Broadly speaking it seems mostly to be the point of focus. In Libertarianism it is all about the individual, having freedoms from others, and being an island.

In Anarchism it is about specific external coercive forces. Those forces impact individuals, groups, communities, and so on.

So a Libertarian may think about food security from a perspective of deregulating supply so that you can choose to buy unsafe food because you think it is a good idea. An Anarchist may instead think about mutual aid, local cooperative production, and preventing external power structures like corporations or governments restricting sharing of resources.

It serves more than one purpose for me, so the calculation is a little different. My freezer has about $1200 of meat in it. If the temperature in there gets up over freezing the meat will start thawing and become damaged or spoiled. Saving that meat from being spoiled would save me spending that $1200 all over again.

The solar panel means that even if the whole power system is out for multiple days I should be able to keep my freezer below zero and keep my meat frozen. Last year we had snow, for the first time here since the early 90s, and it took down power lines on the other side of town. People there were without power for as much as 4 days, which obviously would be enough to heat my meat back up and ruin it, so it isn’t a ridiculous possibility.

Also, I intend to make something larger over time on a trailer which I can move from house to house as I move, being a renter. I want independent power and learning a little with this system is a good stepping stone to building out my own system with much more custom parts, especially including a larger battery system, inverter, and more panels. I plan to run as much as possible from the DC to skip inverter losses, so using cheap modules to pull from the 24-48V system I build to do USB C ports with 100W+ output gives a lot of options, along with using smaller dedicated inverters for required loads like a kettle.

The coolest thing is the fully DC power supplies for a PC. You can run directly from a battery and solar system with just 12V, 5V, 3.3V, and a few little bits and bobs. Very fun stuff.

I think you’ll find different answers based on country because of circumcision. If you have a foreskin it can be pretty variable how much urine will be held by surface tension and hard to remove with a quick shake. You will also find differences based on the local culture, for example in Germany men usually sit to pee while that is rare in places like the USA.

The battery degradation is overblown with lithium iron phosphate batteries, which is what is in the Bluetti Elite 30. If you aren’t putting it through deep discharge (greater than 80%) or high temperatures (above 30°C) it should still work well for a long time. The higher your draw on it, pushing up to that 600W limit, the worse the impact is too.

That said, it can work very well as a UPS for a freezer like what I have mine for, and adding a solar panel extends the usefulness of it a lot. I have a 200W panel which gives around 130-170W at any given time through the day, leading to a full charge in theory in about 2 hours. My freezer pulls around 60-80W with transient spikes to 700W when starting the compressor, but the power station can boost to cover that need for a short time. Over a day I use about 550Wh per day, so about 4 hours of sun per day in theory. It should be covered by the panel I have but the capacity is a little low so I can’t get through the night at this point, it has to switch over to AC after a while. Still, during the hottest hours where I need the most power I am getting solar to do it, so that’s handy.

Anyway, yes, they are useful, another more powerful system is definitely in the cards for me, but they are a great first step and handy as a backup for bad weather.

Yep, definitely a good time to take plan B. Also, the responsibility to use protection is on both partners. Being as he was sober he was in a better position to manage this and made an active choice not to. You bear the burden of what happens and dealing with it, but he gets to have fun and run away. Very uncool.

I would consider how well you could really consent and if you want people who don’t care about that to be involved in your life. You, along with everyone else, deserve someone who will not take advantage of the situation to get off at your expense. Also, he should really foot at least half the bill for the plan B, without him it would not be needed and if it becomes a larger and more expensive problem it would be something he was responsible for there too. Any self respecting person should pay for their share.

Down here in Australia we constantly have people walking around with thongs (flip flops) or barefoot and in swimwear, so bikini top for women and bare for men. Honestly I don’t see a problem with it, I walk around with very minimal shoes now and I used to walk around barefoot most of the time when I was a kid. If you aren’t walking on a road with tonnes of broken glass and no footpaths then you are fine. As for people who complain about women having their chest exposed honestly, learn to not stare. It isn’t the job of women to cover up so you don’t have to put in effort.

