ryzvonusef

I guess the implication is that without such advertisements, old books are lost media for young kids. Their first brush is with new media that IS advertised to them, and upon finding it not compatible to their tastes (at least acc to the article) young boys tune out of the reading hobby altogether.

Obvious retort is that this where parents should step in... but that's a whole different debate.

There is an obvious retort about Narnia being an isekai, but I feel a more appropriate comparison would be Ascendence of a Bookworm, which is an actually well written Japanese isekai literature (written by a female author and featuring a female protagonist, ironic given the main topic) that explores the clash of Earth based norms and customs in a society where gods actually exist, and nobles are literally superior beings, since only their god gifted mana can turn a blank land into fertile soil. In such a world, what value does a mana-less peasant have?

But it does so in a narrative that's engaging rather than scolding; the MC realises that norms arise out of local conditions, and instead of going on some weird emancipation spree, mostly acknowledges local the situations, but still tries her darndest to change things given her constraints (with literal gods intervening, there is little she can do).

The story is titled Ascendence of a 'Bookworm' because her main tool of rebellion is democratising books and knowledge; by inventing the paper and printing press, she will (slowly) help peasants improve their lives over the next coming generations; they will never become equal to nobles who are literally god-gifted, but it's still an important ripple that will change the trajectory of the world.

It's an Japanese isekai, but it resists the urge to dabble in the other other tropes. Yes, Sturgeon's law still applies, 90% of isekai will still be trash and slop, but if you promote good isekai books, then there is still chance for future good literature, even in such a maligned genre.

    > Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.

    > Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.

    > The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”

    > A font is a small program

    > We think of a font as a set of drawings. It’s also a set of rules. Each time text appears, a piece of your system called a shaper reads the font’s rules and may swap one glyph for another. It’s how a font joins f and i into a ligature.

    > Nothing says a rule has to be about typography.

Brothers, there is a market beyond your bash shells!

;p

then again, I'm not a heavy AI user, so maybe I'm missing something.

    > * You must stand behind every idea and every sentence in your docs. (It’s not acceptable to reply with “Oh sorry, AI wrote that, just ignore it.” )

    > * Writing is thinking. (The artifact itself is not the only goal; instead, detailed thinking about the problem is the goal.)

    > * More time should be spent authoring a document than consuming it. (extra time that readers need to spend to understand what you meant incurs a multiplicative cost on the team’s time.)

    > * Longer is not better. (If you are producing a longer piece of writing from a shorter prompt, consider instead just sharing the prompt itself.)

as for alternatives:

    > Starship, which NASA is hoping will return humans to the moon, may still offer ride-share missions. But the rocket is designed with flat Starlink satellites in mind, deploying them through a slot in the side like a candy dispenser. This design might not support bulkier satellites from other companies, although some versions of Starship might have a more traditional satellite deployment mechanism.

    > The war in Ukraine is also having an impact. Prior to Russia’s invasion in 2022, about a fifth of global launch capacity, including many commercial launches, was handled by Russian rockets such as Soyuz, says Henry. Since the war began, that route to space has ended.

    > Another issue is the lack of commercial rivals to SpaceX. Its next closest competitor is US company Rocket Lab, which launched 18 of its smaller Electron rockets to orbit in 2025, but has yet to launch its new, larger Neutron rocket. Many other firms are developing new rockets, but these haven’t started flying regularly. Another competitor, the New Glenn rocket from Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, is grounded after exploding in May. Other rockets, such as Europe’s Ariane rockets and India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, meanwhile, launch only a few times a year.

    > China has also begun operating more commercial rockets, but US and most European satellites are barred from launching on these rockets because of US regulations. “Even if you have a satellite built in Europe, if it has a component from America, it cannot fly on a Chinese rocket,” says Henry.

    > Much of global launch capacity was already taken up by another of Bezos’s companies, Amazon, before SpaceX reportedly ended bookings on Falcon 9. In 2022, the firm ordered 83 launches for its own space internet constellation, Amazon Leo, of which only 14 have launched so far.

    > I anticipated that not having a smartphone would make me more reliant on other people — perhaps without Google Maps on hand, I’d have to ask an actual human for directions. And sure, that’s happened. But I think it’s more accurate to say that I’ve become more reliant on other people’s smartphones. Instead of ordering from the bar or printing out movie tickets ahead of time, I inevitably wind up having somebody else scan the QR code menu or pull up the e-tickets. It’s still smartphones all the way down; I’ve just exempted myself from the costs of carrying one around.

My MSc dissertation was on accounting for aeroplane fuel emission... during research I discovered an interesting fact; because of how the EU ETS (airline emissions regulations) works, (fuel consumption acts as a proxy for emissions) you can technically end up with less ETS penalty by adding a stop just before entering the EU.

You see the penalty applies for the entire flight and not the portion over EU airspace... so you just have to condense the flight instead. So add a stop just before adding EU, and now you have two flights instead of one, and that second flight has lower 'emission' even though the entire trip was longer, and more importantly the extra stops's landing and take off increases fuel expenditure and thus emissions!

Gives you some perspective on how legislation to reduce fuel usage and emissions can act counter to its stated goals.

