Every address has lists of people associated with it, whether they currently live there or have ever lived there or are related to people who have or do live there.

It is used all the time in business like banking, insurance, background checks. My former auto insurance company got very concerned after I moved from a house into an apartment building. They could see in their data that a lot of people with driving issues also had the same address, past or present. None of them had anything to do with me, of course. But it was all one big block of people at the same address, including former residents of my particular unit, and that's all they needed to see to panic. The whole place was a red flag to them.

I had to send them a copy of my lease with just my name on it and a notarized statement assuring that none of these other people had access to my vehicle. The fact that it was an apartment building you can see on Google street view did not matter at all. Even after my statement, they still didn't want to keep my policy in force.

Whatever data they were looking at was clearly easy to fill in with info and details but sticky and reluctant to ever drop old data in favor of current info.

This is all the fault of selfish young adults. The more women are educated and able to work and pay for their own lifestyles, the less they want to become moms, which is a very specific and limited role. Why do that when they can live how they like, travel, buy luxury goods if they want and generally live comfortably.

Japanese men, on the other hand, don't particularly want to deal with women who don't exactly need men and don't want to get married any more than the women. Like single women, single working men are free to indulge their hobbies and games or whatever else they want to do. The have jobs sufficient to fund it.

For both sides, getting married and having kids represents a loss of income, but even worse, they lose tremendous amounts of freedom as they are forced into extremely narrow roles for mothers and fathers. Moms will be expected to do all the childcare and keep house and home, while the dads are expected to work ridiculous hours and turn over almost all their income to the wife. She becomes a housewife mom robot. He becomes a work robot. And that's IT.

These are smart people. They see how they were raised. They see what will be expected of them and want nothing to do with it. They are the generation that can say NO.

The government talks big about meaningless changes that do nothing at all to address why young adults are not having kids. They don't want to make the real changes it would take to fix the problem. At this point, the only way to save the population would be to outlaw not having kids.

Yet another dumb decision from Xerox. One sinking ship towing another one.

My employer had been a pure Xerox shop for decades. A legendary loyal customer. That changed when Xerox stuck us with a couple junk color inkjet machines that are absolute trash. We are lucky to get one day a month of run out of them.

Meanwhile, we risked buying a competing machine which turned out to be an incredible workhorse. It never breaks. It runs circles around Xerox. Our workers love it. Management actually listened to the workers and bought more of them and now we are laughing at Xerox as their service techs continue to retire and leave anyway.

There's almost nobody left to fix their machines. Dozens of techs in our city alone have left. They have like one guy left and he's ready to leave.

There is absolutely no way in hell anyone in our area would invest in more Xerox printers at this point.

Amazon does contact the doctor office. Not sure if they call or just send an electronic request. But they always ask my doctor, somehow, and always get denied because I have to go see the doc in person to get new refills. My doctor never ever ever issues refills without collecting her office visit copay.

But at least Amazon does try to ask on my behalf. YMMV

All of my Amazon Pharmacy orders have been delivered by UPS, not Amazon's own drivers. That says a LOT to me about who Amazon trusts more.

I don't think UPS has ever messed up any delivery to my home. Amazon has. Fedex and USPS have. But not brown.

Have used Amazon pharmacy for over a year because it ends up being cheaper than any other option, and that matters when I take 8 different medications every day.

My job provides medical insurance but the prescription co-pays are three or four times what it costs just using Amazon pharmacy and paying out of pocket. It is even cheaper than GoodRx.

But the main downside is that they appeared to have just one pharmacy hub in Miami. The deliveries are by UPS, not Amazon drivers. Make of that what you will. They have not messed up or lost any of my orders.

Gosh this sounds too much like a Bezos fanmail. Yuck. I need my pills.

This problem is impossible to solve. Educated women tend to have fewer children. Education enables opportunities doing things besides being a parent, like working full time.

Many Japanese women who work earn enough to sustain themselves and provide for some luxury goods or travel, without needing a partner. They are happy as they are.

Asking them to be a parent means sacrificing all of that in favor of being a mom who stays at home, because daycare and similar childcare is in extremely short supply and there is almost no government support for working moms. Thus an educated and employed woman accustomed to managing her own life is basically asked to surrender everything and take on the wife and mom role and jumper costume that goes with it. It's no wonder few want to do that.

