Covering up can't be avoided unless you want to insulate on the inside. And insulating on the inside is a real pita to do right, so covering up it will be :) It's a shame to lose the old stone + brick look, but energy wise we must.

Flattening the outside might not be necessary if you've got local contractors who can do carpentry + flexible insulation solutions. See the first option for an example: https://www.eurabo.be/nl/updates/buitenmuren-isoleren-langs-buiten In Dutch because I don't know the terminology to find something like this in English.

This is dictated by cost and the desire to insulate. It's possible to build well insulated buildings that look traditional, but it's going to cost more and it's not going to improve the quality of living inside the house.

Flat rectangular insulation panels with plaster on top placed on large flat surfaces -vs- irregularly shaped insulation with a cavity and a bespoke brick façade. Just the bricks alone, so without the labour, is going to cost about the same as the finished plaster. In the long term brick and a sloped roof should require less frequent renovations, but I doubt that it would ever offset the higher initial cost.

Reddit attempting to ban bots makes little difference. This is what I was referring to: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-approved-operation-disabled-russian-troll-farm-during-2018-midterms-n976381

I have the impression that there was some impact, but that it was less general and much shorter than when the Russian ira was temporarily shut down around the 2018 midterms. Maybe the effect was bigger + longer on sites with more account security like Facebook, but i don't use any, so I wouldn't know.

Bush W is one of them as well, he tried to use the biblical prophecy about that final war to convince France to support the Iraq war. Except they (the french president + his advisers) at first didn't know what the hell he was talking about, and once they did, they were dreaded by the knowledge that the USA was being governed by religious nut jobs. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2009/aug/10/religion-george-bush

I'd love a systematic solution for 1l, O0 and also rarer traps like rnm. The time that gets wasted on errors caused by the first 2 is not negligible. There's only 2x26 letters in the alphabet and 10 Arabic numerals, it shouldn't be too hard to make them all distinctly unique.

They don't want discussion, they want to spread propaganda. Propaganda works better if there is noone pointing out that it's misinformation or some kind of false narrative, so they ban everyone who dares to explain that. It's the same modus operandi as has been used in reddit subs like theDonald/conservatives/latestagecapitalism since at least 2016.

They also know that they're not going to convince most people, but they don't need to, they only need to convince a small number of people that both sides are the same and that voting is pointless for a hypothetical 49.9-50.1 election to turn into 50.1-49.9.

If there was an Onion magazine for scientific articles, then this could be a headline in it: "The dinosaurs were once considered reptilian, but the new results suggest we may need to rethink their evolution".

The reporter presents the fact that dinosaurs were warm-blooded as a new discovery, but that's been known for several decades now, so we may not have to rethink their evolution afterall. It may have been new information to the people at Scientific American, but when writing about a subject that they know nothing about, I'd at least expect some basic research like reading the first sentence on the Wikipedia entry for dinosaurs.

Checking a few other articles from the Scientific American, they were equally poor or without substance. It's tabloid level journalism about science. They used to have a good reputation when I grew up, so it's sad to see how far it has fallen.

Edit: the New Scientist has a proper article about the same study:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589534-t-rex-teeth-show-the-enormous-predatory-dinosaur-was-warm-blooded/

Internet archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260917184844/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589534-t-rex-teeth-show-the-enormous-predatory-dinosaur-was-warm-blooded/

From another source:
*That meant Salinardi could not look behind Rubio’s decision to examine the evidence supporting it, Taurel said.

“If the Secretary of State says the person is deportable, it is game over,” he told reporters Wednesday.*
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/30/us-judge-rules-wisconsin-mosque-leader-salah-sarsour-can-be-deported

Basically "you are being prosecuted, therefore we will convict you". The kind of judging that is normal in authoritarian countries like Russia, but runs contrary to liberalism. The only bright side is that they had to bring this judge in from out of state, which indicates that he might be an exception and that not all immigration judges are full-on authoritarian bootlickers (yet). That the prosecutors could bring in their preferred judge shows that the entire process is unfair, there's no separation of powers.

Maybe, or maybe she was the one to convince her husband to continue the charade because she didn't want to be in the limelight. Or maybe it was their publisher that forced it when they started out. Or maybe ... But that's all speculation. We don't know how their arrangement came to be, only that it was, and that it was not against her will. As such, I don't see any objective reason to villify her husband.

With Dick Francis' books it seems to have been a public secret for a long time. It was a joint decision by the couple to market the books this way, where she was the one who insisted on not being credited, while he wanted to credit her.

"Most persuasive is an account of a conversation he had with Mary Francis following an interview with her husband in 1980, when he asked her directly if she had written the books.

That's an impossible question to answer," she said. "Yes, Dick would like me to have all the credit for them but believe me, Graham, it's much better for everyone, including the readers, to think that he writes them because they're taut, masculine books that might otherwise lose their credibility."

She begged Mr Lord not to mention this in his article, and he didn't, because he had no wish to damage their careers. But he did keep the notes from the conversation and now he thinks it is about time the truth was told, and she enjoyed some credit for her literary efforts.

"I don't think she wrote them entirely," said Mr Lord yesterday. "What I'm getting at is that Mary certainly has contributed a great deal more than anyone's ever previously suspected, and that Dick himself would like her to get very much more credit for the books."
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/dick-francis-thrillers-were-ghost-written-by-wife-743503.html

There's going to be some fuzzy math hidden behind that article, I'd only expect a 9x difference when comparing lemons with melons, new small electric cars vs older non-hybrid SUVs for example. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if they also ignored less favourable conditions like highway driving or colder temperatures. How they came by their numbers is mostly opaque, but I suspect that this source is pretty biased.

I do believe that if you need a new car and if you can charge at home, that EVs should now be a no brainer for most people. I just don't believe this article.