beigegull

@beigegull@lemmy.world

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beigegull,

I live in a rural area. Electricity goes out for like a week pretty consistently every year.

I’ve got a propane generator, but running a stove off of it rather than just using the propane to run the stove seems silly. If power goes out for too long, I’ll turn the generator off, be without electricity, but still be able to cook.

The health risks of propane seem pretty marginal to me. If I were going to try to change my energy sources for health reasons my wood heat setup would be much higher priority.

beigegull,

Because the thing that knocks out the power is freezing rain / snow mixes. When that’s happening I conclusively prefer being inside.

And replacing my current setup with a similarly function primarily-electric setup would be expensive even ignoring my preference for being partially off-grid. Right now I don’t have 220V to my kitchen at all. Decent induction stoves aren’t cheap, especially with space constraints. My cookware is all appropriate for an open flame (e.g. cast iron, enameled cast iron) and while it may work with an induction setup it wouldn’t be optimal there.

beigegull,

Firefox died long ago.

It was an engine fight, and Mozilla decided not to participate.

beigegull,

The zeal for equality is the marketing line. Believe it or not, the bean counters did the math and figured out it was cheaper, at least in the short term

That’d be less bad if this particular educational structure wasn’t getting mandated as a “legal right to equal education”, with any alternate structure being fought at every step by an array of institutional forces.

beigegull,

Things cost stuff.

Except Bio-Dome, that’s free. Basic economics says that price approaches marginal cost of production.

beigegull,

“The Matrix” was released closer in time to the French Revolution than to today.

beigegull,

The lessons of the 20th century have mostly been forgotten. Re-learning them is going to be very expensive - not just in money, but in lives.

beigegull,

The issue isn’t whether the “company cares”.

It’s whether they end users fix your own problems, or force you into techno-feudalism where the only way to get a problem fixed is to hope the company cares enough to fix it for you.

The simplest example of Nvidia completely failing here is old hardware support. AMD cards doesn’t have that problem because the drivers are open source and upstream. These new Nvidia drivers don’t sound like they’ll help - they’re not maintainable and therefore not upstreamable.

beigegull,

Is there some reason that wall won’t work fine?

beigegull,

It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.

beigegull,

Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas.

I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That’s a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I’d go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).

beigegull,

It’s really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.

And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.

beigegull,

That discussion tactic results in groupthink to a level that even coherent positions on the broad issues get obscured by conformance to factional stereotypes.

beigegull,

What other established constitutional rights would you support large institutions not respecting as long as they aren’t directly run by the state?

We’re literally talking about Meta here. The claim that their actions are those of an independent private company are about as credible as if Lockheed Martin were forcibly quartering soldiers (err… private military contractors) in people’s homes and claiming that wasn’t a violation of the 3rd amendment.

beigegull,

You are also in another world of hurt if you think anarchy works at all. History it doesn’t. Neither does libertarianism and libertarians are just anarchists that don’t want to admit they are anarchist.

I’m suddenly really interested in what warped view of history you’ve developed. What social institutions and broad philosophical norms would you say have worked historically?

beigegull,

Imagine for a moment that you were running a web design business and an intolerant church group requested that you build a God Hates Gays website for them. Should Mississippi be able to have a a law that compels you to build that website or be liable for discriminating against a protected group, or should that law be unconstitutional under a compelled speech argument?

beigegull,

I tried nano, but none of the standard key combination would let me save or quit.

beigegull,

Like, with vim?

beigegull,

User accounts are a reasonable isolation mechanism for reasonably trustworthy server software.

beigegull,

A couple of adjustable wrenches. I lose tools constantly, but I don't think I need new ones every month.

beigegull, (edited )

Nuclear waste remains a problem largely for political reasons. The engineers know how to deal with it: You can burn it to make more power. Fully burned nuclear fuel stays dangerously radioactive for a couple hundred years. It's no harder to deal with than any other moderately obnoxious industrial waste.

One of the ways the anti-nuclear movement really screwed us was by freezing most nuclear technology development in the 1980's. The so called Gen IV Reactor designs are mostly design ideas that had been proposed by 1990 and some still haven't even had a demonstration plant built even though most of them largely avoid both the major safety and waste issues that are the major complaints against nuclear.

beigegull,

How is making Facebook pay for user-posted news links a good idea?

Should every instance this post shows up on pay the WSG for this link? Should there be piracy charges for the use of the archive service?

beigegull,

Which investment generates more energy? How about weighted by usefulness in various ways?

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