Here’s the thing though.
I agree 100% that the world is probably better off without this asshole in it.
But I don’t think we should be doing that. For every one of these guys, you’ll have another guy who got railroaded by a crooked prosecutor, or who will later be proven innocent with better DNA testing. There’s just no way to be sure every one is ‘good’, and I’d rather let bad people live than accidentally kill good people.

Of course it is.

We have more energy consuming stuff than ever. But do you ever see NEW substations being built? NEW long range power lines? I don’t.

Around here, the utility has a deal- they will sell you a top of the line $400 color touchscreen WiFi thermostat that talks to Alexa and displays the weather report and does a bunch of other shit, for $10 (not a typo). In exchange, you let them remotely shut off your AC if the grid gets overloaded.

Why do they do this? Because a few truckloads of thermostats (with a bulk discount) are a fuckton cheaper than actually upgrading the grid.

And so we hear about grid overload days and possible brownouts and incentives to shut stuff off as if this is the way it’s supposed to be. But the reality is these problems only exist because utilities don’t keep ahead of necessary upgrades. After all, why spend the money when there’s shareholders to answer to?

This is harder than it looks.

See those rows of crops? On most farms, you need to be able to drive a tractor through them. I don’t mean a riding mower, I mean a giant thing that pulls a tool that’s working on 5-10 rows at a time doing things like tilling, seeding, fertilizing, harvesting, etc. If there’s big metal pillars every row or every other row, that tool can’t be used.
Thus, as pictured, those kinds of panels can only be used on a farm that’s not using large multi-row agriculture machinery. That means it’ll work for small family farms but not the large ag operations where this sort of tech could really kick ass.

What I would really love to see is more solar over commercial parking lots. That means a million little projects instead of a few huge ones, but think about how much surface area that is overall. It’s huge.
The key to doing that is twofold- 1. create a few cookie-cutter designs for the frameworks that can be tweaked for individual projects, and 2. remove red tape from their implementation.
It should be possible for a business to buy off the shelf plans for such a thing, have a local engineer tweak them for the project specifics, and then have a local contractor do the installation, and have this happen in under 6 months.

As it stands, building anything above where humans will be involves a nightmare of engineering and insurance and liability, making it cost-prohibitive for most companies. That needs to get easier. I believe every parking lot should have solar above it- that not only will produce a ton of power, but it’ll keep the cars cooler in summer.

The answer here is simple- regulations with teeth.

Every saw uses water. Every worker wears a mask. Random inspections.

Inspector sees one person without a mask? $1000 fine. One machine with no water hooked up? $5000 fine. 10 people with no masks and 3 machines with no water hooked up? $25,000 fine. Make it clear that there is no fucking around here.

Job site like described in the article? Shut down until problems fixed.

I’m a liberal gun owner.

Neither gun owners nor conservatives have bloodlust. What we do have is disdain for laws that don’t actually help the problem but just punish gun owners.

Take this 10 round magazine law. You know what is the difference between a 10-round mag and a larger one? A little rivet pin that stops you from putting in an 11th cartridge. Anyone with a cordless drill can remove the rivet and turn their 10-round mag into a bigger one. Anyone with a 3d printer can make a larger magazine. A magazine is just a box with a spring and some plastic bits. Making it longer is not rocket science.

The threat of ‘drilling this rivet is a felony’ does not stop someone who wants to commit mass murder. This law does not stop murderers or save lives. It just makes life harder for gun owners, as the pinned magazine is much harder to clean.

I’ll also remind you that the guy who shot up VA tech had a .22 pistol (pretty much the least powerful gun you can buy) and a backpack full of 10-round magazines. He complied with the law and it didn’t slow him down.

So stop accusing people of having bloodlust, and ask why they don’t support the law that seems obvious to you. You might learn something.

Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn’t store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn’t have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.

However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.

If you have home assistant, you don’t need a zigbee hub, just a ZigBee USB stick. There’s a whole bunch of them, I think they’re all pretty similar, a few have Z-Wave also. I’m 100% Z-Wave so I can’t say personally what is the best stick to use… Just check the forums and whatnot.

The dude picked a fight with a mouse and lost. When one of the largest employers in his state that is also the largest driver of tourism, voiced some opposition to a pet policy of his, he used his political position to punish them. And it didn’t even work. That tells me everything I need to know about the guy, that he is vindictive, cronyest, and ineffective. Not the sort of guy we want in the White House.

Or just get a ZigBee hub and keep using the bulbs without the Hue hub

Ukraine successfully defends against Russia because the rest of the world sends them tons of weapons. And because the famous ‘second best army in the world’ turned out to be a paper tiger. Poland does not want the same thing to happen. They don’t want to have to get weapons after invasion, they want to have the weapons beforehand to hopefully prevent the invasion from ever happening.

You are also thinking logically, like look at our military and look at their military and figure out if we can beat them or not. Dictatorships don’t always work that way. If delivering bad news to the great leader has negative consequences, everybody’s going to come up with good news whether it’s real or not. ‘Oh yes great leader, of course great leader, yes our military is strong sir, we stand ready to crush them like a small insect and there is nothing they have that can possibly stand up to your glorious military sir.’. It works until Great Leader actually orders a fight, and then when said fight goes to shit some people accidentally shoot themselves twice in the back of the head before tripping and falling out an unlocked window in tragic freak accidents.

Point is, Russia has shown that logic is not feeding their decisions. So when faced with an illogical enemy, Poland wants to arm up to dissuade any attempts from being made and fight them off if they happen anyway.

