If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.
The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.
That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire “temp” workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.
There’s a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don’t like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).
Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.
I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.
I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.
I think SPDIF is being phased out because it needs to use compression to do surround sound.
The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we’re probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth’s carrying capacity at the same time. It’s like we’re playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.
What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world’s current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women’s rights and autonomy?
Wealth isn’t zero sum, it’s created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response).
Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees’ surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.
My electricity company says 76 is a good target, and I’ve grown accustomed to it. If sedentary, it actually feels a little cold. People acclimate to their local climate (last summer, daily highs were 100-110 for something like 3 months straight where I live).
Lol, good catch.
Wary of the bill. Seems like every bill involving stuff like this is either designed to erode privacy or for regulatory capture.
Edit: spelling
Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).
At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?
“In an unjust society the only place for a just man is prison.”
I can understand capitalism resulting in slavery, because it wants to minimize labor costs, so slavery is the logical conclusion (also, slavery is still used by capitalists). I don’t see anarchy resulting in slavery, because slavery is inherently hierarchical. I also don’t see socialism resulting in slavery because the workers own their means of production/businesses/workplaces.
What a “man” or “woman” is changes over time and by culture. Some indigenous cultures have more than 2 genders. “Boys” become “men” at different ages, depending on the culture. It is a social construct (though I’d argue constructs are “real”).
It’s very unlikely they’ll control the Senate. I don’t even think they’ll control the presidency.
Here are some that I’ve liked (haven’t played them in years though):
I’ve tried a couple rolling distros (including Arch), and they always “broke” after ~6 months to a year. Both times because an update would mess up something with my proprietary GPU drivers, IIRC. Both times, I would just install a different distro, because it would’ve probably took me longer to figure out what the issue was and fix it. I’m currently just using Debian stable, lol.
It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.
I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.
Just listing reasons why small towns are shitholes… or at least that particular small town. People there are at a high risk of drug addiction because of “shit-life syndrome,” (which is arguably caused by the low wages of the factories).