Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 74

Whenever the food manufacturers complain about the new sugar tax, they always make sure to mention the 350 NOK VAT limit on imports. If your item costs less than 350 NOK, you pay no VAT on it, so people are buying soda from Sweden in droves, both online and offline. They that limit lowered to zero as soon as possible.

I get angry every time I see it, because that limit also makes it cheap to order things from China; usually things they don't sell here, and thus harmless to Norwegian businesses.

@ProfessorBitRot Throw large amounts of money at the most promising projects, with big cash prizes for the ones that succeed.

@ProfessorBitRot A global space race for dealing with greenhouse gases would yield results within a very short period of time, I suspect.

@ProfessorBitRot Repairing ozone is less critical than getting rid of the greenhouse gases. CO2 is the one everyone's lips, so I reckon it must be the most important one, while methane is only mentioned occasionally.

It doesn't matter what the problem is. If you make vast sums of money available, people will work hard for it. That's how we landed on the moon in 1969, despite not really having the technology for it when we first set out to do it.

There is no undo button for a repeating alarm that you accidentally cancelled instead of snoozing because it went off just as you were tapping on something in an app. You can only set a new alarm, but that feels unsatisfying, because you didn't want a new alarm. You wanted the old one to snooze for a bit longer.

@Alastair Yes, so if that's the best way, someone could take those billions, buy large amounts of real estate and plant a bajillion trees. What I'm saying is that we aren't putting our money where our mouth is when it comes to carbon footprint.

I'm pretty sure that if we offered a few billion dollars to anyone who can suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, somebody would figure out a way of doing it pretty soon thereafter.

Norwegian argument-related words:

krangel - angry argument
krangle - argue angrily
kranglevoren - prone to angry arguments
diskusjon - discussion
diskutere - discuss
argument - argument (line of reasoning)
argumentere - argue (to reason)
kverulere - quarrel
kverulant - quarrelsome person
kjefte - scold
enig - in agreement
uenig - in disagreement
hykler - hypocrite
ta feil - be wrong
ha rett - be right
saklig - on topic, neutral
usaklig - off topic, ad hominem

@xrevan86 If you learned something, it was probably a discussion or debate, not an argument.

@xrevan86 Yes, I pointed that out in a toot elsewhere.

@xrevan86 I pointed that out in a toot elsewhere.

"There is nothing a contrarian crowd hates more than a real contrarian, a person who breaks ranks with the group. If the whole point of belonging to the crowd is to demonstrate one’s superior moral position, an insider’s dissent is an intolerable violation and contradiction. That accounts for the special fury reserved for academics who break with the party line on social and political issues."
— Steve Lagerfeld, "In with the Out Crowd"

If I ever wanted to work abroad, I'd basically be limited to Europe due to the difficulty of getting a skilled worker visa without a degree. The only foreign language I speak is English, but the UK is leaving the EU, so I can't go there. If I want to go to an anglophone country, that leaves me with the Republic of Ireland, which doesn't exactly strike me as the tech hub of Europe. Its main attraction seems to be low corporate taxes.

Skilled worker visas are always seem to require a degree or many years of evident work experience. Doesn't really leave many opportunities for talented self-taught people who hate sitting in a class room or auditorium.

WebAssembly is coming along nicely, but all I care about is DOM access (including WebSockets, WebGL, WebRTC, local storage and all the other APIs that make HTML5 so good).

@skypage For me, it's often some person disagreeing with a rant. I'm attempting to vent frustration and someone thinks I'm not entitled to feel frustrated at all.

The most pointless exercise in the world is to have an argument on the Internet. An even more pointless exercise is to have said argument and not get your point across, leaving your opponent arguing against a straw man.

@Alrescha The fact that it unlocks Xcode for teamwork is more of a poorly documented side effect of paying for the subscription.

@Alrescha The main part of my argument is *not* that Xcode should be free (but it would be a terrible idea to charge for it), but rather, that it should be obvious which features cost money. They don't tell you that if you share a project on Git and attempt to use it on multiple computers, it's going to make that difficult for you unless you pay them. That's not what the Apple Developer Program is sold as.

@Alrescha What's not fine is learning, a few months into a project, that you can't have several developers without paying for a subscription that doesn't really have much to do with Xcode. The subscription is for publishing apps and Xcode isn't mentioned anywhere. They can charge what the hell they want for it, so long as they're upfront about the costs.