Yeah, but what about this 5g transmitters in the vaccine? Sure, your cancer is cured, but then you're under mind control of China and may even have an unquenchable desire for sex selective surgery so you can go into women's washrooms...

He's just a plain nut job. I doubt even he has any kind of meaningful political affiliation. He's just deranged.

Well, at my workplace we're opting out of the game entirely. Other than a few machines that require Windows for accessibility or specialized apps, we're moving over to Linux. I test-ran a few different distros, and settled on Debian 12. With a few images and Clonezilla and a bootable USB stick, I've started eliminating Windows 10 from most machines. There's some training that needs to occur, but so far nothing has exploded.

We have perfectly good machines that even if we wanted to upgrade (which we don't), would basically be thrown out, and this dude won't abide that.

I've recently started looking at my power consumption on a 15-minute graph, and it turns out that power usage isn't all that much less during the night. In fact, at times it is higher because all the lights are turned up. But even at night, there's the fridge and freezer, the house electronics, security cameras, etc.

Turns out the stuff I need for work - a notebook and an external screen - barely register.

Yes, and different inverters. I've got a very small solar array, and the micro-inverter on it doesn't even work if it can't find the main power grid to sync to.

A battery will get you over some power grid outage, but not totally off-grid.

You are totally wrong.

I've installed a really small solar array and on sunny days I produce more electricity than I use. I'm sure it'll be a lot less in winter. BUT - I have a wood-burning heater which needs only a bit of electrical power for its control system. I'm pretty sure I can produce enough of that even in winter. So in theory, with the addition of a battery to cover the night, I could survive even if the power grid went down for an extended time.

Solar as a provider of independence doesn't mean everything needs to run on solar. Sometimes, it's just an enabler for another system.

So, in a nutshell, AI runs the risk of creating unrealistic relationship expectations and simulate perfection? No way. That's a completely new thing in the world. Romance novels, movies, gold diggers or marriage swindlers or just, frankly, a whole lot of ordinary people into "presenting themselves" in order to "score" a good catch, rather than being authentic and looking for a good match - I'm sure all of these things are hypothetical, don't already do essentially the same thing just with a lot less processing power, and cause the same issues.

But hey, this one has "AI" in it, so hype!

This. I've started with solar. Now that in good weather I produce more than I consume, I'm thinking about adding storage next. Once you have solar power with storage, an EV or at least a plug-in hybrid becomes a logical next step.

That's not necessarily a given.

Developing countries have the advantage of not having an established base. For example, mobile phones took Africa by storm and were available in many places where landlines were not. And with smartphones, for a while Africa was leading in mobile payment systems - exactly because it didn't have the established base the developed world has.

With solar power and batteries dropping in price, solar is an obvious choice for people in developing countries where the power grid is unreliable. Once you have solar power and storage anyways, an EV means independence from oil prices and not having to drive to a petrol station to refill.

EVs are coming down in price rapidly. They might soon be an actual alternative outside the developed world.

Or alternatively, and stop me if you think this is crazy, whether someone you don't know chooses to die or not is none of your goddamned business, and if they are unable to carry it out in a way that causes as little suffering at all, and seek out professional medical assistance then again, providing they are of sound mind, it's none of your goddamned business.

That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

The argument only makes sense if you completely discount externalities. Once you factor them in, the costs of fossil fuels are absolutely monumental.

I mean, a bullet to the head cures cancer, but I'm not exactly seeing this being proposed as a medical solution.

Ah yes, reductio ad absurdum.

Twelve Angry Men must have driven you insane

You know, I don't have a panic attack if Macbeth is set in 1920, or if they recast Hamlet as a woman. I'll complain if the acting is shitty, but if the actors, whatever their gender or skin color, can pull off a good King Lear, then that's the only thing that counts.