.... and exporting it to China in shipping containers packed tight. I am not kidding. Living in Utah you see absolute complete desert landscapes where they are watering in the middle of the day growing alfalfa. Much of this is packed up and shipped off to China. 80 percent of the water use in Utah is farms. Not farms growing fruit or vegetables, or even really cattle people are going to eat (most is really low grade beef). It is growing alfalfa and shipping it out of state.

Their solutions at reducing watering lawns and silly things like that is not even going to have a blip of an affect while agriculture uses this vast majority, and industry uses another good chunk. We are literally putting all of our efforts into the smallest percentage of consumer, and doing nothing to the largest. A ten percent drop in person usage will not have a significant impact, while the same in agriculture would be massive.

Simply enact a law saying you can not ship alfalfa out of the state it was grown in and you will solve our water problems overnight. It won't be quite so profitable anymore...

I think this has been a long time coming, actually. Offices used to be a decent place to go to work. You had ideally a private office with a door you could close so you could get work done. There was real office furniture, with real equipment in place and it was a place you actually could be highly productive. These were my early days in the software industry, and honestly going into the office wasn't that bad.

Then came the days of cubicles as the first step. Now people would lean over your wall to check in on you and/or ask for your help. Your neighbor would be loud on their phone talking about their weekend plans, or the latest problem with their kids. OK, on with the headphones, but at least I still have space around me to spread out, put some things on the wall, create a personal space I could get lost in and get some work done. I was not crazy about it, but it was workable.

Then came the open office plan. Line us all up on benches, take the equipment away, and give us a laptop. Now you stare straight across at the person on the other side and try to pretend you are not totally distracted by it. Raise up your monitor as high as you can to build a little bit of a privacy wall, but bump elbows with the person sitting next to you if you stretch out too much. Everybody has to have headphones on as the sound is deafening in the place. In fact the company would buy us nice headphones just because nobody can concentrate. Have a client meeting? Now you have to go find one of the few meeting rooms or phone rooms so that the din of the place isn't added too more. Usually, somebody will be squatting in one pretending they have meetings all day so they have some personal space. Productivity plummets, happiness is non-existant

Then the ultimate worse situation came along. Hotswapping/Hoteling... Now I have no assigned desk, no personal space, and just a laptop. Keyboards are scattered about with monitors, so now I have to use somebody else's dirty keyboard/monitor. I get a small file drawer to keep my stuff in for work, and push it around like a homeless person every morning to find my spot. This is now considered the ultimate collaboration! We mix freely as we wander around aimlessly looking for the least offensive spot. Interruptions are constant, and humiliation is at its maximum. I am done, I found a job working from home.

Companies brought this on themselves. The commute is part of it, but they slowly made the office workspace a horrible warehouse of software engineers and not a place any of us wanted to be. Bring back private offices and proper doors and maybe I will consider it again. Even then, it is going to be a tough sell. The companies played their hands too far with this open office crap, and now they are paying the price that everyone got out of the slow deterioration of conditions and saw how it used to be. I hope nobody ever has to go back to that again....

Well it would be nice if they actually did prioritize the rural areas before the cities, but in fact it was the opposite. The current delays have nothing to do with the particular cells being over crowded, it has to do with they are over capacity in the whole network and can not currently service the entire footprint of the US.

I live in as rural of an area as you can get off grid in the mountains. I literally doubt there is another single person in my cell. Pre-ordered on day one, and still waiting with a vague 'mid 2022' pushed from a 'mid to late 2021' at the end of last year. This is not due to a chip shortage as I can literally order one to be shipped to me right now from about 40 miles away, and people are doing it and 'roaming' across the entire US. The rollout of starlink has been perhaps the absolutely worse managed thing I have ever seen.

So please don't assume the other person is in an over-subscribed cell. There are many, many rural cells that have not been turned on yet, or at least they are not going to ship a dish to and nobody understand why at this point, as they are completely mum on why these cells have not been turned on. I hate it when people keep parroting this 'too many subscribers' thing. Unless all the marmots and squirrels have dishes in their trees my cell is definitely NOT oversubscribed...

I do not believe this to be accurate at all and is often parroted... It's never Starlinks fault... If it were user terminals, then every single pre-order would have already been filled. You can go online to an active cell today, place an order, and get a ground terminal within a few weeks. Plenty of incidents of that happening so it has absolutely nothing to do with the availability of ground terminals. They have them, and could fill all day one pre-orders right now, but the cells are not active. So let's ignore ground terminals at all in this conversation. Even if you have a ground terminal in hand, there are many people trying to move to a new address, and they can not get service. So that is not in the equation.

What is really happening is only patchworks of cells are being activated. Yes, the satellites are passing over the whole continental US, but they use beam forming to point their beams at specific cells. The active cells are patchwork all over the US, and it has nothing to do with ground stations to relay, as many spots are within range of ground stations. The next town over from me has service in one crowded ski town, but all around that one isolated cell nobody else can get it. They had critical mass to get prioritized. Basically they are beam forming the satellites onto that cell, but likely can't also handle tracking the adjacent cells on the available number of antennas on the v1 satellites. So in theory they could activate any cell in the country, but no, they do not seem to have enough antennas in the sky to beamform to cover all cells.

