The world is heating up, and we need to continue to find ways to make food and energy production more sustainable, but coming up with these completely un-relatable and nonsensical figures won't help. It's about as useful as a 'carbon tax'.

When costs impact individual consumer wallets, that's when people start paying attention. Food shortages due to lack of water or shifting climates drive up prices and create scarcity. Water scarcity and resulting political instability is scary, and starting to rear it's ugly head in a few places.

Unfortunately, I think people are going to have to get a taste of the impact before they do anything meaningful about it. Time has shown you can yell about it all you want, but sitting down to figure out how you can accomplish these goals without reducing quality of life is the most important thing you can do. Leaning into modern, safe nuclear energy for energy abundance (in addition to solar) is much better than advocating for artificial scarcity and extreme conservation. Figuring out ways to more efficiently grow food at scale, as we have been doing since the mid-20th century, is better than advocating for immediate, drastic changes in diet. Lab grown meat that tastes and feels identical to the real thing but environmentally costs far less to produce once it's at scale? I think it's possible. Keep working on it. Hyper efficient crop growth? I don't think we've gotten close to what we can accomplish with a given acre yet, or vertical greenhouse farming. energy efficient de-salinization or condensing? It appears possible. Space-based manufacturing and asteroid mining? It's far better to mine the asteroid belt than the earth, and send the products downhill to earth. Metals that exist in abundance in the solar system should be gotten from elsewhere if robotic mining and modern delivery systems can make it economical. This is a GIANT untapped economy that will eventually bare fruit, but it may take a while.

There's a lot of things we could push really hard that we're not doing. Markets are lazy and want to optimize today and not worry about tomorrow, if there is no immediate perceived danger. It creates a kind of blind spot that can lead to the world eating its own tail, causing a collapse. We'll either figure it out or we'll collapse and have to start over, or possibly die out completely. I think there's a window of opportunity to continue to lift civilization to great heights, that will close in the next 100 years if the status quo continues as-is.

Just a few weeks ago there was a slashdot post via the Reigster giving a good clue as to why people still pay for it versus LibreOffice/OpenOffice versions or Google Sheets:

"Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register."

You might say, "Well, if you have 20 million cells in a single spreadsheet you're doing it wrong" but excel has been abused in all kinds of ways for edge use cases and it will take it, and that's why people still use it. People have found it enormously useful to crunch vast amounts of data, and sometimes it requires astonishingly large cell counts. The world excel championships show just now useful it is for so many things. At an aerospace company I worked at, excel was the primary tool to calculate suborbital and orbital rocket trajectories given initial specific impulse, drag, mass, etc. The person who created the spreadsheet was a math and physics genius, and I referred to him as 'the Excel whisperer'.

Large companies that pioneered a piece of software have a first mover advantage, and then when they get big, they can afford to keep plowing money into improving the software and adding features to keep ahead of the competition that is less well funded, or relying on volunteers in the case of Open Source.

I ran into a similar problem trying to switch from Solidworks to a much cheaper lookalike competitor, as when you started to dig down there were some critical features that I needed that were just completely missing. I have the last bought and paid for version of Solidworks that they offered (2022) with no subscription, works great for my needs.

I use excel these days for a very complicated cost calculating sheet I developed to sell a particular product line with many different options. It calculates shipping weights and volumes critical for international container shipping quotes. It's a godsend. This sheet could be replicated on one of the free pieces of software, but since I own an Office 2019 desktop license outright, I'll continue to use it until I can no longer install it on future computers. You can still purchase a copy of MS Office 2024 desktop outright from Microsoft for $150. They don't advertise it much, but it's there on their website. I don't generally do software-as-a-service subscriptions, with a few very narrow exceptions. That's the one thing that will finally drive me away from Office, when 365 is the only option.

I'll keep driving my car that A. doesn't have any of that stuff and B. is to old for anyone to want to steal /25 year old truck with a bulletproof engine /10 year old car with same

Channel subscriptions, and I have my own channel that I manage.

I don't use that Google account for anything else though, so there's that. It's not logged in to my smartphone either. I have a throwaway account that holds my contacts in case I lose or break my phone. I got tired of re-entering the contacts by hand each time I got a new phone, so I gave up on staying logged out entirely on the smartphone.

Knowing Google, it's quite the possibility. To avoid that, you would need to stay logged out, use private browsing in a browser that isn't chrome, and use proxies to vary your IP address, and probably randomly spoof your browser type and OS type to avoid other methods of profiling. I don't think I care that much.

Hopefully not if you've left your YouTube watch history turned off.

Go to your Google Account settings, click "my activity" and then there is a button for YouTube history where you can disable it if you don't want them needlessly collecting data about your watch habits.

