So what? Look, I don't even know how much of what you wrote is pure stereotyping or something more accurate. But it does not matter in the context of this discussion. None of those 'examples' are relevant to the discussion, at best they show a slightly different balancing of basic human needs from one culture to another. But in no way do they even suggest that any of those needs are negated in certain cultures.

Bingo. This idea that "asian culture" is so different from "western culture" is just intellectually lazy. Sure there are differences, but fundamentally people are people, they all want the same stuff - food, air, water, sex, sleep, security, health, family, respect, creativity, etc.

The sort of reforms we saw that came in on the western industrial revolution aren't culturally specific, they are human-specific. The implementations will surely vary along with the timelines, but the end result will be the same because if it does not get to a similar point of satisifying universal human needs, it will collapse because the humans won't tolerate it indefinitely.

Yeah, not going to happen. The people with power will be able to game the system - they will figure out (or more likely hire) people to create false trails. Thinking that a panopticon society could ever be a level playing field is to ignore basically all of recorded history.

Yes, because most electricity is used by business. Just look at any power company that has time of use billing schedules, peak rates are generally from 10am to 5pm.

Apparently you have not heard of grid-tied solar, where the homeowner does not have any batteries to worry about because the electric grid itself takes the place of the battery. This sort of set up is very common nowadays, I'm no expert but I wouldn't be surprised to find that ~90% of all residential solar installations are now grid-tied since not only does it eliminate the cost of batteries, it also eliminates the concern of not properly sizing the solar power system.

Grid-tie solar won't completely scale up to the point of totally eliminating power plants because you need some source of power when the sun goes down. But the majority of electricity usage occurs at exactly the same point in the day when solar power is the most abundant so it can go a long, long way to reducing the need for power plants without the environmental cost of hundreds of millions of lead-acid batteries.

No, there are not. However, there are PATRIOT act rules that require them to verify your identity to prove they aren't doing business with a "terrorist." Those rules are not technically cash-only, but cash is basically the only way to make a purchase that does not also involve officially identifying yourself - so you will get that bit of hassle.

This ruling is huge.

I agree. It is so important that we should fully expect that MAFIAA lobbyists to now focus their efforts on getting a bill passed to make the owner of the account legally culpable. They even have a case to point at and say, "this is a loophole in the currebnt law, just look how this court ruled."

There are optical data-diodes (yes that is basically the industry term for a hardware unidirectional network connection).

Most plants are going to manned. Which makes a manually-enabled 2-way network an option. Only pjhysically power it on for maintenance with a VPN and you've narrowed the vulnerability window down to practically nothing.

Shock and awwhhhhh?

Theoretical Air Gap!

How does noscript affect this? Am I going to have enable javascript for every site that has a PDF that I want to view?

I'll just leave this here: Republicans, Get In My Vagina!

How did that happen? What organization is responsible for chasing out all of those other groups from having the power to abuse you like that?

On what basis do you say "we don't?" If these differences are only now being identified then it isn't necessarily a case of "do not" just "have not yet."

Structural != "hard-wired" it just means that there are different brain structures associated with specific traits. It isn't saying that the traits are immutable, just that if you have those traits you probably have a certain brain structure to back them up.

No, it was Putin who busted it into smithereens with one blow from his mighty fist.