Good for you. But you're still missing the benefits tied to where that property is located. Most property taxes are used to pay for services provided by the municipality you're in. In most places your property taxes are used for public schools, fire protection, and city/county services.

The property tax system was based somewhat on the Land Ordinance of 1785, and updated by the Homestead Act of 1862, where section 16 of each township was set aside for the maintenance of schools. Landowners were always expected to support the services provided in their area.
Land Ordinance of 1785

In many places in Europe, the property tax was based on the width of the sidewalk at the front of the building, which is why so many buildings in Europe and skinny, deep, and tall. Minimal front profile. Requiring many people to pay a small amount to benefit the majority has been a function of communities for centuries.

The reason I thought of flywheels was because I was thinking of something that could take over the more than 5,000 megawatts of load, then slowly decrease it. Batteries would normally be fully charged and unable to absorb the gigawatt load of the servers shutting down. Chemical batteries, pumped hydro, or thermal batteries might help during the re-startup but be unable to absorb the massive load of shutting down all the servers quickly.

Perhaps exceptionally large power users that can quickly drop their demand should be required to have a flywheel energy storage unit on-site to smooth their cut off and start up demand.

When they see the need to shut off their servers, they transition their power requirements to spinning up a flywheel storage system, then gradually reduce their power requirements. When they are ready to start up their servers again, they can tap into the flywheel's energy and slowly transition back to grid power.

Using a flywheel storage as a huge capacitor to smooth out the draw on the grid. Spreading the sharp decrease and increase over a 5 minute interval should help stabilize the grid.

She was 89 years old, confined to a wheelchair, living in an assisted living home, but in fine mental condition.

Just six months before her death, she attended a tribute for her work where she signed autographs, posed for photos and attended an early birthday celebration, where she briefly but joyfully kicked up her heels and danced. https://people.com/tv/nichelle...

Assuming because she was old and needed assistance she is fit to let die is just SO wrong.

A five-fold increase in course failures, mostly attributed to cheating, would not be lessened by requiring a minimum ACT or SAT score before entering the program.

Filing a lawsuit that says "The school didn't check if I was smart enough to pass the two-digit entry-level classes so I felt justified in cheating" probably won't get far.

A lax regulatory environment and a technology that is outclassed by wind and solar in virtually every single metric except space usage in a country with nothing but space?

The output of a SMR is heat. That heat can be used to power a steam turbine or it could be used to generate heat directly where heat is needed like industrial or chemical plants. Imagine a SMR that could produce electricity, heat, and desalination in high latitude locations like Alaska. Or a small version could be used at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic during their 24-hour nights. If they could be built into the same form as a 40-foot shipping container, ten of these could be prepositioned around the country to generate power after natural disasters.

I agree there is a market for a mid-power tractor like this. As long as it has hydraulics for the front-end attachments, a decent 3 point control for the back, and a reliable PTO shaft for powered devices, I think many small farms would welcome something like this.

The closest a typical homeowner would get to these would be a riding lawn mower. If the brake pedal breaks, do you want to call Troy-bilt, wait a week for a custom brake assembly, then wait for the technician to come calibrate the brake pressure and unlock the software so you can finish mowing your lawn? This is similar to what John Deere is expecting farmers to do with their tractors.

In California they ARE required to offer and provide copper service for new customers. AT&T wants to stop offering POTS to new customers, then quietly discontinue POTS for existing customers.

From Page 12 of their filing:
Grandfathering does not affect existing POTS customers, all of whom
will continue to receive their existing services for now.[2] Grandfathering simply
allows AT&T to restrict POTS to its existing customers. New customers can then
select from the available service offerings throughout AT&T’s territory.
---
[2] AT&T has initiated separate proceedings with the FCC to seek permission to
discontinue POTS service following at least a one-year notice period.

AT&T soon wants to discontinue POTS service to existing customers without offering them a viable alternative. They suggest VOIP is a suitable alternative without acknowledging that removing the copper wires will leave some customers with no access to VOIP without satellite service. They want to remove an unprofitable service without providing a replacement.

Thunderbird gives you a few options to manage your email storage. Assume an email with both HUGE inline photos and a 20MB attachment.

For the attachments:
1. If you need the email metadata (date, time, sender) of the email, but not the actual attachment, you can right-click on only the attachment and delete it.
2. If you need the email metadata but want to keep your email cache smaller, you can detach the attachment and store it outside Thunderbird. This lets you edit, modify, trim, or store it in a compressed folder. Thunderbird remembers where you stored the attachment and keeps a link to it instead.

Advanced manipulation for inline items:
For those items encoded into the email message as b64 blobs, you can save the email to your desktop as an .eml file, open it in a text editor, and modify the SMIME entries. In some I have selectively deleted overly large photos. In others I have downloaded the photo and downsampled it, created a temporary email to store the smaller photo as a draft, then copied the smaller b64 block into the original email source. Yeah, it is a pain but I edited a 25MB email down to 2MB. I then drag the email back to Thunderbird's inbox so all the metadata is preserved but with smaller photos instead. I can delete the 25MB version and keep the smaller version instead.

I have emails dating back to 1998 stored in different folders. I copy my profile each time I move to a new PC and periodically review the email folders to delete emails that aren't worth saving. Thunderbird gives me the ability to manage my email archive better than relying on cloud-only storage.

It doesn't seem to be a huge problem. Mark the used water as "Non-potable, irrigation use only" and sell it at a discount to farmers for irrigation use. By the time the water gets to the fields it will be cool enough for irrigation use.

New data center construction should be required to source at least 50% of the power requirements from new renewables. If they are building huge centers that require more energy than many small towns and huge amounts of cooling water, they can at least help mitigate their impact in the local area.

Huge data centers might put solar panels on their roofs and sunward walls, build closed-loop cooling systems, or hold cooling water long enough that it can be reused as agricultural irrigation water. If the data center has to build a new wind farm 20 miles from the data center to feed into the grid they are connected to, then this helps offset the impact they are creating.

New data center construction permits should be balanced with growth and impact with the local area.

What an ugly robot model with those huge yellow sacs on the front. Unfortunately, that is very close to what these strange birds actually look like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There is a population of sage grouse near the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory that is slowly declining due to wild fires and natural changes to their habitat. Similar but not identical to what is happening near Grand Teton.
https://species.idaho.gov/wp-c...

And it's not that hard to determine that. In these days of pulling credit reports and asking for social media passwords, not much remains hidden.

If your social media accounts are filled with keg drinking headstands, funny drunken photos, and stupid decisions made on pub crawls, you need to sweep your accounts before job hunting. Or create a bland generic account and let it sleep until you start your next job hunt. Companies look for creation dates, not consistent activity.

There were several finalists for the post-quantum cryptographic submissions and one (SIKE) was found to have a mathematical flaw and was dropped from further consideration. One flawed approach does not make all of the others "laughably weak against conventional attacks and laughably unverified."

NIST would not be actively testing and then publishing finalized standards if the new algorithms could be broken by a laptop over a single weekend.

https://www.nist.gov/news-even...

Luckily in 2024 we found another HUGE supply of Helium in Minnesota.