This will however make your YouTube landing page blank. But your subscription page for following channels still works the same.

I was clicking around Zillow a few days ago and noticed the First Street link. I clicked on it for a few local homes where I know exactly where they are and they gave some of them nonexistent flood and wildfire risks. I don't know how they distill their data but I'd say they're doing it wrong, or erring on the side of paranoia. As both a homeowner and a potential home buyer it's not something I would ever look at. In California you need to rely on the Natural Hazard Disclosure Report for the property you are looking to buy.

Also, flood zone determinations as a general thing are often widely disputed for insurance purposes, sometimes properties are not considered to be in a flood zone when they should be, and sometimes they are considered in a flood zone when they are not.

Folded it's nearly 1/2" thick. Perfectly fine for an inside jacket pocket. but where I live you only wear jackets about half the year. The rest of the time you have to shove it into a pants pocket, no thanks. My S23-Ultra is already bulky enough with the Otterbox around it.

Also, one more hinge point is one more mechanical thing to break.

It would be nice to have on an airplane flight though.

A large part of the experience was as a frustrating guessing game. There's no interpretation at all, so you have to put the exact string it is expecting to accomplish a task or action. And if you have no idea what that is, it can take hours or days to figure it out. And a whole lot of it was completely un-obvious. Invariably you rely on someone else who had figured out how to get past a certain part. It was a group effort.

The themes and the writing were cool. The experience of actually playing through the game, not so much.

It would be interesting to fish through the code to see how it was put together.

Talk about exploiting a loophole. Had no idea that was happening. I'm assuming they did not pass on the savings. I've never seen a third party booking go down in price after being booked.

When I book directly with Marriott while signed in, the lowest price is usually 'flexible' (You can cancel it.) Sometimes I use third party sites to get a really low price if I know I'm not going to cancel, but lately I've been booking directly with the hotel to avoid hassles if it's a major chain I have a login for.

Due to business travel, I had a year or two where I had platinum elite status with Marriott. (the only scenario in which earning status points has any effect - if you live out of a hotel for 3 - 5 days a week and someone else is paying for it, or you launder a ton of purchases through a points credit card, but those can have yearly maximums) The various perks were nice and there were enough points to pay for a lot of our personal hotel stays for that year, with free room upgrades wherever we went. Fun while it lasted.

It must be nice to have the luxury of doing that. For most of us that kind of money would be a helpful windfall in these rough times.

...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.

It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.

I don't allow smart appliances or home automation in my house. And really, it's an easy choice. The cheapest stuff does not include that technology. You have to spend more to get a fridge with a screen.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues and information sharing, which all of us here are familiar with, there's another overriding reason not to have smart appliances or home automation - reliability. When you add complexity, things break more often, and costs go up. Obsolescence of your investment happens fairly quickly.

My line of work involves sometimes working inside of very high end homes and the newer ones contain every automation bell and whistle you can think of. And they break, and fail, a lot. One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works. The more complexity you add to a system, the greater chance of a failure. These are people that paid a premium for these features, and I think they were sold a bill of goods.

Home automation companies market whiz-bang features to high end home builders and their customers, not letting on that A. The ecosystem of hundreds of different products they are assembling is not perfect nor trouble free, and B. Whatever they are putting in the house now will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, and it will become more difficult to maintain over the next 10, 20, 30 years without substantial upgrades and replacements. What is state of the art now will probably be seen as fairly archaic when the house is sold again. For large homes and mansions, there is probably a middle ground somewhere that allows for some automation, but has enough manual control so that if something fails the device in question is still operable. This is not what I'm seeing in the newest systems. They are entirely reliant on a server for things as basic as turning lights on and off. Where a light switch would be, there is a keypad with five or six buttons, none of which anyone ever uses except the top button that turns the light on and off, and it's harder to find and press vs. a traditional light switch. The idea of being able to have dimming presets, etc. sounds flashy, but in reality they go largely unused. The biggest visual effect of course is when you push the button, it slowly fades the lights on. I find that annoying. I just want it on. Maybe that's just me and my old school ass that grew up with regular light switches. Being around this stuff has completely absolved me of ever wanting it in my own home, and I used to be a pretty big home automation enthusiast in the early days of Homeseer, X-10, Insteon, etc.

For a regular sized home on a regular suburban lot, there is no need for home automation. It is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. If you want to change the temperature, go adjust the thermostat on the wall. If you want to turn on a light, go hit the switch. There have been plenty of examples of home automation companies going under and the network enabled features of their appliances are suddenly rendered useless. With my dumb home, the problems don't exist. I don't have to do anything, maintain anything or subscribe to anything. It's bliss.