Nice stuff, sadly - not for my latitude. Most likely I couldn't keep these critters alive beyond October, and would have trouble restarting the culture until May. Maybe with heavy thermal insulation and the vermiculture filter somewhat underground... but then again, sometimes when the snow melts, everything that's underground and is not sealed, gets flooded.
...apparently, this is how Israeli settlers and the state, hand in hand, are recruiting the next generation of members for Hamas (or some similar organization).
Highly unjust and entirely irrational. :(
During the Little Ice Age, cabbage and kale were among the plants that kept farming from collapse (they don't fail like the ordinary crops when snow arrives in summer)...
...so dinner almost certainly did include something of the sort. :)
For me, this question untangles like:
- do I have objections to indirect ownership?
- do I have objections to speculative investment?
- do I have objections to passive income?
To answer:
-
I have objections to indirect ownership, so I don't like the concept of owning shares in companies where I'm not involved - especially if those companies don't have any kind of internal democracy. I might make an exception if a company did something I would consider very useful to society, or if a fund only dealt with companies that do something very useful. I would worry about oversight - how would I know which companies respect their workers?
-
I don't oppose speculative investment, but I do that rarely - only when I'm confident that a market is irrational and I know better. I consider most markets defective, allowing a person who finds a market malfunction to extract profit. In total, I have made a speculative investment about 5 times in my life. It can result in loss or profit - for me it has resulted in profit. I have maintained a hard rule for myself: I'm only allowed to invest money which I would not cry about losing, and I'm not allowed to hurry.
-
I have limited objections to passive income. I don't mind my neigbour earning money with a solar park he built with my assistance - if it provides kilowatt-hours to the grid, it's not passive in my book... but I consider the proliferation of rent-seeking behaviour as a gateway to dystopian class society where people lose their autonomy. :( Additionally, I object because the country where I live (Estonia) taxes passive income lower than active income - another gateway to a dystopian future. However, if passive income was taxed appropriately (equally or higher than doing work), I would not have that objection since it would not destabilize society. I do not currently earn any passive income, and I have even stopped simulating it (over here, that is done to optimize taxes).
My answers reflect my own behaviour and may not particularly sync with any political or economic theory.
When I've had excess money, I have sometimes spent it to cheaply obtain something that is broken (in my case, a malfunctioning electric vehicle, the leftovers of a welding shop, such things) that I definitely know I can fix and sell for profit, or disassemble and sell without loss. I avoid such ventures when I'm not confident enough.
Depends on the person - I have seen households where a person uses less than 20 liters per day. :)
Besides, seawater can be used to wash oneself or flush a toilet - I think it's the use of drinking water that makes a difference.
There is a pattern: more persistent heat waves, more persistent cold waves, more persistent wet and dry periods. On a planet that is a bit hotter on average, we get "more weather".
Trying to figure out how my heat pump supposedly supports WiFi... in unfathomable and non-standard ways. It's available as an access point, I can associate and ping it, but no TCP ports listen and no UDP port responds. Nothing cool, undocumented features down to the rocky bottom. When you buy a heat pump and plan to automate its use, check out supported protocols before making a decision. :)
"What is the probability that the post will refer to Taiwan?" -- me, before opening the link :)
Yep, they have figured things out over there. :) Getting it right requires overcoming some obstacles, though:
- standardization
- modularization (if the vehicle needs more power, it has more than one battery of the same type)
- a future-proof control / ownership scheme
Standards do not emerge easily unless some player on the market is capable of achieving monopoly (a bad thing) and creating a de facto standard. Typically, to create a standard, an association of manufacturers is needed. Sometimes, a state or municipal body may also have to step in. For consumers to join the system, there must be some level of guarantee that the standard won't be temporary fad.
If the obstacles can be overcome, benefit for society is tangible and considerable. People will save time that would otherwise be spent waiting, and batteries can be slow-charged, prolonging their lifetime.
About the Taiwanese scheme, one can read here. They have a vertically integrated system where the same company provides charging places, batteries and scooters, and provides tehcnology to other scooter manufacturers so they can make compatible scooters. It has a market share of 33% so it's not a monopoly, but a big player. Their system is not perfect, there is room for improvement, but it's reasonably good in my opinion. :)
Yep. As for why:
- the material being raised and lowered must be very cheap (to be able to afford much of it)
- the material must be possible to automatically handle in arbitrary amounts
- the friction of raising / lowering the material must be low
- the handling should not require a slope of particular grade or a specific height
Trains fail the cheapness and arbitrary amount check, along with the slope grade check. Sand fails the friction check. Concrete blocks are close to failing the cheapness and arbitrary amount check. Cranes fail the specific height check for certain ranges of height.
Water... it also requires a certain slope grade, but the range is not narrow.
Regarding the connection scheme - I have not come across wind power inverters with multiple inputs. I think they are rare.
I think people solve the problem of multiple generators either with:
- parallel inverters, coordinated among each other (with one inverter or an external controller acting as a coordinator)
- parallel inverters, uncoordinated (each inverter only syncs to the grid frequency and dumps load independently)
- with a battery buffer, so there are parallel chargers but a single inverter
Basing on intuition, I would pick the latter option. I think it might result in a less complex system.
I got in without doing anything special, but the chat server (XMPP) seems down from my perspective. Pidgin says "incorrect username or password". I wonder if it could be related somehow?
Edit: apparently, I was automatically discarding cookies and thus my web browser routine didn't change.
My advise: if voting is a distraction, then don't get distracted. It costs nothing. Cast it and care no more, focus on other things immediately after doing it. :)
You can't build a better future by just voting, but you can use it to stop someone from running your society totally into ground.
In my imagined future, a country can climb down from voting to sortition, and decentralize the power of sortitioned representatives further downward until the state is just a label, but abandoning the present because of a future that's out of reach - that's not wise.
The present system needs attending to, until the next step is within reach.