Kudos Ledow! Nice! Just one piece of advice though - if you are thinking seriously about disconnecting from the Grid, please look into all the ramifications thoroughly. In many municipalities being Grid-tied is a requirement for a building to be considered "livable" - you don't want your home condemned on a technicality. And that's just one factor - there are others I'm sure I don't even know about.

I plan to do what you've done - probably more in a one-shot than grown over years - and I'll always keep a Grid tie regardless of how well energy independence works out - never hurts to have a Plan B (or C and D for that matter).

Indeed - I bought United Health on their big dip - it's up more than 35% since then

So, let me see if I understand correctly:

Your leadership gave you access to a new tool, without any training on how to use it.

A budget to only spend $45 worth of "work" from it. Each. Per month.

Assuming you make about 90K in yearly salary that works out to roughly 1 hour of your time. So if you can use the tool, only spend $45 in tokens, and get MORE than one hours worth of saving from it (magically, without any training in it mind you), you are WAY ahead.

"And we blew through that in 2 days" - what did your management expect? I mean actually, what were their expectations? That they could spend $45 a month and double your output? Wouldn't that be a treat!

Yet another key part of this arrangement is scale - GE has 450 workers in this "pool", so, on average, there is plenty of coverage for all the work GE needs doing.

Smaller employers cannot make use of this - with a smaller pool of say 50 workers, there will be many times when the workers availability (and unavailability) will leave gaps in the work schedule.

Also, the employer must, to some degree, be able to "batch" the work, and not have hard deadlines, so that having more labor at some times and less at others can still be useful. Probably would not be possible on a car/aircraft/etc. assembly line.

At Case Western University, USA.

I "speak" 11 programming languages. So that means I have the brain of a 12 year old!

Wait, that didn't come out right....

I'm old enough to remember that back in college, engineering majors were still gently being push to try to learn German (being dubbed the "lingua Franca" of engineering at the time).

And almost old enough to remember riding dinosaurs. Good times!

If that is the case, then it all makes a whole lot more sense. There is no need for cost-efficiency when dealing with military equipment - the only question to answer is does it do what is needed for the GD system? And if what is needed is processing tracking data and generating firing solutions locally, without multiple trips back and forth to orbit, then making it work is the key, not cost or complexity (to some degree, even the DoD has limited funds).

About what I expect: Bottom line is, if the battery company warrantees them for 10 years, and is planning to BE around in 10 years (i.e. buy from an "established big name player") then I fully expect them to last a good bit longer than 10 years.

Destruction of AA systems is only half the story. Needing AA systems to take out drones is the other. I've seen numerous pictures smuggled out of the conflict that show mobile AA systems with but one or two missiles loaded on the rails - there are extreme shortages of AA missiles on both sides now, so that remaining munitions are being hoarded for defending the highest value targets.

This is the other factor allowing medium and long range drones pretty much free reign throughout the region.

You could consider it a bug - when have you ever NOT auto-scrolled down to the end of syslog in order to figure out what just went wrong? If they wrote in reverse chrono order, you could just open the file and BAM! you'd see the relevant bits right in front of you.

Backpacking? Sure, 20%. Military? More like 33%, and up to 40% being a "normal" load on a soldier. So 39 Kg is not too bad, as long as they are not carrying much (and ideally nothing) more.

"You know, data centers want to run even when it is dark."

Do they though? If we're talking about an AI data center. supplying Agents and Chat, for business use primarily, aren't the heaviest usage hours going to be during the day?

Solar power may be just the thing to supply the lions share of power when it is needed -- during daylight hours. Of course there will be some level of usage 24/7, but solar may be a better fit to provide the bulk of AI data center power than people realize.

There is no problem with cattle in Texas. Someone got all bent because the size of the herds in Texas is the lowest it's been in many years. Size as in number of cows. The size OF the cows, however, has been going up, every year, for many years. Same amount of beef being delivered: fewer cows but bigger cows.

So no actual problem.

Oh, I miss access to pseudoephedrine - that used to be my "nuclear option" for tackling my occasional acute but pretty severe allergy attacks. Take that, crash (couldn't do much else - it really knocked me out) and wake up the next morning more or less functional again.

Now it's 2-3 days of total misery, stretched out to a week of not being able to sleep well. None of the current stable of antihistamines does a damn thing for me.