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This is brilliant. In Germany, it's popular to buy €200 solar panel / inverter combos that plug into a nearby power outlet, feeding the power back into the grid, running their power meter backwards. "Installation" just takes a minute. Folks in apartments simply hang them from their balcony “like wet laundry.” Over 500,000 have been sold. With power at €0.25/kW, the payback time is about 27 months—after that, it's just free electricity. nytimes.com/2024/07/29/busines

@KI5SMN @ai6yr Running the entire internet uses less electricity than Bitcoin though. Some quick googling shows that the internet consumes around 1x10^11Wh / year, while Bitcoin mining consumes around 1.7x10^13Wh / year (so approximately 2 orders of magnitude more electricity).

Are both of those numbers large? Well yes. But the kind of whataboutism you’ve just engaged in doesn’t reflect the substantial differences between the two, let alone the value of each (which, for the internet, is high, and which, for Bitcoin, is far less if not zero).

The cryptocurrency industry has been working overtime to sell a story: that there is a large contingent of voters voting based on candidates’ crypto policy stances. The problem is, it’s a story that does not seem to be well supported by data.

citationneeded.news/when-did-c

#CitationNeeded #crypto #CryptoLobby #USpolitics #USpol

Reading all these articles about the high traffic from AI bots, here is my experience from a small German hoster: It's a huge problem, and it is getting worse very fast. There are bots like claudebot from Antrophic which are so aggressive that they block whole systems, outranking actual attacks for example against WordPress. And they change their AWS cloud IPs so often that blocking doesn't help for long and they also ignore robots.txt. Our on-call is regularly alerted for such issues.

In nz, "tough on crime" means cracking down on youths robbing corner food stores, by sending these children to military training camps, and hiding gang patches.

It doesn't mean being tough on domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault. It doesn't mean crackdown on wage theft by employers, violence by racists, male supremacist and gun violence, terrorism targeting minorities or men harming their former partners.

It's only targeting those that scare financially comfy conservative adults.

Instead Of Fact Checking #MAGA, Democrats Have Moved On To Vibe Checking - techdirt.com/2024/07/29/instea "It’s not about saying “and here are the reasons this is nonsense.” Instead, they are now saying “holy shit, did you see that same nonsense I did? I mean… really! Are these guys that wacko?”"

PSA: We have some immediate availability for software engineering and product management consulting. Reach out if you want to chat! We have some niche expertise.

limeleaf.net/expertise/

#SoftwareEngineering #RustLang #GoLang #NetworkProgramming #Performance #ProductManagement #MVP #SLC #IoT #API #SystemsDesign #SystemsProgramming #Linux

@lwriemen I think he was onto something. I have read anthropologists who say that semi-nomadic pastoralism is the most robust variety of human lifestyle, having survived longer than any other way of living. I've been saying for awhile that I think the future is going to involve more donkey carts than most people expect.

This adherence to status quo means that until the status quo is changed, the order of the day will include not only defense of the progress made, but also more empire building, and more money for military and cops, and more bombs to bomb civilians in Gaza and elsewhere, and so on.

@natureworks Hosting a mastodon server isn't that hard, what most it departments fear is having to functionally support it as well. One thing that would possibly be of help is to see if not only your own country council would benefit from a .gov.uk mastodon server for example, perhaps there already is one? To sway anyone you could point out that the Swiss are making open source the defacto standard 🙂

Amazon ebook pricing reflects its dominance in the marketplace -- for an 8-year-old book, the Kindle price is $12 while the paperback is just over $8.

Note: In order to sell Kindle books, publishers are NOT ALLOWED to have lower prices elsewhere.

That should be illegal.

I went on Twitter for 30 seconds to find an old Patrick McKenzie tweet to prepare for an upcoming talk, and literally IMMEDIATELY ran into a guy that proposed beating up Muslims and self-identifies as "supporting the white race".

Like, holy shit, what a fucking degenerate Nazi cesspool. I thought the coverage had to be exaggerated a little bit for effect, which you know, is fine, but I actually think it might be understated.

Besides the obvious stuff, this is what's really going on with #uspolitics and the #kamala4potus campaign:

prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-

Lina Khan is doing work far better and beyond anyone else in government in my lifetime. And the corrupt financiers and capitalists hate her for it. And so much rides on whether the next POTUS supports her and keeps her around or not.

In Britain, agriculture arrived about 6,000 years ago with those Neolithic farmers. As at Blätterhöhle, they intermarried with the local hunter-gatherers, eventually absorbing that community.

But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned throughout many parts of the British Isles in favour of increased reliance on pastoralism and wild resources during the Middle to Late Neolithic.”

People seem to have abandoned the growing of crops like wheat in favor of gathering wild hazelnuts, the shells of which show up in large quantities at sites throughout this period, and herding domesticated animals. Stevens and Fuller note that this period also coincides with population decline, which they suggest was driven by a worsening climate but which I wonder might not have been a product of the plague (genetic evidence for which shows up all across Europe around this time).

But the authors also note that this is the period during which monumental stone architecture, like Stonehenge, was constructed. So clearly the people of Britain were still able to coordinate and mobilize for massively complex undertakings, even if they had abandoned agriculture for a long while. It’s hard to square a thousand-year abandonment of agriculture by a sophisticated and energetic society with a teleological story about agriculture’s inevitable advance and structural advantages over foraging.

cambridge.org/core/journals/an

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Uber is a long con disguised as an "app", to monopolise and enshittify the taxi industry, exploiting drivers and ripping off customers. This was obvious to me from day 1. I've never used Uber (willingly) and I never will.

The Chinese equivalent, Didi, makes it just as easy to hail a real taxi as a private car. Regulating to make Uber and its imitators do this in their apps is the MVR (Minimal Viable Regulation) anywhere they start to operate.

#enshittification #RideHailing #Uber #Didi #MVR

The Heritage Foundation has a tax-exempt status that depends upon their not engaging in political action. They of course do just that, with their project 2025.

Here's the form to report them to the IRS:
irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f13909.pdf

The "we're going to take our ball home because you dare constrain or question us in any way" vibes from the Silicon Valley VC / big tech crowd are getting tedious. To the degree that threat has any teeth, it just demonstrates how much concentrated power these folks have, and therefore the need to constrain and question it.

At the moment:

US health care: disabled people aren't allowed to get married.
EU health care: immigrants can't use our system.

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