skuzz

We've used piped gas into homes since the 1820s. Good riddance.

Cheaper to own one car than two.

LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude's stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.

They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.

That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.

How about using the thermal mass for both heating and cooling? Too bad EVs don't have throwaway power like hybrids, could use the excess to heat/cool the mass as necessary. Probably still not as efficient as raw power storage.

Nope, that's not how physics works. SUVs are insanely inefficient. A box on wheels. 11MPG vs 50. Likewise, all electric vehicles have more mass than their engine equivalents. And that mass is constant. Aerodynamic shit cars are simple piles of metal that ingest a chemical and produce range. Not even getting into the human and environmental cost of battery production.

Gas propulsion cars need to die, no question. Only because their fuel is finite and there are much better options now. However, there is no easy Apple keynote solution. It is complex and sometimes doesn't make sense.

Solar panels on houses aren't the win they seem to be unless one lives in a market with an unstable grid and requires self-powering. It's nice to feel like you're "helping" but grid-scale solar will always win. Plus the whole home solar market is a complete scammy racket now unless one can find a reputable local company.

Looked into it a while ago, oftentimes the agreement has the solar company leasing your roof space for 30+ years, and during construction they have a carte blanche permission to access any part of your house at any time. After install, you have to then seek permission through them if you want to do anything to your roof. Hail storm caused a roof leak? Well, you'll be waiting a bit to have that taken care of. My favorite agreement was one with a California firm, you had 72 hours to cancel after signing and the only way to cancel was to telegram their California office.

They also do a piss-poor job of factoring in things like the expense of having to rewire your utility panel or the necessity of lopping off the tops of trees (which then reduces the carbon sink they were doing, and shade on the house) in the initial estimates and try to wave away the mushrooming expenses. If the company goes under and there's not a transfer of stewardship of the generating equipment, it can arbitrarily be disabled until the homeowner finds a way to manually override or a new vendor takes over in their stead.

Doubtful. Smaller cars are ~~more~~ aerodynamic and much higher fuel economy.

I think the fatalism comes from a place of helplessness. Who is going to survive? The rich. How does a normal person survive or help stave off the worst? They can't. They're busy trying to figure out rent and food for next week, while trying to ignore the chronic condition their healthcare system won't let them fix.

Now, if we all rise up and eat the rich, we might have something. Not sure how one inspires such a necessary movement these days. Especially planet-wide. Plus, it would likely lead to violence, which many are not a fan of, I'd prefer not, myself.

But, if they don't keep yelling at people at the bottom, the people at the bottom will then realize the people at the top are the cause and get angry. Same thing with that 1970s commercial with the "Native American" (who was actually Italian) crying on the side of the road over trash. It was a corpo smear campaign to cover up the fact that the lobbying corps that were running the ad were the real polluters.

Mac is not Windows. As for better, these days, that is debatable. Apple has mostly stopped any kind of major growth, innovation, or rewrite a decade ago, after they ran out of the backlog of Jobs ideas. Now their products are just a cup game of feature juggling.

It's a good and proven tactic. Ask 400% of what may never happen, but at least we get 50%. What [email protected] said.

Agreed there is always a more, and really want all paper spam to stop immediately. Disagree on the impact of mass-messaging at a nation scale.

Every SMS will wake a phone and keep it active for 10-20 seconds, if background processes firing don't keep it awake longer. This robs every texted phone of battery wear and flash wear, as well as using energy that will have to be recharged. (Arguably, pointless app updates to manipulate review systems are an even bigger energy drain here. Or how carriers put cheaper plans on weaker bands, causing the modem to have to yell louder.)

The messages are in the control channel through the cell network, and the network must schedule them inside the management traffic. Probably less of a power hit here, but still a hit. There's power running the machines sending the messages, and the microscopic hit from always on network hardware along the whole path. Individually, it's all noise. Collectively, it's going to be quantifiable power use.