Most people in apartments don't work 9-5. They eat dinner between 4 and 8. They use an 6-8 amp microwave or frying pan for 5 to 20 minutes in that time period.

Your apartment building only has so much power coming in. It might be as little as 10amps per unit. This works because most people don't run their stoves at the same time. Window AC units really put your building close to the max. In Canada we brought in rent controls in 1976. In the first part of the 70s purpose built rental units made up 1/3rd of new dwellings. It went to zero by 1978. The same thing played out in the rest of the English world. So your rental appartment building is likely over 40 years old. It isn't designed for even one AC per unit let alone a bunch of car chargers. Oh, and you can't upgrade your building because the street it is on is also maxed out.

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The remaining UV radiation that makes it down to 50km can easily be stopped by the structure of your habitat or the solar panels on the roof. The ionized particle from the sun would be comparable to high altitude cities on Earth.

You might even end up with algae problem on the outside of your colony, since bacteria will like find a way to do photosynthisis there.

Acid is easy to take care of. We use stronger acids everyday and most of them washoff with water or are harmless if diluted enough. Martian dust is toxic. I will choose corrosive acid over poison.
Where are you going to live on Mars? You need meters of concrete above you if you don't want to die from the radiation.
You need an insulated, radiation proof pressure suit to do anything outside on Mars. An acid resistant suit is all you need in my cloud city on Venus. Temperature is perfect, pressure is fine and no radiation.
How will you generate electricity or get power on Mars? Solar is plenitiful on Venus.
Mining for carbon, water and all the elements of life sucks. Percipitating it out of the atmosphere is easier.

A big balloon is a relatively easy thing to transport to Venus compared to what you need to take to Mars to set yourself up. Especially when you don't even need your balloon to be perfectly sealed. There will be no pressure difference with this floating colony. So holes will smell awful and make your eyes water if you don't fix them fast but a large hole on Mars is going to literally suck.

A floating ship in the Venusian atmosphere is far more habitable than Mars will ever be. An airship filled with breathable air will float in Venus's atmosphere at 50km above the surface where the temperature is 23C and the air pressure is one earth atmosphere. The atmosphere outside the balloon contains all the main chemicals for life and everything you need to make plastics. Solar panels would get 4 times the energy they do on earth and the Venetian atmosphere bellow your airship is so reflective you can put solar panels under your ship. The Venetian day is so long that a small amount of propulsion would allow you to always stay on the day side of the planet. Transit times between Venus and Earth are also faster and more plentiful. On Venus there is no need for radiation shielding. Holes in your balloon are not fatal. The gas on both sides is at the same pressure so there would only be diffusion through the holes. The Venetian atmosphere is corrosive to many materials but it isn't toxic like Martian dust so to leave the inside of the airship you don't need a pressure suite or anything much more fancy than an airtight hazmat suit and you can just be showered off on reentry. The two main issues with Venus are the difficulty of putting any robots on the surface for any length of time and the fact the delta V to orbit is almost as high as Earth's. Mars on the other hand is toxic, near zero pressure, radiated and cold. Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize.

But thread will then put your device on the internet and give it an end to end channel to its manufacturer. You never want your IoT device to have the option to talk to its manufacturer. All the money in the IoT space is in controlling the devices.

Selling you subscriptions to use your own devices or worse selling your information and putting ads on your stuff. I've been in standards meetings with almost 200 companies and only 5 of them were making physical devices. the others all wanted the standard to be easy for them to control and syphone information out of the devices.

I live in Californina and Ottawa, Canada. In Canada we have Dollaramma, which has lots of stuff between $5 and $1.25. For cleaning supplies they are amazing as well as anything where quality doesn't matter much. And to be fair they have some decent quality stuff. I've seen the exact same products for $4.50 CAN sold for $14.00 USD in the Dollar General. With the exchange rate thats 4x the price. That was maybe extreme but for everything else the price is 2.5x the Dollaramma store and often smaller sizes.

You want smart home devices that talk only to a hub you control. You don't want them able to connect to the manufactures network. You don't even want them on the internet at all. If they can only connect to your hub then that's, for most people, the only thing you need to worry about securing. You also don't want Over the Air Updates. Rarely are these to the benefit of consumer.

Z-Wave would also be an option, since it should work like Zigbee and once had a far better manufacturer association but every Z-Wave hub was created by morons

The third issue and the biggest one is how the grid is funded. We use a fascist model. Private money puts up the funds and daily management of the grid but the government controls how much is charged and when capital investments can be made. It made sense 100 years ago when the risks where high and governments ability to raise large amounts of money limitied. Today it leads to miss management, short sighted descisions and cronic underfunding of the most logical long term required capital expenditures.

