UK. I installed solar on my roof and put a home battery in last month, and am very happy with the results. It took up-front investment of course and payback times vary between 4-7 years depending on the rates for selling energy back to the grid, but I'm fine with that. My first bill has my electricity cost down about 40% - I installed part way through the month so can't really give consistent figures as yet.

With the solar+home battery, all my domestic electricity usage is easily taken care of. I also took the opportunity to put in a whole home backup, meaning that if there's a power cut the house carries on. Power cuts aren't really a big problem in the UK but little micro ones do happen, and I got fed up of resetting the digital clocks and rebooting everything.

The solar+battery doesnt take care of 100% of my usage though, not by a long way. I've been driving an EV since 2018. I do around 22,000 miles per year, My solar peaks at around 5kWh and is best used to power the house and add to the house's battery capacity. I use about 22kWhs on a round-trip commute, and the home battery is 12.5kWh. The typical max I might need then is 34.5kWh a day, and I also need it overnight - solar isn't going to help me there. My actual pattern is load-shifting: charge both car and home batteries cheaply overnight, use solar+battery through the day on the house and sell the daytime excess to the grid.

On the car alone I have saved around £8-10,000 vs petrol, add in the car maintenance and the savings are even higher. For solar+home battery I don't yet know, not owned it long enough to be able to give good figures but the usage pattern is looking good. If I'm asked about EVs I rarely make an environmental argument - if you can charge at home, the cost argument is so massively in favour of them that's it's barely worth a debate. If you can't - nuance time and more questions to be asked.

I'm not off fossil just yet - still have gas heating. The heat pump equations are a lot trickier to work out - without load shifting it's much more expensive, plus how will it average out over winter when I presumably get less solar to recharge the home battery during the day. So heat pump is the next bit of research rather than my automatic next move. For the rest though - just no argument, the renewable/EV route is just better.

Lol imagine defending a 75% tax rate. Fucking communists.

Ask your city managers to prohibit drones.

Drones are dangerous. We have heard of only a few serious accidents. If drone delivery continues, there will be many more accidents, including a package delivered by a drone hitting someone.

Acting - as part of "the arts" - is more play than work for the people who do it. That merits not automating it because without enjoyable things to do, we become nothing but consumption machines.

Why should the movie studio executives, board of directors, or shareholders care? To them, it's a business to maximize profit. You can do that if using AI costs less than paying actors.

Maybe the AI added it?

But yes, it's not possible to run a high-trust computing environment in a low-trust society. I still find it amusing that we were told we're not allowed to connect to the office from Linux machines because Security, yet we now use the "secure" Windows laptops to connect to the office and run software on Linux VMs which download all kinds of random dependencies from all over the Internet because "you can trust us, bro."

Since AI bots are technically able and completely immoral I think we can safely say we won't be downloading all kinds of random dependencies from all over the Internet much longer.

Indeed. We should all get our information from news outlets owned by billionaire oligarchs.

Have a look at the map dude. Iraq is a mostly land locked country on the far end of the persian gulf, far from where the hormuz straight is. They definitely could have fucked with the oil facilities in Kuwait, but last time they tried that the americans dropped the hammer on them very rapidly.

Plus, the Iranian military is around 7-10 times the size of Iraq's, and around twice the population, so theres that.

Back in the 1990s when I used to attend a lot of "extreme" metal gigs, there was a local grind metal band who where on this permanent quest to discover the "brown note", a mythical infrasonic frequency that would cause the listener to shit their pants. Thankfully for us punters, no such tone exists. One could imagine however using an ultrasound frequency like the researchers suggest to induce a perception of smelling shit. Heck, even get the audience to puke. Thankfully said band are now all in their 50s-60s (and likely not actually a band no more) and probably less interested in such irresponsible, but possibly funny, experiments.