Given what it does, it eating you might be considered more humane! But no, is the fuck you, I just want to cause pain tree.

Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.

• The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can’t wait on it.

• That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.

• We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.

• Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.

This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.

• Combined with the carbon credits will be negative credits. If a group takes a ton of CO² out of the air, long term, they gain a new credit. They can sell this to emitters. This will provide the CO² emissions industry requires, while meeting net zero.

An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.

• Geo engineering. There are multiple methods of reducing incident sunlight on the earth. Everything from powders in the upper atmosphere, to mylar solar shades at the Lagrange point. They will be short term fixes, but will buy us time.

None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It’s also worth noting that I’ve not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.

An no, I’ve no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what’s required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That’s just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? …Fuck knows.

Latin is used BECAUSE it is dead. It means the terms don’t drift. It also lets the names/terms be a descriptive as necessary.

Asking a doctor to memorise some Latin words is a lot easier and less error prone than a sea of acronyms.

If it smells like pork, you’re holding it wrong.

Fully agree with that. Tesla got thoroughly screwed over.

He could give lectures, but the computer massively slowed conversations. He also apparently had a bit of a temper. Some of his colleagues took to wearing steel toe cap shoes because of him (electric wheelchairs are heavy).

Apparently he didn’t trust patents etc. He would come up with fanciful ideas, that sounded vaguely plausible, as cover for what he was actually working on.

At this point picking apart the Good, the bad and the cover is an …interesting exercise.

For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.

The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.

Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.

Context also matters. A funny joke to 1 group will fall flat with another, without the social context.

It’s also worth notice that /jk indicates a joke, while /s indicates sarcasm. They are related, but not the same thing.

We used to, but too many arseholes used it as social cover. They would say something racist/sexist etc then, if it turned out people called them out, they broke out the “it’s just a joke” card. By tagging at the beginning, they lose that excuse. 90% of the time, it’s not needed, but we also don’t want the arseholes hiding behind us. I’d rather clarify than help them.

It also helps, since this is an international community. What is obviously a joke to you, won’t be to another English speaker from elsewhere. Let alone someone with English as a second language.

In the UK, they’ve taken some tills out. About 4 tills become 16 self checkouts. They still have plenty of tills for normal checkout.

It definitely lets less staff get more people through, in less time. So far, it’s not been excessively abused over here. It’s also made my life significantly less annoying.

To be fair, that’s a fairly universal problem. In the UK it’s a basket Vs trolley split. They do have trolley self checkouts, but it’s separate, and mainly intended for scan as you shop.

On a side note, what’s with American supermarkets not having baskets at all. Did I just have really weird luck?

I went to the US for a few days. Their self checkouts seem to be universally awful, compared to the UK or German equivalent.

While the hardware is far less reliable, and more convoluted, it’s the users that seem the main issue. Self checkout is generally intended (over here) to shift the fast, small shops out of the main queues. 1 big line and a dozen or more tills. In the states they treat it as just another till. Built for trollies, and 1 queue per till. Combined with a slow user and it becomes hell rapidly.

I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.

As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.

I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.

I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.

The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.

Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).

In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.

There needs to be room to escalate. Ultimately he’s just a small fry patsie. By keeping it light, it sends a message, but makes it easy for police to keep it low priority.

There’s also the fact that we don’t even know if it’s related to his role. He might just have mouthed off at a couple of teenagers, and gotten “educated”.

The fuse is in the plug itself. It goes with the cable. That’s the point of it! 🤣 It lets you down rate your cables from the breaker rating.

The fuses aren’t to protect the circuit, they protect the end and intermediate devices. The breakers protect the actual circuit.

E.g. you’ve got a thin flex for a low power lamp. You don’t have to worry about a short allowing 40A to flow down a 2A cable.

Fuses mean protection is localised. If the socket is good for 13A, but the cable is only safe to 5A, you can fuse at 3A or 5A, and know it’s safe.

This is partially useful for extension leads. We don’t have to worry about overloading a multiway extension. If we do, it will pop a 10p fuse, rather than cause a house fire.