I have concrete tiles on my roof. They look a bit like terracotta tiles but they are just moulded concrete. They are just over 50 years old. In 2020 we hadd 5.6kW of photovoltaics fitted on the roof. The photovoltaics were mounted on rails about 100mm above the roof. The rails are attached to the same timber battens that hold the original tiles, which remain in place. We had to replace a dozen or so tiles after the solar panels we fitted due to the accumulated 50 years of damage and some additional damage from the contractors who fitted the panels.

The rest of the roof was left as-is. The roof doesn't look "new" but it keeps the weather out like it did when it was new. The solar panels shade the roof so we need less AC in summer. Barring some kind of never-before-seen-in-our-area weather event I expect to get at least another 30 years out of the roof + panels (The panels have a 25 year warranty) though we may add more solar and a battery before that.

This is insightful. There's no "labor shortage," there's a shortage of suckers who will work under their shitty/pay/conditions.

I think this is related to the lie that is the "cost of living crisis." This should realistically be called a "corporate greed crisis." Corporate profits are through the roof. The problem is that the corporations don't want to reduce their prices so they're squeezing the consumer. We consumers are partly responsible too, because we vote for assholes who enable this. Voters are terrible for voting against their best interests, because they think that maybe-one-day-in-future they will be the shareholders making the profits... so they vote to allow the corporations to shaft them today.

A similar event occurred in Australia in 1880. A highwayman on the run from the law made his own armour out of ploughshares, and later got into a showdown with police. The armour held up to the police gunfire, but he was eventually taken down by shots to unprotected areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It may be enough to treat the moon as the metaphorical high ground. Now that Earth's orbit is getting crowded with spacecraft from many different nations, perhaps having a base on the moon has some strategic value.

Stop carrying a phone with you everywhere.

More shit getting rammed down our throats. Who wants this? I for one want my car to STFU and let me get from A to B.

Don't forget to deduct the cost of the stamp next year :-)

Here in .au, the previous government voluntarily killed our domestic car industry in ~2018. Funnily enough, as well as cheap Chinese EVs, we also see plenty of big Dodge Rams, Jeeps, etc even though they cost heaps more to buy and run. A huge portion of the automotive market is completely irrational. Hopefully the the kost recent oil price panics will make them see sense, but it didn't work in 1973, or during any of the other Middle East conflicts in the last half century. I just wish governments would stop pandering to these idiots. The writing has been on the wall for decades, fossil fuels are finite and prices will always go up in the long run.

I'm with you on everything else, but this one is direct consequence of the half hour of commercials at the start of movies these days.

I'm pretty sure there was an article share here on Slashdot recently that said less than 50% of Americans read a book in 2025.

Wait, you were serious? Wait while I laugh even harder.

Perplexity can fuck right off.

This whole concept is so crazy. Even "non-techy" people know about identity theft, not sharing passwords etc. The news has been full of amusing "AI" fuckups since the models became public. Most of those stories are riffs on the 1980s "computer fucked up" news stories from the 1980s. Even Joe Sixpack knows that computers can't be trusted.

So why the hell is anyone letting an LLM near anything useful or important? How are vendors marketing these "assistant" tools? At this point I can only conclude that it's a deliberate plot by OpenClaw et al to mine users' data so they have something else of value before the "AI" bubble pops. Either that, or OpenClaw et al are just a front for some three-letter agency, just like those "Anom" phones from a few years ago. Or Crypto AG from years before that.

This comes up a lot in online conversations. Often the poster just means "authoritarian," which is of course a tendency of many fascist and many "communist" systems.

Exactly. Orwell was an optimist. When he wrote 1984, he thought that the government would have to force people to submit to surveillance. Instead, people willingly paid money to buy these stupid glasses, and gave up their most intimate details to a private company.

"Now is a great time for the Edsel" said Henry Ford.

"Full speed ahead," said the captain of the Titanic.