Even if there is no alternative, and internet for some reason is an absolute must, I'm not above cutting a ribbon cable with an exacto knife. Dead screen on fridge is better than ads on fridge.
YES! I replaced my GE fridge because it broke with a new Samsung and I was amazed that the fridge was perfectly happy to work without a filter. The GE one had a goddamn RFID sticker on it, which made replacements $80-100 as opposed to the previous RFID-less ones (which were internally the same damn thing) which cost about $20. If you wanted to put in one of the $20 filters, you had to watch a YouTube explainer video of how to carefully remove the RFID from a "donor" filter, carefully install it on the new filter, and ignore the fridge warnings about how it needs to be replaced constantly.
With Samsung? Remove the filter, done. It has a built in bypass when no filter is present. We don't bother with filters, our water tastes fine from the tap and aside from ice, we use water from the kitchen tap 90% of the time anyway.
There's a cell IOT signal designed for single kb/s that is so cheap it's basically free. I know because my former company did some testing on these for IOT devices like temp sensors, water sensors, etc. Those devices were usually less than $20, and included a battery that lasted months.
Something like that can't serve visual ads, but it can send fingerprints of your activities so they can be served to other devices with higher speed connectivity.
> The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.
No, it's the position of being anti-enshitification.
A refrigerator's main function is to keep food cold. That's the reason you buy a refrigerator. If putting a screen on a TV actually had a demonstrable benefit to that purpose then fine; but it doesn't. It actually has no objective benefit whatsoever, and the increased complexity not only increases cost but also reduces reliability. That's literally the definition of enshitification.
If having a computer screen in your kitchen, mounted to your fridge, is that useful... get a tablet and mount it to the fridge. Not only would that be cheaper, but if the tablet fails it doesn't make the refrigerator scrap metal and vice-versa and you can upgrade one without throwing out the other. Bonus is you can take the table off the fridge and put it where you need it.
I have a leatherman multitool that I keep on me whenever I'm out of the house. It does a lot of things, but it does none of those things as good as a dedicated single-purpose tool of the same kind. It's a good knife but it will never be as good as an actual knife. It's a good pair of pliers but it will never be as good as a proper pair of pliers. It's a decent screwdriver but I will always reach for a normal proper screwdriver if there's one available. Does it make me a luddite to not want a single item that does all things kinda shitty instead of many items that each do their one thing well?
=Smidge=
I love our samsung fridge and microwave. They "just work", have no screens, and the features they had were perfect for us. We replaced old GE devices, that were about 5-6 years old and broke. Not saying you should change your opinion, just that individuals can have different experiences.
> Wouldn't I be better off having the package delivered to an Amazon Lockbox right next to or even inside of the post office, and then not pay any fuel surcharge?
You realize this is already a thing the post office does, right?
You can also have items shipped to, say, a UPS store or have it held at a FedEx shipping hub for pickup.
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Stand down soldier. It's not an attack on your precious Lord Musk, but simply a rhetorical technique to convey the cost in relatable terms, e.g. to emphasize that these missiles are within the means of affluent consumers. Reporters do this all the time, and yes, many such measurement analogies are arbitrary and silly.
> It may be a shitty project, but the people all had at least an indirect say in it.
No we didn't. Nobody votes for what NASA does, not even indirectly through their choice of congress critters. More often than not even Congress barely gives more than a passing thought to NASA's budget, and even then all that matters is how much of that budget will be spent in their jurisdiction and not what it will be spent on.
I do not approve of congressional (or presidential) meddling in NASA's projects, but not because of what the projects necessarily ARE - I care because you cannot hope to make progress on a project that'll take 10+ years when the project changes every 2-4 years.
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It's funny because if you go back in time about 40 years you could replace "Chinese" with "Japanese" and get the exact same sentiment. And we all know Japanese auto makers definitely didn't learn any lessons and definitely didn't eat US automaker's lunches, right?
> There are plenty of good used cars if price is the issue.
Fun fact: There can't be any used cars if nobody buys new cars.
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> It's money-neutral for everyone involved
Not only will the LNG plant absolutely cost more than $1B by the time it's all said and done.
Not only is LNG something that needs to be paid for in perpetuity, unlike wind, which means an ongoing expense that will be paid by utility customers.
Not only is the price of that LNG linked to global markets which are, for lots of reasons, more expensive and volatile now and will be for the foreseeable future.
But the LNG plant will be built in Texas, and does not generate electricity at all. Do you know what an LNG plant actually does? Generates Liquefied Natural Gas. Do you know why you'd do that? To put it on a boat and export it... not to burn it for electricity. Not that generating electricity in Texas - which has an isolated grid from the rest of the US - would be of any use to the people in the Northeast US and Canada who would have definitely benefited from cheaper electricity.
So not only are you wrong about it being cost neutral in both the short and near term, but it could ever be neutral 'for all involved' either. The people of the Northeastern US are fucked out of cheaper electricity, and the people of Texas don't get anything out of the deal.
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I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.
It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.
Yes, I'm aware there are forums full of people with no personal experience with X complaining to the people doing X every day that X simply can't be done. A forum full of truckers saying EV trucks can't meet their needs doesn't mean EV trucks can't meet their needs. It only means they have opinions about it strong enough they feel it necessary to post online about it.
Meanwhile, all-electric trucks doing 800km (500mi) trips across Europe has been a thing long enough that it's becoming mundane, and they only have rated ranges of ~300-400km (190-250mi) loaded. Again, I'm not going to say a 500-mile range is never needed, but I'm absolutely saying the necessity of that range is way overstated. The tech is very clearly good enough for the vast majority of real world use cases and has been for some time, evidenced by the fact that it's successfully used in real world use cases and has been for some time. Those guys can post on their forums about how it can't be done until their fingers fall off, but it won't make their opinions into truths.
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> Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?
I'm gonna guess that you're one of those idiots who think Amazon sales are a great deal, rather than the 'sale' price being the normal price and the non-sale price being inflated by 20% (because fuck you what are you gonna do about it, leave the house?)
The flip side you're not seeing is if they peg you as someone who ALWAYS buys Maxwell House coffee even when other brands are cheaper or on sale, they will charge YOU SPECIFICALLY more for that product because they know you're likely to pay it. Amazon already does that shit (try looking at the exact same item in a different browser or device while not logged in...) and with the use of digital price stickers on shelves it's likely gonna start happening everywhere.
And in case you're wondering how; the security cameras are already face-IDing and tracking you from the moment you walk through the store. All they'd have to do is set that coffee's price to $20 and give you a 'discount' as you approach, which of course won't be as much a 'discount' as someone they aren't sure has a strong preference for that brand.
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Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.
You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.
Depending on where the regolith is sourced
Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".
But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.
I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*
"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."
For God's sake, learn to fucking read.
Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith
Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.
As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.
And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.
You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.
RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.
Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.
** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.
The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.
Viola! *eyeroll*
And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.
There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
