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.

I always knew Dink as “Double Income, No Kids”.

I don’t think it means the same here however.

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.

It frustrates me as well.

Apparently the biggest problem for male teachers is accusations. For a female teacher, there needs to be proof. They get the benefit of the doubt. Male teachers don’t. Many parents and even other teachers take the “no smoke without fire” mentality. It’s stressful to do the job, when you dare not let yourself be in a room with a student without someone else present.

As a dad, I try and help with dad’s being seen as care givers, as well as just providers. It’s a long and slow fight however.

We are not allowed to be caring and nurturing. Any man that is, is often seen as “suspect”.

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.

I knew someone who used to monitor the transmission of porn (TV) channels. Apparently, it was the most boring, soul crushing experience. You lose all interest by about day 3. It also messes with your own love life.

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.

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.

For safety, the BS1363 (UK, type G) is by far the best.

• It’s fused. (Seriously why the hell aren’t all plugs fused!)

• Live and neutral can’t be reversed.

• Holes are gated (so no kids sticking spoons in).

• High capacity, 240V at 13A gives 3kW of power.

It’s only real downside is its size.

It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.

It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.

I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.

It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.

Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.

It can, actually be done. It’s just inefficient and requires too much trust.

You either do a general broadcast of power. This is incredibly inefficient, at any real range. To get power to the edges, the power near the transmitter will likely be enough to cook your cat.

The other method is directed. You basically put out a power beam that improves efficiency. Unfortunately, you also now have a directable energy weapon in your living room. I wouldn’t trust something capable of cooking my brain, while I’m sat on the sofa, if it gets hacked.

Neither are likely viable for general use, though both could be useful under certain conditions.

The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.

Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?

These can get an impressive range to a water balloon. Reduce the mass with an egg and 1/2 mile is likely (just) within range.

I would say stink bombs are even lighter, but I doubt Trump can even smell them, over his own stink.