.0 sounds very mid 2000s now. This time whoever is driving this is trying to make it about crypto/decentralization etc. as if it's a new thing even though I feel that's kinda been a thing for a quite while now.

From what I've seen it mostly it's Americans writing about the US losing the next world war in fictional books like Ghost fleet: A Novel of the Next World War or Twilight's Last Gleaming.

Men do outnumber women on apps but I think you'll find it's actually very difficult these days to get men to attend dating events like speed dating even in western countries.

Why are men afraid of dating events - https://www.originaldating.com/blog/2015/6/18/why-are-men-af...

Speed-dating event in Membertou cancelled due to lack of men - https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/lifestyles/speed-dating...

Art museum hosts a speed-dating night and only women show up - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-speed-da...

The death of speed dating - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/charly-lester/the-death-of-...

Privacy does have a cost. I was working at TfNSW at the time they were phasing out the paper tickets and the main reason they got rid of them was the enormous cost of having and maintaining all that paper ticket infrastructure. I think it was basically going to cost alot more to have the ticket infrastructure than the revenue gained back from the actual tickets due to the very small number of people still using the paper tickets.

In fact most of the decisions around ticketing were more about reducing costs and improving efficiency than reducing privacy (that was just the side effect) for example on buses people paying with cash were massively slowing down the boarding in busy areas, so they made pre-pay or opal only buses during peak hours hours in some areas to improve the on time running. Bus drivers also hated dealing with change and carrying money as well. They were already trying to phase out the use of cash on buses and I think covid accelerated that trend as they now had a great excuse to do so everywhere.

In fact even a few years ago there was already discussion of using CCTV and facial recognition to track people through stations and what they use, the idea being you could then pay for your trip the same way those Amazon supermarkets work as that would reduce the congestion at gates and allow better tracking of full trips as Opal data can't determine your exact route, only the parts where you tapped.

The reality is most people will complain far more about having to pay slightly higher ticket costs than for the loss of privacy, so it's a fairly easy decision for politicians to make and why Australia has so many sweeping surveillance powers.

Except modern fruit variants are not what we evolved to eat. Some zoos have stopped feeding fruit to some animals because they are too high in sugar. https://qz.com/1408469/humans-have-bred-fruits-to-be-so-high...

That would suck.

In China when you win the lottery, while they don't reveal your name, you still need to collect the prize/cheque in person and pose for publicity shots. This has lead to the amusing situation of most winners turning up in various masks or even full sports event mascot style costumes to collect the winnings.

Didn't Biden say within the past couple of days there wouldn't be helicopters evacuating the embassy like in Vietnam? Guess he got that wrong.