They will not admit this, but it is rapidly becoming apparent given they are not fulfilling orders on a first come first serve basis, but rather first come first serve IF they happen to open up your cell. Most cells in the US are not in fact open, and most pre-orders have been delayed to 'mid 2022' which is another vague promise of sometime in the future. This includes northern latitudes with heavy coverage. So it sure seems to me like the current number of antennas in the air can not actually cover the US for all cells, just some of them.

So they are going to offer aircraft connectivity, but right now most cells in the US (Starlink works on 15 mi hexagon squares) are not actually open. They claim to be out of beta, but there are many, many pre-orders from Feb 8/9 that have not been filled. Starlink will claim it is due to a chip shortage, but it is an out and out lie. You can find active cells in the US and order a terminal today, and it will ship within a week or two. Meanwhile, there are many people with these pre-orders who just got moved from a promise of mid to late 2021 to mid 2022 or even later.

The real situation is that it is clear their current first shell of satellites can not actually provide coverage to most of the US. It can hit a few random cells here and there, and what they have done is prioritize the cells with the most pre-orders to jack up their subscriber numbers. Meanwhile, the people in rural US areas are being skipped over in preference to these more populated cells, unless you happen to be adjacent to one of the ones they picked. The chip shortage is to provide them cover to not have to admit their satellites can't provide this complete coverage.

There are many stories of people in areas who pre-ordered the very first day (myself included) who live in very rural areas who just got delayed. I am within range of a ground station, and am in an area that definitely could be covered (there is coverage not that far away), but they are skipping my cell and others around me because it is clear their satellites can't handle it.

So I don't see how they would handle aircraft coverage until they can cover all cells, as planes fly over me all the time. It would be a horrible patchwork of coverage as these planes flew in and out of service areas and completely unusable. It is the same reason that them saying they are going to have mobile coverage soon is a complete fabrication. You can't do that until you have all cells in the lower US open, or at least almost all of them. Right now, it is not even close and my guess is Elon found out he can't actually cover the landmass with the current satellites and only gets spotty coverage.

So if you think you are getting mobile or aircraft any time soon, just check in on your Tesla CyberTruck order at the same time and see how that one is going as well. They used pre-orders to basically take a hundred bucks from everyone to figure out which cells they should turn on, and which ones to leave off until the next batch of satellites someday make it to orbit....

If you had ever been to Shiprock NM area, it would be readily clear and apparent. There is zero infrastructure there and people live sprawled out along a single highway running south, and little dirt roads headed off into the desert. Building powerlines to all of these remote places scattered about would be crazy expensive. So likely they have the power, but no way to get it to them.

Realistically the would have to move the solar panels to the houses, but that then involves batteries and all kinds of other expenses. More realistically, they could at least build some smaller installations where there are concentrations of houses, but even that is challenging. This area is a last mile nightmare for electricity....

It is not a popular idea, and it is only about half true. Like everything else, people want a 'close it all down', or 'open it all up' mentality so it is either schools are super spreaders, or it does not spread in schools at all.

The reality is that they are not super spreaders, but definitely are spreaders. There is a great article on this but it does not get widely circulated as it does not support either opinion at all, and people want their free daycare. I reference it here:

https://www.nationalgeographic...

Basically elementary schools are minor spreaders for ages below puberty. So basically with some level of risk, likely representative of other activities and the state of the local spread, below puberty age students present a reduced risk of spread. Above puberty (i.e. high school) it likely spreads at the same rate as adults so likely if the spread is high in the community, it will spread at a similar rate and enhance spread in the community. It also talks about if you shut everything else down, then schools will naturally become the primary methodology of spread.

So in long and short, schools absolutely spread coronavirus. The question is if you decide that the risk to the community is worth the benefits of in person classes, and if there is high spread already, opening schools is probably a bad idea.

Personally I feel highschools should be online, as they are of an age they better know how to learn from online resources as that is the future of the world in all occupations. After all, I thought this was the digital native generation???

I have a 75ah AGM, and a 60W panel and it has never gone down yet, including days where the panel gets covered with snow and multiple cloudy days. There are many, many models of foscam cameras, and many have built in wifi. I am using a very basic camera to just get low power out of it and it works fine. I have a fancier PTZ one as well, but that one is on my main battery bank and does consume more power. All of them run on 12v standard, and so far all have been tolerant of the 14+v that it peaks out at full charge...

Overall I have been very happy with it. Reliable and always up with the ability to tie in all kinds of things to Blue Iris.

I live off grid in Colorado at over 10,000 feet. There are not power lines anywhere near me, yet I have a full suite of security cameras on the 13 acres of property by using off the shelf foscam cameras. The trick is that almost all of these run on 12v native anyways, so just get a small cheap solar controller and a small AGM battery with a 60w solar panel, and you will have your own continuous feed wifi camera that will be almost constantly up. I have two operating on solar this way and they rarely go down unless we have a very long stretch of clouds

Then I run a small micro pc running the blue iris software. This connects to the cameras and stores clips based on motion detection on the micro pc. This also gives me a web interface that I can watch live from anywhere in the world (I have my own static ip and routing and don't use a cloud service, and use a reverse pipe front ended by ngnix all running on a raspberry pi).