____

    > https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jate/vol2/iss2/3/

    > Another way to reduce the EU ETS charges is to change the route so that the last leg of the flight into or out of the EU is shorter than the current non-stop route. Changing routes to include an additional stop reduces the amount of fuel used for flight segments into and out of the EU, and therefore reduces EU ETS charges because the charges are based on fuel consumption during the entire flight, not just the portion over EU. A major US-based cargo carrier, UPS Airlines, considered adding stops to reduce the EU ETS charges (Cameron & Michaels, 2011). Instead of flying non-stop from between hubs in Hong Kong and Cologne, Germany, the route would be changed by adding a stop in Mumbai, India. While UPS estimates that the route change reduces the ETS charge by 25%, UPS also estimates that the emissions are increased by 33% due to the longer route and added takeoff and landing.

https://x.com/chizutodesign/status/2093530030467092512

    > SpaceX, in partnership with Nvidia, has designed a space-optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 system for launch to orbit in Q4 next year, with significant scale in 2028

    > Our design is significantly simpler, lower cost, denser and lighter than a traditional rack

The latest message I'm being bombarded with it a reminder not to use Whatsapp without a 'valid' sim... like wtf? Is there something should know? Whatsapp is a private org, why is govt asking me about that? But all I get is the random sms bombardment and more questions than answers.

    > With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal. The Commercial Space Federation predicts demand for thousands of satellite launches annually in less than a decade. Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033. Henry’s own firm, Quilty Space, has charted a change in the discussion from how many launch companies the US market can support to who can execute the fastest to meet surging satellite needs.

    > And if things are bad now, there are reasons to believe they may get even worse over the next two to four years.

    > The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has previously said the operational lifetime of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032. However, more recently, commercial satellite customers have been running into difficulties when trying to purchase a launch after 2028. One source said SpaceX has told the US government that it intends to end commercial launches after 2028 but will continue flying the Falcon 9 rocket for a limited number of federally contracted missions after that.

    > As the impending launch crisis comes to the industry, questions have begun to swirl about whether the federal government might intervene to keep the Falcon rockets flying. After all, NASA financially supported the development of the Falcon 9 and its launch pads to some degree through the Commercial Cargo program. And the US military has leverage over SpaceX through the National Security Space Launch Program.

    > Some of the wilder ideas involve forcing SpaceX to sell its Falcon 9 infrastructure to a third party—another space company, a space-interested billionaire, or someone else. Others have suggested that the US government could step in and nationalize SpaceX. That could be done if the US Congress passes a law stating that assured access to space is essential to national defense.

    > ABSTRACT

    > We study the effects of H-1B immigration on U.S. industries that employ H-1B workers and their trading partners. Using a novel cross-industry design and the 1999–2003 expansion of the H-1B visa cap for identification, we find that H-1B exposure raised incomes for natives and pre-existing immigrants, with gains concentrated in non-STEM occupations. Income gains propagate forward through supply chains to downstream industries but not backward to upstream industries, consistent with a productivity shock rather than a labor supply shock. We find no direct effect on patenting, suggesting that productivity gains arise from better task execution rather than patentable invention.

The question is, will it be meaningfully lower?

if processes are mature, and because of economies of scale the difference comes out to something like a few cents (or less) per cell... at that point it might become meaningful to ask if the density becomes in play again.

Sure for grid density is not an issue, but installing and setting up a pack still has a cost... so let's say the cost saved by sodium allows them to buy an extra pack... but lithium's density allows them to save the headache of installing that extra pack... won't it even out?

Lithium prices have faced a massive crash, so there is no cost penalty for them anymore. Sodium's cost benefit isn't that significant now, and while other technical benefits exist, the question remains, is it worth it to setup an entire new factory from scratch for that marginal benefit?

Aren't you and I saying essentially the same thing? If you are taking a loan, there better be a job that helps pay for it.

The point was that certifying/licensing exams have a more direct correlation with a specific job/set of jobs than a simple degree, which are more open-ended.

Many countries have free college education, but at the end of the day some one has to pay for it, and those are the tax-payers.

And frankly, if your country's tax payers are, for whatever reason, NOT willing to subsidise it (in whatever way or form)... what can you do?

It's not like I like this situation, but those are the facts. The wave of anti-social trend going in the west is because of this belief; tax payers in those countries no longer feel program XYZ is worth it... so it goes.

I live in a 3rd world country, and due to the limitation of our weak taxpayer base, we can afford to fund only limited number of seats, which are won by certain competitive exams, and anything beyond that is considered 'self-finance' (i.e. figure it out on your own). Your country will have to decide its own limits.

My father grew up dirt poor, and a basic associate degree (gotten via his saving from a factory job plus a partial scholarship he won) changed his entire trajectory from being a random labourer to an white collar office worker with enough funds to educate his own kids, especially his daughters.

My father and my siblings helped fund my education, a privilege I'm very cognizant of, and I'm very jealous of countries with free education.

But as someone living in a country with a very poor economy and an even poorer tax base, I also have very realistic expectations in terms of what tax money purchases and what reasonable expectations one should have.

I desperately want an expansion in the education base of my country, but also realise the current tax payer base has limit on how much they can pay to purchase this expansion.

And this fact also extrapolates to rich countries, they may have more money but at the end of the day the math is the same, there is a limit to how much they wish to indulge.

In fact I'm currently applying for a chance to win a PhD abroad, which would clearly be funded by foreigner tax payers. I would be at the whims of their largesse to get paid to study, and if I don't win, it's clearly because they do not wish to expand this indulgence to me, a bitter fact I must accept with grace and move on.

I may cry and moan about it, but one has to be realistic about these things.

Precisely my point! Tax-payers/Voters (effectively the same thing) get to decide how much indulgence they want to give.

In Australia you are happy to extend the base, but in the US it seems they are reducing the base, and thus they are limiting options.

Some countries limit the indulgence not by limiting access to loans/aid, but by limiting available seats in university instead.

Ultimately it's up to the paying party how much risk they want to tolerate.