30 years ago was 1926?

My solar panels were made in Singapore. Besides China the top producers are Vietnam, Malaysia, and India. They are also made in a host of other countries including Canada. China makes over 80% of the world's supply, though.

A lot of people are using raspis as workstations, with any heavy lifting being done elsewhere. They are perfectly adequate for most normal daily tasks, silent, and use very little power. There's a lot to like about them, they're just overpriced for what little you're getting. If you didn't have to pay extra for basic features like an M.2 slot maybe they would be worth it. After you pay for a case, power supply (and they are picky as fuck about that) and so on, you're not saving any money compared to buying a MiniPC with better support and a richer set of available software. Raspi only has good vendor support compared to other poorly supported SBCs, all the heavy lifting is done by the community which often has to work around the pi foundation's failures.

In California, it's illegal to do this. We call it a speed trap, even though that already means something — cop hiding in some shitty spot where the speed limit suddenly and unexpectedly drops or whatever. I got busted with one of these in Jackson City, TX, a trivial little carbuncle on the asshole of a slightly shortcut route to Austin if you're heading East on the I-10, with a stop sign completely enveloped in a fucking tree that probably produces 50% of that shithole's revenue.

*ahem*

Anyhoo this CO scheme wouldn't be legal here in CA. And we'd also make a city cut a tree back if they wanted to keep writing speeding tickets based on a sign inside of the fucker.

To be fair, this is why we founded the nation of Israel in the British partition of Palestine.

Amazon provides services to the military.

That is a question which fundamentally has not been answered yet. The legislators and courts will collectively have the final say.

Er, I didn't write that right. Edit fail. This part:

Too much work. The point is that the devices are very expensive compared to much simpler devices.

The point is that the devices are very expensive compared to more complex devices. A phone has a LOT more hardware. It comes with a LOT more support. It comes with a LOT more software. It's shipped in a nice box with accessories, at least a sim tool if it's got a slot. Raspi has none of that. It's made with excess SoCs, whatever they can get cheap. Every single part of it is cheapass. And you can get a phone with as much RAM, much more CPU, and both cellular and wifi for around twice as much as the top end Pi. It's got a screen, it's got a bunch of storage, it's got a battery, and lots of such phones are not sold in huge volumes. So why is this grossly simpler device so expensive? Answer, people will pay for it.

The cost of development of a raspi is not much different from say an Arduino Mega. It's got a more expensive SoC which does a lot more, but that's still not a very expensive part. It makes the PCB more expensive, but not dramatically so. The community does most of the hard work of supporting it.

BOM: way less parts than a cellphone. Cost of assembly and production: way less than a cellphone. Cost of running the business, including engineers: Way less than a cellphone. What am I comparing? A much much much simpler and cheaper device to engineer and build since it's just a bare board with some cheap parts including some SoCs that BCM had too many of lying around, which is how they pick 'em.

Too much work. The point is that the devices are very expensive compared to much simpler devices.

A side point is that they also often suck. They keep making dumb errors in power supply or USB which compromise devices. Then they just publish errata and tell you how to work around their fuckups. How about doing some testing before shipping?

It's historic because it's the best and most sensible thing that's been allowed to happen under this administration. Sunsetting the penny gets an honorable mention, but that's trivial compared to this. Both things have been in the works for ages.

You won't see wars fought over solar panels or wind turbines because "anyone" (industrialized) can make them and it's not cost-effective to take them. Once the solar panels are installed somewhere, it's cheaper to make more than to go there, fight the people who have them, uninstall them, pack them up, ship them home, and then reinstall them. This goes many times over for the wind turbines.

You don't see wars fought over coal plants or natural gas power plants or nuclear plants either, at most they are objectives but more commonly they're just targets in wars. And it's for the same reason, it's not worth it to try to ship them home.

Yep, even if you couldn't get lithium batteries, at least you could still make inferior lead-acid ones. You might need a battery room to accommodate the homebuilt kind, but they'd still be feasible.

Sadly, it's going to take a lot more than that, but it certainly would be a big help.

Tonight, you drink from the bottle.

Also, for 99% of what you would like to do with GPIO, you can hang a $3 Arduino Nano off of a USB port.

You're not saying anything that I or someone else hasn't already said in this discussion and therefore I'm well on top of it, except that it's off by default, that part I didn't know. Perhaps I turned it on, I don't recall. And your claim that it doesn't work if you're not "aligned" with Steam, whatever that's supposed to mean. It's always worked for me.