So net effect is I have 4 security cameras all solar powered stuck in trees on my property providing both motion capture/alert/emailing and a live stream whenever I want to check in on it or see what is happening in the remote parts of my property.

OK, so he along with tons of other people take photographs of snowflakes.... Not sure how this is news since the pioneer of the field was doing this back in the 1930s and even used candles and all kinds of crazy things to take some absolutely amazing photographs of snowflakes and to print them in beautiful ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There is even a museum in Vermont dedicated to his work. I have a few prints of his taken directly from his original negatives. If you are ever in that area I highly suggest a peak as the prints really are amazing.

So again, why is this guy noteworthy? And this article has almost nothing about the actual snowflakes, but rather seems to be some kind of weird promotion of him as a person.

I have an off grid cabin in the middle of nowhere, and rely on satellite internet for work, so streaming is not an option for me. DirecTV kept hiking fees, adding 'sports fees' which I never watch and don't want to pay for, and started charging never ending equipment rental fees, etc. The darn bill was way over $100 a month, and I finally had enough of them. But I still like to watch some documentaries, reality type stuff (Alone), and some other random things here and there. So I had to find something else that was way more affordable and not just fee after fee. I found Orby and it was a great fit. Very limited selection of channels and no local tv, but you pay for the equipment up front and you own it. The monthly fee is $50, no additional fees or taxes, pay as you go, cancel and restart through the app any time with no fees. Additionally, I could do a self install and they even threw in a signal meter with the install kit. Quality of the display is not great, but for gosh sakes, it's just junk TV to pass the time on a rainy day, not a cinematic experience. I am not a paid shill for this company or anything, just letting other rural people know there is a cheap option out there now. I wish more companies would go this route. I hate sports, don't care for many of the channels, and just want some basic stuff to watch on rare occasion. That is not worth over $1200 a year. The cost is sunk once the satellite is in the sky, so why not get more subscribers by offering cheap basic channels. Orby is doing a decent job of that, albeit with a very limited selection. I think DirecTV would stop their bleeding if they offered a barebones package as well. There are many of us out here in rural areas with internet that is crappy and will not allow streaming due to data caps. I was a direcTV customer since 1993, but it just wasn't worth that much money anymore. I was glad a bargain basement offer came along without a contract....

I got really sick of the slow price hikes over the years. I live in a rural area with no high speed internet, and have to rely on satellite internet with serious data caps. So streaming is not an option at all, or you would use up all of your data. Every recent year, as I first subscribed in 1993, you would have to call them up and threaten to quit in order to reduce your bill rate as they added more fees, taxes, and all kinds of crazy service charges, that basically almost doubled your bill. It was up again to $150 which is way too much for just being able to watch some basic channels. I don't care for sports, and never subscribed to them but was still charged a sports fee....

Then along came Orby. Very basic lineup, not the best HD in the world, no local channels or sports, but only a flat $40 a month, and $100 for the receiver if you installed it yourself. They even included a bluetooth signal meter for me, and setup was a breeze. So for less than 1/3 the price, I have some basic channels to watch, no contracts, flat fee, cancel any time. This is how satellite TV should be. They already pay for the satellite bandwidth, so just get as many people receiving it as you can, and offer cheap packages. So far I am a happy customer despite the not so great receiver, because of the price.

DirecTV should do the same as it is all sunk cost. Offer a really cheap pay as you go basic package with no extra fees, and I would have stuck around. Nothing but gravy for them at this point, and I think they would not be losing all of these customers. Some of us just want some basic TV for a rainy day...

Good grief. I don't think when people are talking about processed foods they mean basic things like grinding or cooking. We are talking about massive changes to the basic ingredients such that there is very little recognizable about what is there at all anymore. Not simple things like heating, grinding, cooking, or even boiling in a stew.

Half the garbage in the supermarket has so much non basic ingredients (like high fructose corn syrup) in it and we wonder why obesity is so high? I am not even close to some kind of a health nut. I just find if I start with good ingredients and treat them gently, you get such a better tasting, and I believe healthier, end result than pre-packaged food.
Nature made things surprisingly tasty and healthy for you.....

Often they finish them on a feed lot. If they do, they will be better tasting but finished on corn. In that time, most of the nutrients will be stripped away from the grass. If they are truly only grass fed, they have an entirely different taste and will be quite lean. You have to even cook them differently.

Check out a local coop.... We get our cows from a local farmer, straight grass raised, and for about $5 a pound for a quarter of a cow. Goes down from there if you buy a half. It really isn't that much more expensive if you use the whole cow. Now if you just wanted the rib eyes, well of course you pay more

There really are other options out there, including your local farmers market and all kinds of things now a days.

Sad how many people think it is either this, or McDonald's are their only choices, or that you can't eat good meat in moderation with other items and still be good for the planet....

Honestly, the best thing you can do for the planet is to not have more children, and not many are bringing that up....