This is essentially how marriage worked for most of human history. Not just arranged marriages, but parents were supposed to find potentially good matches for their kids who they could marry. The idea of random "dating" is a recent invention and it's clearly been a disaster.

Talking about "victim blaming" is so 2020.

Yes, there are real victims we should have sympathy for. But most of the time when people talk about "victim blaming" they're just trying to avoid taking responsibility for the obvious consequences of their own actions.

I don't live in the US but I recently moved to a rural area and in doing so I have started to plan out a utility-independent future.

Why? Well, various reasons, including water and sewage companies taking the piss (or actually... not... just dumping the piss in every river in the country and crying that they can't process it because they gave all my money to their shareholders, but... anyway) but also because electricity is literally a con too.

And nowadays? I *can* viably make my own electricity. So... why wouldn't I? Why would I pay a company to do a bad job when I can do it myself?

I did a number of things when I moved to that area, including demanding smart meters on everything, and I monitored my electricity down to 30 minute intervals for 2 years. And you know what it showed? That 1% of the time, I have no power. That's in dribs and drabs, a power cut here or there, a scheduled one lasting a day or there, and so on. But 1% of the time they can't even get electricity to me and... there's nothing I can do about that.

So, if I want a computer to stay on... I already need to spend money and do it myself because they simply can't do it. 1% may not sound a lot, but that's 3.65 days a year if you think about it. Spread out randomly - an hour here, an hour there. Literally my computer "uptime" was "two nines" and that was driven entirely by grid power supply.

That's ATROCIOUS in my opinion, in the 21st century. And I wasn't prepared to tolerate it. I was already buying the house with the intention of becoming utility-independent but that really drove home why I need to. So I started to build my own solar, for several reasons.

1) To ride out the outages
2) To reduce my bills so they got as little money from me as possible
3) To not be reliant on the grid
4) To ultimately remove the need for grid entirely

And it's really not been hard. I started with cheap junk just to see if it would even work in my climate, with that house orientation, etc. It did. I started with a small 12v panel and an old car battery. And it was actually worth doing when I ran the numbers. It would take a few years to pay off the cost of the panel, but it would do so.

And then every month for 2 years, I would get more panels, more and better batteries, more efficient and powerful equipment in between. And it got to the point where it is technically capable of running my whole house for much of the year. And that's before I ever got onto SERIOUS panels and professional installs. That's just me, a bunch of cheap 12V panels, some 12V LiFePO4 batteries and a serious enough charger/inverter, then later going onto 24V by re-arranging them.

And I'm looking at that and thinking: Why the fuck hasn't government / the utilities done this for me? Why am *I* having to do it? Because it really is that simple and they have access to far more land, far better kit. But, no, I'm still paying inflated grid prices from when Ukraine was first invaded because of the price of GAS. What the fuck are we doing?

So now, more than ever, I plan to be utility-independent by retirement, which is 20 years away, and whereas before I was wondering if that was even viable in that timeframe, I'm now expecting that to be 100% done way ahead of schedule, just by a factor of "whenever I can be bothered". It was that easy, and doing the maths was that easy.

I might retain a grid connection, or not. It depends on what happens and what kind of low-usage tarrifs I can get in the future but I'm looking at the whole thing thinking "Fuck you, I'll do it myself" because even as an amateur... it's perfectly viable to do so. I don't care if it even costs me more (it won't). I don't care about having a grid connection or not. It's just that I will be able to be *independent* of it. When they play games, raise prices, or have power cuts, I won't be reliant on it at all. I'll use it when it's to my benefit, and not other times.

But all I ever think about the whole thing is: How have I, an amateur, cobbling cheap Chinese shit together, come up with a more reliable and cheaper power supply, that's utterly independent of fuel prices, than an entire national electricity grid could do?

The answer, of course, is corruption and profiteering. That's the only part that I've eliminated. And that's the part that, when it's gone, makes it all viable and even cheaper.

And that's the thing that's going to see me having zero electricity bills when I retire. Just by removing the profit and corruption.

Wasnt there a SCOTUS ruling recently that ruled that agencies cannot enact their own rules, but can only enforce rules as laid out in law? And if Congress wanted the agency to enforce a rule, it should pass a law to that effect?

We all know that that was targeted at agencies like the EPA, FDA etc, to get rid of the agency-created limits on things, but it feels like it should equally apply here - the law says X, the agency cant change the law.

I'll say it again:

Active military personnel carrying around standard mobile phones is such a breach of all kinds of basic security protocols that it should be illegal.

But can't let the troops get bored, eh? Have to let them do their fitbit on board your cruiser that you're trying to keep secret, and have them checking into Facebook while they're in Helmand province, and giving away their movements when they're running around your bases at home, and having an always-on device capable of tracking and recording everything from audio to the radiowaves to location, made by the Chinese, wherever they go.

Dumbest fucking idea ever.

"OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market"

It says as it releases an Alexa....

... if I didn't have to search for apps because the Start Menu wasn't a piece of junk that does everything possible to hide the apps I want to use.

It's just a midwit being a midwit. Midwits believe that being "well educated" makes them smart and therefore they should tell everyone else what to do.

This is why every "well-educated and civilized" society ends up collapsing back to third-world conditions like the West is today.

Smart people lose interest in social media when they realise they're just arguing with the TV because most people are NPCs who can't do anything but repeat The Current Narrative.

It's become even worse now half the posts are AI-generated and half the rest are paid political grifters. If I want actual discussion I got to private web forums where smart people hang out.

> And these health care jobs, that's good for the next 20 years, but what then?

All that "free healthcare" that Boomers voted themselves is soon going to swallow up the majority of the economy. It's simply unaffordable and those jobs will be automated away or they'll never be hired.

It's impossible to make sensible long-term plans when governments can create or destroy industries overnight.

The good news is that degrees are mostly just a way for colleges to make money and aren't needed for the vast majority of jobs. They're just a tick-box for HR, which is another job that's about to be automated away.

BUT MUH OVERPOPULATION CRISIS!

There's no need for immigrants. Business and government contain huge numbers of useless or actively counter-productive make-work jobs which could be eliminated overnight, leaving millions and millions of people to do the jobs that need to be done and aren't being done.

Donations are pretty much irrelevant at this point.

US "healthcare" is something like 20% of GDP. It could be slashed to maybe 4-5% just by enforcing existing laws, but then you'd see an economic depression as 15% of GDP disappeared overnight and the politicians who did it would never get re-elected.

The cancer has simply grown too big to solve in a democracy and will continue expanding until the economy collapses because no-one is willing to lose the votes that fixing it would cost them.

Seems like a problem you could fix overnight with guaranteed national minimum wage, worker's employment rights, and opening up immigration to regain the trust of those people you shot, killed, kidnapped and ripped their children away from.

Who the fuck would CHOOSE to go work in the US at the moment?

That's a feature, not a bug. They want to end general-purpose home computing and rent computer time to us instead (if our social credit score is high enough)

Starting to think I should buy another DGX Spark while they're still cheaper than a new car.

If you talk to people who know what they're talking about, it turns out the cost is very similar. As for light delay, it's a few milliseconds; if users can connect directly to the satellites it may be faster than communicating with a data centre on the other side of the US.