What is in it for her except some sort of duty to country? It's absolutely not enticing. The government offers pathetic incentives to have kids and does nothing to support women who do choose that path.

On the men's side, many of them aren't even particularly interested in starting a family.

The only way this is ever going to be "solved" is to take unprecedented drastic measures like forbidding women from working jobs above menial level, to force them to marry to survive and hope that produces enough children. This is not going to happen. Nobody would stand for it.

There just soon won't be enough people to stand for or against it either way. Japan has very little time left to fix it and a terrible really bad track record of poor attempts to do anything -IF they even take it seriously at all.

The ones with actual users ...

These are the sort of self-generating monopolies I've seen in the past 25 years of the internet.

Effectively, everyone goes there because everyone goes there.

A bit more than herd mentality, but makes any startup something which requires large amounts of energy to succeed and then keep going. Never stop.

Twitter has self-inflicted wounds, thanks Elon, but continues to limp along. I find myself less likely to visit because -- not everyone is there any more.

Not all Venture Capital are angels, some come in and kill the fledgling company and take it's IP, others wring it dry over months or years while skimming money off the top. Never occurs to some investors a company could be the next Alphabet or Meta.

It'd be one thing if ChatGPT was trained on the law, given all jurisprudence to digest (with the ability to restrict everything to a particular country) and able to be directed to lend significant weight to that over any and all other Intarwebbynetz content. It's quite another to include so much of the garbage out there.

Side note: four days ago, someone posted over at that alien site that he'd asked ChatGPT to write a message in the style of a bookFace MLM hun trying to recruit, with emoji. The result was indistinguishable from the real ones. The story grew legs long enough that two days ago the response was a serious message about the dangers of the corrupt business which is MLM.

I want to know which services they were using &/or applications. Either they service (or app) they used has shit "encryption" or there's now more than the last number sieve used by RSA/PGP. Thing is, I'm really glad that criminals are stupid/ignorant. I'm a huge privacy (and Free Speech) advocate, but with some incidents over the past 25 years or and only made possible by breaking encrypted communications (like this kiddie-abusing senior Met officer or [pdf] these shitbag, would-be bombers, and which aren't just dog & pony shows designed to take away more of our rights.

These and others weren't just suspects harassed by police but have been proven cases further investigated and found guilty based on overwhelming evidence, I find myself no longer the complete absolutist I used to be. Which is why I don't know if I want to know what they used for "encryption". Not so much as /.'s ever-beloved security through obscurity so much as the fact smart people will figure it out (and already have) but most criminals are dumb and I don't want to help them.

Actually, it's not impossible at all. The UK grid needs about 3 times the amount of wind and much more solar and 2 terawatts of underground hydrogen storage.

There's enough salt caverns around the UK that can give it that storage, and the hydrogen can be manufactured via electrolysis when the wind and solar is producing too much. It's not very efficient, but renewables are cheap.

It CAN be done.

The Australian grid is rather different, it's a LOT closer to the equator and their renewables are a lot more consistent, so they need a lot less storage in percentage terms.

Not really, but the grid operator is basically the government for the grid, and they're highly incentivized to not fuck up. They're the ones that sent out the request for quotes.

FYI as of 2021 the UK had 1.3 GW(h) of battery storage on the grid:

https://www.solarpowerportal.c...

I'm not sure what the total storage is now, it's going to be over 1.5 GW(h) with this installation, and probably a lot more. Note that large batteries aren't needed, it's the total battery storage that's important.

The UK grid operator was particularly keen on getting batteries on it, because the HVDC interconnectors to the continent have been unreliable, and they tend to suddenly break with no warning. That has meant that the grid needs to have a couple of gigawatt of spinning reserve instead, particularly spinning overnight, but with enough batteries they can shut most of that down into hot standby.

The last outage the grid had, due to a lightning strike, they didn't quite have enough battery, and that meant they had to do load shedding and that caused chaos. They should have enough battery now to keep it up long enough if there's a repeat to get backup power running and avoid any load shedding.

The other thing these batteries can do is help smooth out the production curve. If we had enough batteries to smooth out the evening power demand, the CCGT gas turbines would be much more efficient. When they first start up they use about twice as much fuel per kWh until the second cycle kicks in. If they start up less, costs should go down. But we'd need a lot more batteries to make that work.