Our beach culture is great because it is so laid back. If I had a business near the beach I would assume my customers would be barefoot and topless and make appropriate accommodations including somewhere to clean their feet off and taking care to keep the floor from being sticky. When I lived in the UK I found the constant demand to wear shoes stifling and awful and the USA felt really judgemental and gross.

Pictish.

It is a lost language from the British Isles and from one of the coolest populations in the area. They would paint patterns on their skin in blue then charge into battle naked. I reckon their insults and swearing would be absolutely raucous.

Also, if you do decide you need to escalate past this asking them to explain the joke can work really well. It works wonders for bigotry and other issues too, if they say “it’s just a joke” say “I don’t understand, can you please explain the joke?” This makes them articulate their explanation for why they find it funny and chances are they will sound like a complete dingus in front of you and others, heavily disincentivising this behaviour.

Yeah, so for Bedrock it is hosted by Microsoft and they are responsible. For any hosting infrastructure they will need to manage things themselves, but Microsoft seems to be taking things a step further. They seem to have blocked chat for Java users who are not verified to be adults. This means you may have to use a third party provider to verify your account by providing them with various details and trust that they won’t sell that information on.

Honestly, it is not something required by the law and it fits with a pattern I have noticed over the last few years. VPNs are being banned, age verification is being required on more and more sites starting with porn but now moving to things like video games, and the third party companies who can verify your age seem to be able to either sell that data on or sell things derived from that data. If I were planning to use authoritarian methods to control a population, similar to what ICE is doing in the USA, I would choose this strategy. Given the information in an age verification check I can train my AI systems to recognise specific faces and link them to the IMSI from a mobile phone present at a protest. This would identify the protestors and allow retribution at scale. Is that what is happening? I don’t know. But does it look exactly how that would look? Yes.

If you provide the server, the actual computer used to provide a service, you are responsible for that server. Minecraft Bedrock servers are operated directly by Microsoft and as such are something they are responsible for.

The browser accesses any and all servers for web pages. Regulating the browser would not work as they have no control over the content, nor do they have the ability to effectively filter.

The confusion comes from you running two similar programs on your computer and having one of those behave differently to the other. The key is that the game client is a client only for that game, but the browser is a client for any web server out there. The client is not regulated at all, the server is. Anyone can access any web server from a browser, but only one server from a game client.

Interestingly WoW has custom servers which are not operated by Blizzard and as such Blizzard is not responsible for what happens on them. The operator of the server is the responsible party here and has to control their platform.

I have a small SSD on my laptop. Only 500GB, so I can’t install all of the games. I move ROMs to my external when not playing them and move them to the internal to play. I also package games up from Steam/other sources and do the same. That limits how many games I have installed at any time and helps make some friction to getting stuck in choice paralysis.

That said, for other thing is multiplayer. I an playing Hytale with my partner and we were playing Minecraft before that for a while, so playing together becomes playing that game together and is therefore simple.

January was $1262 in AUD. I eat a fairly meat based diet with ribs, pork belly, eggs, butter, and good coffee. I would consider it reasonable for myself, my partner, and my cat. That also includes other household things like cling wrap, dish liquid, and so on, so actual food cost is probably more like $1000-1100. In USD that is $697-767, so well under $200 per week. Also my meat is top grade Australian beef, widely considered some of the best in the world, and the butter is grass fed cow butter. I work 20-25 hours per week and can support my partner and myself on my pay and my partner’s disability payment.

This annoys me. Many articles about ADHD refer only to children with ADHD, not adults. I’m nearly fourty and I still have ADHD now, if I make it to 80 I will still have ADHD, why is it always about kids? It is lifelong not just a childhood thing.

