I hear they are a solution to the problem of increasing mileage/efficiency. I am no fan of Tesla, but we have to admit, there is some merit to that argument, however debatable the efficiency benefits are.

That’s not to say safety isn’t a serious issue. The biggest problem is the reliance on electronics. Now if someone can reinvent the design with a highly reliable mechanical system, with multiple redundancy.

Define “never”. Never in as in never in the history of 21st century America? Pretty tame assertion. Never in the anthropological sense? That would be completely farcical.

Reality check: you don’t make boatloads of money for having useful skills everyone has (or should have). You make boat loads of money when you have useful skills that few people have.

Why stop at appliances? By that logic, humans are nothing more than self-propelled heaters. The whole universe is nothing but shifting pockets of heat like the ripples of a pond bouncing back and forth until they all disappear.

Such nihilism.

This is how the United States of America turns into the States of America.

Here’s the thing. Y’all sitting around waiting for the institutions to do their job. Y’all waiting for the institutions to do the right thing. But y’all institutions have been corrupted, so they ain’t gonna do anything. It’s up to you, the people to clean up house now, by sending a strong message. And it doesn’t take that much to take action. There is incredible power in the people and in collective action. But for now it is locked away in tepid comfort. That comfort won’t last though. It never does under tyranny.

The plastic (including polyester fabrics) in your car was most likely derived from petroleum. The car parts were most likely shipped around during manufacturing using combustion engine vehicles. The energy to cast those car parts, probably some of it comes from non renewables. The labour to build the car almost surely comes from other people who consume gas (for example to drive to the EV factory)

That “100%” renewable energy? The installation and maintenance of it was/is almost certainly done with large industrial equipment and vehicles burning fossil fuels. (Similar issue with production of parts).

Look, I’m not saying you aren’t making positive choices by choosing renewable options. What I am saying is, while they are more renewable, they aren’t truly 100% renewable when you factor everything involved in it. Fossil fuels are so pervasive in society, it’s virtually impossible to both function in a modern society and not contribute to the consumption of fossil fuels.

Hard times make hard men, hard men make soft times, soft times make soft men, soft men make hard times <- we are here.

Your insight is accurate, but also as ephemeral as the assumption about the state of the world that came before it. The wheel will move forward yet again, starting with hard times hardening you.

People rather lie to themselves than face hard truths. It’s in human nature, and itself explains a lot of the evils of the world. But facing those hard truths is also liberating. The sooner we accept these human flaws, the sooner we can get back to that experiment of progress.

I think the design philosophy is that each tile represents no more than a single entity at a time, and compact enough that you can arrange the entities in a section to represent a device, room or group.

In your example, perhaps the room also has a humidifier and/or heater. So in reality, the room temperature entity isn’t truly tightly coupled with the fan. The heater and or humidifier are also a part of the whole.

With tiles, you are in complete control to arrange groups of entities that represent a larger whole, in whatever scope you like.

IMO, setting it up at home is not the bar for decentralization. I don’t think it’s even practical to run your own self-hosted fediverse server.

I think we can get just about all the same benefits of decentralization at the scale of the city.

You’ve conflated laws and ethics. Does piracy violate some laws in some jurisdictions? Unquestionably. Is every single law ethical? Unlikely.

Hear me out: what if repealing section 230 would end up killing our social media monoculture, since it would be impossible for these platforms to operate. Instead, what if people had to host their content themselves, you know, like we did back in the day, when the Internet was fun.

This is all kinda moot. There will be no companies to run when the economy crashes because there is no one to buy goods (or even to pay taxes to support government spending). It’s a giant house of cards.

AI, crypto, just like .com, are very much very real, valuable technologies that have and will continue to stick around and be used until we destroy ourselves, or something even more advanced comes along.

What was/is a grift, is all the stupid money and people around it that don’t have a damn clue where the limits of the technologies actually lie, what kinds of real problems are solved and have been sold lies stop lies without doing their due diligence.

I don’t do online gambling, so maybe I am missing an important detail here, but there’s no recent development that would explain why online gambling would have an effect now, and not a year ago, or even 15 years ago.

I don’t think you understand what being squeezed is like. There is no fighting back when you have no options.

Hell nah. I don’t give a damn about your up votes, down votes, replies. Hell I don’t even look at my inbox and I’ll be damned if I will end up back in this thread.

I’m just here for the occasional meme and maybe get a bit of news, and I’m all out of good news.

Is the objective to “reclaim control over your technology”, or is it to be a single purpose device? I can think of a lot of single purpose devices loaded with subscriptions and telemetry, and just as many general purpose computing platforms without that crap that let you be in control.

Well yes, this was the original intent of crypto. Putting payment in the hands of the people. It’s only been made terrible by tech bros and greed the same way the Internet has.

OP, you are in for a seriously rough time if you think containing micro plastics is as simple as removing lead from gasoline and paint.