I think I've run into a couple of dystopian stories which involve a resurgence of coal usage.

Some are kind of post-ecological failure, where the population lives in domed cities and is energy dependent to keep the domes functioning. I think one involved a crisis several years into a continent-wide drought that required a massive desalination and pumping project to prevent literally running out of water.

It's the preferred location for exiling troublesome political figures with French ties.

I kind of wanted it to go up in flames not because I think ACA was perhaps one of the worst economic giveaways since the Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s.

Basically we just ended up enshrining the for-profit healthcare industry, including the insurance companies, into law, forever. Sure, there were some goodies in there for people with pre-existing conditions and a handful of other things, but my sense is that it really didn't do anything to address the out-of-control costs of healthcare or the relentless profiteering WITHIN healthcare.

Unfortunately I don't think any of this can be fixed without going single payer and greatly stripping the profiteering out of healthcare by making most of it nonprofit.

ACA just says "well, we're just going to make more people buy healthcare and hope it makes it cheaper because a bunch of healthy people won't use it" without even beginning to address all the people who WILL use it more now (thanks to some of the goodies) at the current, high-profit, high-cost expense levels.

I wonder if that's a case of misleading by proportion.

It reduces the nonfunctional material in the battery by 80%, but what portion of the battery is nonfunctional material?

If a 100kg battery has 5kg nonfunctional material, losing 80% of it is nice, but you're only losing 4% of the total mass. The same kind of thing goes for volume. If the battery is 1000cc and the nonfunctional material is 50cc, losing 80% is great but its a much smaller part of the entire volume.

I'd guess that this is why the bigger claims are from process improvement. If it meaningfully shrunk mass and volume, they'd probably wave that flag, too.

Where did you buy it?

Also, I assume the battery has some kind of charge controller integrated into it so that it was a direct replacement for a regular lead acid battery.

Eventually being Amish is going to be a preferable (without the religion part) way to live. Low tech is future privacy tech.

They'll try to take that away, too, by polling other Amish who claim you aren't Amish.

Although generally it's an interesting idea, and I wonder if anyone has actually tried "becoming Amish" (without actually being Amish) as a way of going off the grid in a way that doesn't draw attention because it fits some "known" role of people living off the grid.

The p2p element seems reasonable but I suspect would be kind of thorny. Most people's broadband connections are asymmetric, with upload speeds only a fraction of download, so you'd have to limit total upload bandwidth to something small enough that it wouldn't prove obnoxious, either to performance or that would cause users to hit caps, especially the kind they didn't know they had.

And then there's the question of figuring out who has the content on my download list -- even though the streaming catalog is kind of finite, it may prove less efficient or reliable to grab content on my list from random sources whose connectivity to me is unreliable.

The other idea that I had that I thought might solve some of the content owner objections is a download that is a fractional download -- download only half the content, so that you still stream the other half but have the streamed content and the local content interwoven so you grab byte 1 from netflix, 2 from cache, 3 from netflix, etc, so that the local content was "incomplete" and thus didn't fit any strict definition of "local content".

Realtime streaming is a bandwidth pig, but if you had something with 128 GB of storage you could download content in the background at a much lower bandwidth rate. 128kbps, 12 hours a day for a week would give you 300 gigs of offline content.

Netflix could do this with your "My List" of titles and possibly interweave this with some predicted preference stuff and maybe catch a percentage of things you might watch while just browsing (er, vainly searching for something interesting).

At this point you could possibly be watching most of your stuff offline from cache without the need for real time streaming or bandwidth.

I think I've read Netflix say "we'll never do offline streaming" and its probably a licensing/rights issue, although maybe Netflix has some rationale for not doing it to, so that will keep it from happening.

Most STBs and smart TVs don't have storage, but it doesn't seem like adding some flash capability (internally at assembly, or via USB sticks by consumers) would be that expensive.

I realize you are speaking mostly in jest, but it is a misconcept that trees use/need/take water.

After the first 2 years, you never need to water them. They tap into the ground for their water. And during those first 2 years, the water they need is about 10 gallons per week, during the dry season. When we wash & prep the parsley we eat in one week, we create 2 gallons of waste water (that could go to that tree). Clothes washers create gallons & gallons of gray water that can be used to water trees -- in our household, we produce 150+ gallons of gray water from clothes washing alone.

It takes ridiculously small amounts of work and creativity to have enough water for outdoor plants without ever having to turn on a tap.

But it's naive in the extreme to believe that some kind of informal system of first come, first served meets squatter's rights would prevail when the players in question are large commercial entities.

The Internet as we knew it 15 years ago (or more..) is dead, as is the benevolent giant of Google. It's not run by geeks for geeks under some informal geek code of honor anymore. It's a commercial marketplace run by corporations for a profit.

And anyone with a clue and any exposure to Google would have to understand that their services and systems change as they see fit. If you rely on Google for anything, you'd better be, as the MBAs say, nimble and able to pivot when they change their minds. Their services come and go. Beta, labs, products, whatever, if it's not making ad revenue it's on life support and will disappear whenever they feel like it.

It's an off-by-one error.

I think local donations is a great idea. So many local organizations are the ones actually executing hands-on help where the amount of useful work done per dollar is higher than larger organizations that have larger administrative overhead.

Why follow Microsoft's arbitrary release cycle if you don't have to?

The software they are using is just as functional now as the day it was installed (more so if you count bugfixes installed since) and the system integrations, testing and validation they have done are not inexpensive to repeat with a new operating system because Microsoft stopped supporting something, not because they had to -- but because they need to, to keep revenue flowing.

It's not hard to imagine complex installation scenarios where the cost/benefit of paying for extended security updates is better than replacing the OS, re-engineering third party solutions, fixing problems and so on.

I think your argument is more realistic for prosumers, small business, etc, where the main reintegration task is moving user profiles or replacing an old laser printer because drivers aren't provided for a new OS. Tracking MS release cycles in these environments ends up being easier to do, even if the rationale isn't that the users have/want/need new "features" but that the vendor yanks support after a period of time, even if the system still works as expected.

Great example: Friends Of Trees (or similarly themed orgs).

They always need help, of all kinds -- donations of food, money, time, etc. I happen to have a truck, so I donate that. I also love the physical workout. Looking forward to doing it again this fall.

And the net effect is almost a half million trees planted in this area in the past 25 years.