I just bought a few bulbs from Aliexpress which came preloaded with ESPHome and got set up in about 2 minutes per device. They cost about $15-20 per bulb (AUD) and I am very happy with them.

Not necessarily. You don’t actually need the fluid to be perfectly sealed out, just slowed down a lot. This means that you could run it open but with very close tolerances and there would be almost no leakage. You just need to make the gap small enough for the leakage to be trivial.

As for magnetic alignment, that is all about maintaining smooth operation without losing efficiency to friction. Instead of a guide with friction you could use magnetic attraction to keep things aligned.

Yep, critical thinking enhances all other intellectual pursuits. It is so easy to fail at the critical thinking stage and go down a blind hole pursuing something absolutely nonsensical because you didn’t check your basic assumptions.

I would want kids to learn about the Monty Hall problem, do a little Bayesian analysis, etc. I think they could learn through trying to smuggle some lies into a paper and then peer reviewing each others papers and finding the flaws. Kids are way more creative than they are given credit for and they would find ways of sneaking things through we wouldn’t ever consider. Making it adversarial would prepare them for interacting with the huxters and frauds that make up a huge amount of modern life.

Yeah, but there are many good options. Magnetic alignment can keep things from touching most of the time, maintaining very good movement without friction. Graphite is a great lubricant and works even in very cold environments, not to mention it will not be all that cold given the heat passing through the system. Redundancy is also a big part of the design, making failures much less impactful. And using sterling engines for the highest draw part of the lifetime of a probe with peltier style generators there for later would allow a failover to a solid state system at lower efficiency.

Blackmail material is only powerful as a threat. Releasing material from it makes the remainder less powerful. If you raise the stakes a little by adding some small details, an association here, a plausibly deniable link there, you can enhance the fear of the person on the other end of the blackmail without ruining the value of what you have. So depending on what people want they can get better results by keeping that information hidden.

On top of that most people who get dirt on one person get dirt on many people. You may want to take down one person but by if you release some stuff from the files then someone on the other side can burn people on your side. Mutually assured destruction will paralyse everyone.

As an outside to everyone I want all of it released because in my mind anyone implicated is either an active predator or someone who tolerates predators. But if you have paid good money to have a specific member of congress get into office and they are able to act in your favour then it doesn’t matter if they have a D or an R, they are yours. It is very expensive to get someone who understands the game into office and under your thumb. Much better to prevent the whole system from becoming unpredictable due to lots of sudden new blood and to keep known actors in place. Members on both sides of the aisle want the files locked away forever, meaning they want to protect predators. The failure to act is a choice, not an accident.

To be clear, I am including foreign actors, massive companies, all sorts of people. If you have an asset that can protect another asset without knowing then you generally would do so.

This system is fundamentally broken. In Australia there is no path by which people on Centrelink would not have their payments processed for more than a few days. I remember a bank issue which caused a bunch of people to not get their payments on time and it was a major issue, people were absolutely livid. That was only a couple of days late and was resolved promptly with hardship temporary support available for those who really needed it.

For the system to be able to fail like this means those who designed the system want it to fail this way. They could change the funding mechanism to make sure SNAP is immune to government shutdowns if they wanted to. They have chosen not to so that they can use hurting poor people as a political weapon. Removing this weapon should be the goal of any reasonable party and it should be urgent. There are many similar funding holes that can be closed with reasonable legislation and would take away the impact of political dysfunction from the poorest and most vulnerable of society. Choosing to do otherwise is choosing that harm.

As a fellow Aussie I share your conclusion, though the Made in Australia plan from the Albanese government seems like it could change the game. Producing solar panels here would make purchasing them cheaper even if just from the shipping costs. Add the federal investment and the creation of demand and it should get cheaper again.

Now I do worry about things going the way of the NBN, starting with a goal of future proof fibre to the home being chipped away by the LNP until it was a small upgrade on internet service funded by the government but not anything like the goal. I want good green tech, not just barely solar sometimes.