I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.

I didn't say PC hardware isn't good enough, I said there's no point buying compromise hardware that's not what you really wanted, because in the long run it's all pretty damn affordable. If an Intel or AMD box is what you prefer, by all means buy one and enjoy!

One thing I want out of my hardware is the ability to run my OS of choice without a lot of hassle, and since my OS of choice is MacOS, that kind of narrows down the field for me.

I imagine it's pretty mediocre, but I don't know and I don't particularly care, because I don't spend much time playing video games anymore. If I was a gamer I'd likely buy a different machine for that.

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

My voltage doesn't vary much at all no matter how much power I'm pushing. And, unfortunately, I couldn't set my inverters to derate if I wanted. I'm fighting with the installer over access to configure/manager my inverters. They offer quite a good repair/service warranty and also a production guarantee, and won't give me control without voiding both of those so I'm debating which I care about most.

(I somehow replied to myself instead of you. What am I, some sort of /. n00b?)

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.

I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

Are computer purchases not consensual? Nobody is forcing you to buy overpriced RAM if you don't want to, so the rape analogy doesn't work.

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.

Trying to save money by buying cheap computer hardware is like trying to save money by buying single-ply toilet paper -- you can do it, sure, but why make your life noticeably worse when the amount of money you'll save is trivial?

They sued both over the same issue.

Apple won, Google lost, in spite of the fact that Google had the more open ecosystem and the better case.

Indeed. We should also, however, recognize that emissions reductions can never get us to net-negative CO2 and that is where we need to get. We should be investing heavily in research into carbon capture and sequestration, because it is the ultimate long-term solution to greenhouse gas emissions, the thing that will allow us to actually reverse global warming.

In the meantime, as you say, we should start by looking at the CO2 emissions sources that allow us to most quickly and cheaply reduce our emissions. The easiest area is electricity production... made even easier by the fact that wind and solar are the cheapest technologies we have for producing electricity, in many cases even when the cost of battery storage is included. And of course as we convert electricity production to non-emitting sources, we should electrify as much as we can the other areas where we burn fossil fuels.

But we also need to be investing in carbon recapture, because some things are going to be hard to convert and, as I pointed out, only recapture can get us to net-negative. We should also be researching geoengineering techniques, such as methods of reducing insolation. Geoengineering isn't a solution (e.g. reducing insolation does nothing to fix ocean acidification), but it may be a necessary short-term measure, and we should be prepared, having already done what we can to understand it in case we need it, and before we need it.

Carbon reduction is good, but it's insufficient and I worry that we're not putting enough into other approaches. A large part of the reason is that people are afraid that attention on anything other than carbon reduction will harm the emissions reduction efforts. That's not a ridiculous concern, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scale and scope of the problem.

I'm going to make a radical suggestion: how about we leave it all in the ground, and continue to enjoy living in a viable biosphere instead?

That would be ideal, but I don't think it's really necessary. Just keeping the list a subject of public debate is sufficient to prevent things from getting too skewed.

There is zero evidence of this, and the fact that you seem to believe it makes me dismiss everything else you might say out of hand, because you clearly either lack or don't engage critical thinking skills.

I don't think that would matter in practice. This law wouldn't let them specify what *news* is allowed, only what news sources, and there would be a huge stink if they tried to block the major real news outlets. They'd like to, I'm sure, but I really doubt that they'd succeed.