Yup this is the answer. Without Putin keeping him in power Lukashenko won’t last long.
Also hilarious that we haven’t heard much from Belarus about the recent Russian Duma comment that ‘all neighbors are up for grabs, the ones that cooperate like Belarus will just be last’.
‘We’re gonna conquer you, just not today’ is the sort of thing that SHOULD be turning allies into enemies…

Um, isn’t that exactly what MFi (Made For iPhone) did with branded or licensed chargers and cables?

TL;DR that everyone seems to have missed:

Poland isn’t sending weapons to Ukraine because they are arming up themselves instead.

“We no longer transfer weapons to Ukraine because we are now arming Poland,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki

Not surprising given than it’s Wyndham, and reinforces my policy to never stay in one of their hotels again.

I went to one in Florida, good location, nice area, near an attraction. Sign and lobby were new. Prices were premium given their location near the attraction. But the building with the rooms— ho-lee fuck. It was worse than a tenement. Flickering fluorescent lights in the hallway. Paint peeling off every surface including walls and doors and ceiling, both inside the room and out. Carpet in the hallway was filthy. The people doing the room had tried to clean it, but it was still awful. More flickering lights and peeling paint in the bathroom. Loud music from both next door rooms. And half the parking lot was cargo containers. No bed bugs fortunately, so I got like 5 hours sleep (arrived at 2am ish) then checked the fuck out. At least they had no problem refunding me.

I emailed the hotel manager and Wyndham corporate basically saying what the ever loving fuck. I was polite and respectful, but was quite clear that if they value their brand they need to close this hotel until it can be seriously rehabilitated. Both the hotel manager and Wyndham sent back a generic ‘sorry we didn’t live up to your expectations thank you for your feedback we will consider it’. AKA- we know and we don’t give a fuck.

So yeah… Wyndham never again.

I now have a simple rule- Hilton or Marriott, Hilton highly preferred. They cost more but at least you know you’re going to get a clean building and a decent nights sleep.

Assuming the cost is stupid low like a $1/year, low enough that almost nobody will think ‘is this really worth it?’-- every required click or tap after hitting ‘subscribe now’ costs you 25-50% of the people who are still there.

Make it 1 penny for a lifetime subscription. Just having to thumbprint for Google Pay will still cost you 25-50% of the people who hit subscribe. Make it a credit card form with card/exp/cvv/address/tel# and your purchase rate is down to maybe 1% of the people who hit subscribe.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I love the idea too. I remember back in the early 00s there was a watch that was like 3-4" wide, only single strap, but had a big display that, while segmented, still showed a lot of stuff. I just don’t think most ‘normies’ would go for it though.

I dunno. I think it’s the same issue with Google Glass, AR kits, and Bluetooth headsets. The vast majority of people aren’t interested in being quite so openly nerdy as to wear that constantly, and then a lot of the people who do wear it act like douchebags so then nobody else wears it because they don’t want to look like douchebags. That happened to Bluetooth headsets- what SHOULD have been an easy ‘wear always’ thing became a ‘I’ll act like a douchebag and yell into my headset in public places’ thing and then nobody wants to wear one when not on a call lest they be grouped in with the douchebags.

I like the concept of a 2-strap watch/phone, but I don’t see it having common appeal. That will also be heavy, and even a basic phone’s current weight will be felt a LOT more on the wrist than on the belt / in a pocket. Plus a watch gets exposed to a lot more damage as the user goes about their day so it will need to be a lot better armored (increasing bulk and weight) and also easy to repair.

You may though be right about the device makers wanting us to have two gadgets rather than one…

It’s an interesting thought, but he misses the #1 problem with online subscriptions- sign-up friction.

If you could just push a button and instantly be charged something, an awful lot of people would do it.
But when you go from $0 to $0.01, you will lose 99% of people, because most people can’t be bothered to fill out a form, put in their credit card number, etc. Even if the amount of money involved is absurdly small, it’s not the price, it’s the friction.

Now if he integrates the app with Apple Pay or Google Wallet that will help, a little. But only a little.

Screen and battery weren’t there for it. Still aren’t I don’t think unless you significantly increase the size of the watch to either be a real hockey puck, or more likely stretch it out to be both thicker (probably about 1/2" to 3/4" thick) and wider (I’m thinking 3-4") it’s gonna be an option anytime soon.

This is exactly it. Their young population is heavily overworked and underpaid. There is no work life balance, there is only showing dedication to the company. And for this you often aren’t even paid enough to move out of your parents house.

To put this in perspective- in Japanese offices there is a thing called hanko. It’s a small stamp that is unique to each person. Memos are often printed on paper, then circulated, then each worker stamps it with their hanko to indicate they’ve read it. This caused huge problems during COVID and many offices refused to close simply because the management didn’t want to try any sort of ‘digital hanko’.
The obvious answer to a Western culture is ‘that’s fucking stupid, replace that with any sort of e-document manager that tracks access and save a ton of time and paper and money’. But in Japan, the gray-haired manager gets respect and is not questioned so the hanko continues. The worker does not stand up and say ‘I demand more money and better working conditions’ because that is not how things work.

So of course the overworked, underpaid, 20something year old who is just scraping by has no time to go out and try to meet a partner, let alone start a family they won’t have time for.

As a nation, they will reap what they sow. The nation is turning gray and there will be nobody to care for them, or replace them. I think they will come out stronger- perhaps in 10-20 years when more of the older traditional people die, some of the younger folks can make serious changes. But for now they need radical reform if they want to avoid a very unhappy decade.