I've worked with electric utility operators in North America and the UK. The mind blowing stupidity in California, Texas and Fukoshima are the norm. However the UK has an added level of cronyism and contempt for anyone not in their in group.

If you were poor more than 150 years ago living in any large city, be it New York, London or Rome, you didn't have a kitchen or running water to make your meal or even a place to store food. You ate out every meal. There were places that just served poridge, or bread, or stew. If the water was supect you ate it with beer or watered down wine. No seating, no servers. Bring your own bowl. Sanitation was questionable, the bread might have bits of stone or sand that wore your teeth down and it wasn't cheap by our standards. In fact food likely made up over 80% of most people's spending.
We could bring these back and they would be cheap. And they could be nutricious and sanitary, but I'm sure they would struggle to meet all the present day regulations and be profitable. So we are stuck with either eating out at very expensive restaurants or being rich enough to have the leasure time to spend preparing good food.

If you are a seller they want you to charge under the market rate so they can sell it faster. If you charge 5% less than the market they might sell it for one day of work, that's better than weeks at the market rate.
Buyers agents are even worse, they want you to pay to much and to ignore faults with houses so that you buy sooner. They also steer buyers away from homes that are being sold without an agent even though it would save their client 2 or 3%. I've seen buyers agents recomment home inspectors and then tell the home inspector not to look closely at foundations or look for asbestos.

The fix is easy. Make the buyer pay their agents fee. Then they would be incentivies to be more careful and it would allow sellers not to use an agent at all.

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When there is asymetric information in a market or uncertainty it hurts the one with the information (or seller in this case) just as much as the one with less information (buyer) as the one with less information will be unwilling to take as much of a risk. In this case all buyers will pay less.
Funny thing, Roman slave traders figured this out and by using a guarantor were able to get a higher price.

You aren't going to like the answer. The economy needs two things, capital and labour. It produces two things, consumption and more capital. Don't look at the wealth distribution. That's the ownership of the means of production. Honestly do you think your company would produce more or less if it was run by the government?

The crisis is because the boomers figured out how to funnel all the consumption to them. They did this by restricting new house building to push the value of their homes up. They did it through government deficit spending that spent more on entitlements to them than they paid in taxes. They did it through full time job benefits that favoured older workers. Though government subsidized healthcare that favours older workers. Though government regulations and licensing that restricted younger workers from competing with them. And the young bought into this. The young think of a house first as an investment and second as a place to live. They think everyone should be able to retire at 65 even though people live longer now than ever before.

It gets worse. Young people are screwed but they don't want to believe it is the older generation because that would mean retirement is a pyramid scheme and no one wants to be the last one in a pyramid scheme. So the young buy into the idea of greedy billionaires and corporations. They have delusions that unions or wealth taxes will magically let them consume more. Think about it. The math doesn't work. Poor people and old people consume all of their earnings. Rich people and profitable companies invest their income in more capital. Elon Musk doesn't eat 2000x what you eat, his vacations and housing isn't 1000x yours. He took nearly every penny from Zip2 and invested in what would become paypal. He then took most of that money and invested it in Tesla (and a little in SpaceX and some other ventures). If you had a magic wand to turn his and every Billionaire in the USA's wealth (5.7T) into consumption that would cover the US federal deficit for almost 3 years. But you would also lose all the means of production those people owned. All the jobs they employ.

So who is reaping the benefits? Who is getting more out than they put in? Who is starving the youth from opportunities? Underinvesting in housing and capital? Strangling innovation and competition? It's everyone over 45 who owns a house. It's every retired person. It's every young person who sells their vote to who ever promises the most entitlements.

Lets caluclate the mass. Mylar is 0.020kg per m^2 and let's say we want 2% solar reduction to reduce temperatures by 1.5C. (earth radiates at the fourth power of temperature, so it is really hard to change the earths equilibrium temperature, which is good). You will need 3 million square km of mylar. Or 3x10^12*0.02kg = 6x10^10kg of mylar that you have to accelerate away from earth and then slow down at L1. I also suspect it will act like a sail so keeping it at L1 would be hard but lets ignore that. The total mass we have sent to the moon is 2x10^5kg. So 300,000 times more. The Appolo missions took about 0.1% of world GDP for 10 years. Assume we are 100 times better at lauching stuff and the world is 10 times richer, if we devoted 10% of the worlds GDP we could make the shade in 30 years.

The Electric Utility share holders are guarenteed an 11%-13% return on their capital investment. The rate varies from place to place but was set a hundred years ago when the electric grid was built. If the people of Sacramento successfully sue SMUD, the public regulator will just raise the electric rates to everyone in Sacramento, such that SMUD in the long run still makes the same profit. So in the end all that would happen is lawyers would get paid but no SMUD customers would see any releif.