Thank you Froggo. I really needed this one!

Thank you!

Do you have a link to a story of what happened to ScummVM? I love that project and I’d be really upset if it was lost!

Yes! And you can mix and match with regular habaneros to tune your own spice level until it’s perfect. You can basically achieve any spice level between zero and full habanero by combining in different ratios!

I’m not sure! What you can do though is use habanadas together with a habanero as a way of diluting the heat. If it’s a saucy dish you can just cook with a small piece of one as needed, then use nadas for the main pepper flavour.

If it’s something like a stir fry then just cut the pepper, remove the seeds, then stir fry with half or two halves of the seeded pepper, then remove or otherwise don’t eat it. It’s common in Chinese dishes to include a very hot pepper that you’re not supposed to eat which just imparts a bit of its heat to the dish (because it’s not chopped up or crushed it doesn’t release too much heat unless really cooked a lot).

Really confused on the purpose for this. Pepper growers have a petty good handle on how to dial up/down the heat level of peppers (stress tends to increase the heat). We also have people breeding tons of new varieties of peppers with different shapes, colours, flavours, textures, and heat levels.

Check this out:

These are habanada peppers. A variation on the habanero, they have no heat at all! Similar flavour but zero capsaicin, just like a sweet bell pepper.

I meant distant past before statehood was even a thing. That was before agriculture when all people lived in nomadic tribes. There were no neighbouring states because no one had fixed territories. Groups still fought among each other as they tracked the movement of migratory herds (mobile food supply) but there were no raids on granaries because there were no granaries yet.

The first agricultural societies had a really bad time. Their nutrition was extremely poor compared to the meat-rich diets of nomads. The nomads with their superior health and mobility had easy pickings on the crude granaries and poor defences of early farming villages. Statehood began when those villages began to work together and start their own militaries which led to specialized soldiers for the first time (as opposed to nomadic warriors who fought but also hunted and parented and everything else their tribe needed them to do).

During the Spanish Civil War, the anarchist militias/army *were* hierarchies, but directly democratic ones, where soldiers would vote on who their commanders would be, commanders would vote on who their generals would be, all with the ability to immediately revoke that power if it was abused or performed badly.

First of all, that’s not what direct democracy means. Direct democracy is when voters are directly voting on a course of action. Soldiers voting on who their military commanders should be is representative democracy (electing a vertical power structure) which is exactly what the OP is arguing against. A purely horizontal power structure is one where no one can give orders to anyone else and decisions must be made by consensus, unless those decisions have only a small reach (within the domain of an individual).

So you’re not really arguing against my point which is that having a military chain of command with hierarchical decision making is superior to just letting everyone do what they want (tribal warrior societies). The point about democratically electing your commanding officers is a cool one but no army is going to hold an impromptu election for a new General as artillery shells are raining down around their ears. When the shooting starts, you stick with the chain of command you have or all hell breaks loose and you get routed.

You’d have to amend the European Constitution. I don’t think there’s much appetite for that.

Hierarchical, formal power structures have a competitive advantage when it comes to making decisions quickly and directing the group. This has nowhere been more evident than in the countless military victories of organized armies over groups of tribal warriors.

The advantage of anarchism and structureless society is with diversity of ideas and the innovations you can get from that. Straight up fights against organized adversaries is its biggest weakness.

Bad actors are going to build their vertical power structures whether you like it or not. This is the challenge liberals are posing to anarchists: if you are unwilling to build your own vertical power structure then how do you stop the bad actors from building theirs and then using it as a cudgel against you?

Exile and public shaming are tools that only work against bad actors as individuals. They do not work when the bad actors team up and form a critical mass.

In the distant past, anarchism worked because everyone knew each other and bad actors had nowhere to hide to build their power structures and grow in strength. The agricultural revolution changed all this because of food storage and the potential for an outside group to attack and steal the food. People formed power structures and developed the first militaries in order to defend their granaries and this led to the growth of large cities where people no longer had the ability to know everyone.

Militaries also showed the power of hierarchies. Making decisions by consensus is slow. A military with a formal power structure has a huge advantage in combat against an unstructured tribe of warriors. This was proven again and again as the empires of the past conquered their neighbours.

But I digress. A large city where it’s impossible to know everyone is a huge problem for anarchists who want to prevent bad actors from forming a vertical power structure and taking over. There simply is no known social tool which can combat against the formation of conspiracies and elites within a large society.

The hard part about social platforms is not the code, it’s getting people to use it. The inertia is vast for existing platforms where everyone already congregates.

Yes, it’s just that you’re often seeing a regular person on one of the worst days of their life, not a normal day. It gives a rather unkind impression to the viewer!

I dunno if you’re being sarcastic here but wow, what a low opinion of normal people!

Honestly this every time I read ACX posts on Al risk/trajectories.

Generally nature doesn’t keep doing a useless thing if there’s no longer any need to do it. Energy efficiency is a constant selective pressure in the absence of all other challenges.

My bet is that baobabs are shaped that way for very good reasons. The fact that the trees are spaced far apart even in baobab forests is a clue: the environment is very harsh, especially on saplings.

Since baobabs reproduce via many fruits and since they can be spaced very far apart my hypothesis is that they evolved to be very tall with featureless trunks in order to attract fruit-eating birds to carry their seeds. The tall and featureless trunks would make the trees difficult for ground-dwelling predators to climb, keeping the birds and their nests safe from attack.

I believe leopards are fairly common in these areas and they love to climb trees, although they prefer ones with lower, wider branches they rest on and even eat their prey within. Leopards have been known to carry large prey such as gazelles up into the branches of a tree to protect their kill from being stolen.

It’s extremely efficient given the low calorie density, high fibre diet and extremely limited grazing time (dawn and dusk) of crepuscular rabbits.

Think about ruminants for comparison. They spend all day every day grazing on the same kinds of foods as rabbits. Rabbits have a much more rapid metabolism (faster resting heart rate and ridiculous athletic ability) than, say cattle, yet they manage to extract more energy in less time eating. Rabbits are a marvel of efficiency!

Think about it this way: they’ve evolved a clever behavioural hack that doubles the length of their entire digestive tract without any increase in weight. This is extremely efficient!

They deposit them directly into their mouth. They know when they’re about to produce one and they reach down there with their mouth and consume it directly.

If you think about where wild rabbits spend most of their time (underground in burrows surrounded by dirt) this makes total sense. By not allowing cecotropes to touch the ground, they avoid contamination with soil-borne pathogens.

All spiders are little mechs to me! Their legs are powered by hydraulics!