Antibacterial soap doesn't contain antibiotics... At least, it never has in any country I've lived in.

Their properties are supposed to be chemical in nature, not medication based - the fact that they haven't exactly stood up to scrutiny isnt surprising, but they arent adding to the current antibiotic-resistent problem...

It will live on on the various worlds of Alastair Reynolds books...

Bitcoin relies entirely on SHA256 ASIC's for hashing and they typically need replacing every year or two because more efficient models come out making the old ones unprofitable, especially at halvings. Due to the RoI and first-mover advantage the profitable ones are very expensive.

If you want to heat your home with proof-of-work, use a coin that uses RandomX or some other deliberately ASIC-resistant algorithm (usually CPU mining).

You can pool mine on an old CPU and still get a few pennies for your efforts, though if you want to invest in an EPYC and have other uses for it (maybe you have work jobs to run during the day and want more heat on cold nights) it could actually be profitable.

Resistive electric heating is still a very expensive way to heat, though some people don't have better options. There's a development near where I am that was built shortly after Nixon announced Project Independence and every house (cold climate) has wall-to-wall electric baseboard heating.

I generally agree with you, but I dont think the OP works at SpaceX, they are just a fanboi dissing on anything else - and they are the target of my comment.

The estimated number of deaths in people with a resistant infection rose from 2,041 in 2023 to 2,379 in 2024, a 17% increase.

It is. It's also illegal to advertise prescription medicines. Sunak may have been pretty useless (someone needed to show him how to use contactless payment FFS), but being the child of two pharmacists seems to have paid off. Allowing pharmacists to prescribe medicines for a very small number of illnesses takes a little pressure off GPs. By "very small" I mean about half a dozen. Strep throat is one of them I think.

We don't feed animals with antibiotics in the UK, and you can't just buy them from a farm store without a prescription.

A few things to note...

Over the past couple of decades, more and more roles within the British healthcare system have become able to prescribe - pharmacists (as noted in the summary), nurse prescribers, physicians associates (who technically should be under the supervision of a GP, but the way the NHS has that set up its very much a "PA prescribes, GP actually has little say")...

The role of doctors in the British healthcare system is being deminished and replaced by lower paid, lower trained positions, and GPs are particularly hard hit by it - which is why GPs are retiring or moving overseas at record rates, far beyond the ability for the current GP training schemes to replace them.

The UK is actively doctor hostile these days, and British doctors do not want to be part of it any more.

Get ready to drink a verification can of Mountain Dew.

These companies aren’t stupid. Pay a few lobbyists and the taxpayers will burden the costs.

There are two ways to do this. First is to feed AI slop into AI - this ruins the training models and is actually one of the biggest problems in AI right now - everyone is using it and posting slop all over the internet. But it also means when you crawl for data, you're ingesting that slop as well and it's corrupting your models

The other thing to do is to poison the well by posting non-slop that's deliberately wrong. If you give a command or code example, hide in ways that are destructive or don't get the job done. Things like today's equivalent of "rm -rf /" (which doesn't work since "rm" actually requires a couple more parameters to do it - but make it appear it's a normal argument to rm). Non-slop that's wrong is just as harmful - people are using it without thinking so if they're blindly following AI commands to do a task and it wipes their machine, well, that's a goal as well.

If you run a mailing list, have a hidden archive of AI slop generated archives that look a lot like the real thing and make it harder to sort the real from the fake

Your post is about encountering municipal bureaucracy when you had it in mind to do it yourself in the first place.

I'm no fan of bureaucracy for its own sake. But there's a reason you need to jump through some hoops when you want to change something on your property. Those trees you want to cut down might be crucial for flood mitigation. That room you want to turn into a spare bedroom might be a fire-trap if it lacks a window or quick access to an exit route. Digging on your property might disrupt buried pipes or cables.

Like it or not, we do need rules, even though sometimes they may seem silly to you.

Oddly, I don't think that's ever been an issue because DIY is happening all the time, and that's why those regulations are there because someone dies and people find out it's because an unauthorized renovation happened that created a firetrap.

So no, it's not a deterrent because it's happening all the time. It's made worse by house flippers because those people are cutting corners to save money (i.e., make more profit), who you know aren't taking time to get permits, do inspections, or even bring things to code. By the time the flawed renovations are discovered, it's too late and the buyer is basically left with their house falling to pieces.

So I don't get get the claptrap that DIY is illegal - because if it was illegal, substandard construction and renovation work wouldn't be happening. There's probably a small fraction of the unpermitted work done properly to code (or better - remember code is just a minimum) and you'll never know until decades down the line when someone tries to renovate and discovers no permit was ever taken out. It's just it was well constructed, well built that no one needed to do anything. But that is far from the norm, and DIYers are basically the reason for the regulatory hell.

Also why "house flipping" should be an immediate rejection of a house - it looks pretty but the pain is likely concealing a load of issues you won't find out until later.

For Africa, the situation is different. The government led projects aren't happening not because of regulations, but because corruption and other things are basically draining the resources. Building an electric grid even without regulations we have (basically it's the wild west outside of Western nations) still costs money and effort, and enough palms get greased that no money makes it down to do the work. That's why it's not happening. And having electricity is better than not, so even the shadiest and lousiest of DIY gear you can get off Temu makes your life way better than trying to get it done the right way. Electrification rates in Africa are disputed because if you have a house with a single LED light that provides light for a few hours after dark, you're considered to have electricity.

Even the most basic DIY solar projects in Africa provide that, but also power to charge cellphones and provide Internet connectivity (during the day - there are batteries but they provide the lighting) - when the sun is out the battery charges and runs an inverter so you can run a computer to get Internet (usually via cellular network). This is often enough for farmers to access trading networks and get weather forecasts which is why it exists and is considered an important resource. And while the sun is out, cellphone charging is done.

It may be *possible* to squint really hard and make up bullshit good-faith justifications for policies that mean one can avoid naming the obvious bad-faith actual justification for said policies. But it is not *advisable*. It makes you look like either a credulous buffoon, or someone who thinks other people on here are all credulous buffoons.

It’s not like Trump and his administration have *hidden* their desire to support ICE vehicles and damage EV vehicles, is it? There was some sort of weird hiatus in Trump’s own rhetoric when he was sucking up [sic and also sick] to Musk for a few months, but since then he’s been back to saying what he said beforehand, that he thinks EVs are shit and should be discouraged. And the rest of his admin never indulged in the hiatus.

Hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras.

It's a little surprising that this doesn't happen more in the US, where some people seem to like being rugged and independent.

It is very viable to go off-grid, or at least have enough backup energy storage and generation to survive days of no grid power.

You don't even need to deal with regulations, there are products that allow you to have it all isolated to your own home, or simply plug critical appliances into a box of batteries and solar panels when needed.

Legally I'm a software engineer despite not having a degree in engineering or computer science.

Not much I can do about it. That's my job title and what I put down when I am told to provide accurate information to a government agency.

You may certainly petition the legislature of my state in order to force my employer to change their job titles. But it's out of my hands (I also do not care)

What do you mean by a four hour turnaround? I’m really confused.

My EV has a 330 mile range and my charging is either done at home (plug in at night, unplug in morning) or at my destination (typically a hotel, and once again plug in at night, unplug in the morning). If I really have to do a fast charge on a longer trip, I can go 10 to 80% in about 40 minutes, so I’ll time a charge for when I’m hungry. But I’ve only done that a couple of times in the last two years.

So it might well be that my current EV meets your nominal needs. Unless you mean something else by turnaround.