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Comment Re:All copper is "oxygen-free" (Score 1) 68

The only thing stopping you from calling the water pipes in your house "copper-phosphorus pipes" is laziness and poor attention to detail.

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Comment Re:Water is what scares me (Score 1) 48

After decades of decreasing water supplies coupled with irresponsible explosive growth in the Great Basin, Front Range, and SW in particular.its just asking for trouble.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

Comment Re: Well... (Score 1) 69

Mr Putin, is that you?

Every fact checker out there declares this one false and bogus. While corruption happens under all parties, this story is false. Repeating it as fact is dishonest. Please stop.

The current crass state of political discourse seems to use this sort of lie to justify one's own political team's increasingly lewd, illegal, and unconstitutional behavior. If you think we're bad, you should see those awful, evil, Democrats! Or, if you think we're bad thank your lucky stars the Republicans aren't in.

It stinks.

Comment Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score 1) 80

And of course that Mac Pro idea was killed by the cosmic trashcan thing. In a sense what one wants is a kind of 'docking tower' into which a Mac Studio fits, giving a lot of expansion. If you want a machine with 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs, you have to put up with crazy sprawl with modern macs. With an old school tower with it all contained inside, you had a single box you could pick up, carry around, and just plug in.

Comment Re:Good. Now copyright terms (Score 1) 90

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

Comment Re:Blessing in disguise? (Score 1) 77

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

Comment Re:Slowly boiling the frog? (Score 1) 74

And wonder how long reddit will last when people start moving away cos of this.

People won't move away because bots get screened. They'll start moving away if the screening process shows too many false positives.

Their bigger risk is financial. If they're honest about getting rid of bots, traffic and subreddit participation will slow thereby resulting in reduced ad revenue and potential and valuation. If they're OK with that, then they'll do well. If, however, their shareholders press them to "increase ad revenue at all costs" then they'll loosen up bot restrictions, claim that the tech is advancing too much, and simply claim that all user accounts are humans for the sake of revenue generation.

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