This is competition regulator stuff. The EU has lots of competing departments with different expectations. Privacy isn't regulated by competition regulators. But like most places, competition regulators kind of have sharp teeth.

israel-first zionist out of office.

If you have to invent things to be angry about, I'd suggest you'd get more value out of a therapist than a discussion forum, because thats a terrible way to live.

Sanders has been stridently opposed to the IDF and has called for international action to end the genocide in gaza.

Unless, you just mean "he's a jew". If so, again, therapy, not discussion forums would be my advice.

Anyone who says we need to do X to solve climate change is wrong, because there is no one "X" that does it.

We need renewables, nuclear, electrification, synthetic fuels, forestation, mangroves, direct air capture, BECCS, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, cloud enhancement to increase albedo, possibly orbital solar shading, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more that I don't know about including things maybe no one has yet thought of.

We created this problem through a wide variety of mechanisms, burning many different kinds of fossil fuels in many different contexts, and we're going to need an even wider variety to fix it.

And even if they happened faster, it still wouldn't be enough. The focus on emissions reduction to the exclusion of everything else is going to kill a lot of people.

The only way we're going to fix this is to get to net negative, and while emissions reduction can help it will never be enough. That being the case, we should be investing a lot into capture and sequestration research.

Absolutely. We should admit that we're in for some more CO2 rise before we can make it fall, no matter what we do, and invest in geoengineering research focused on techniques to directly reduce insolation and ocean acidification.

None of this is either/or. We need to be doing all of this in parallel: Electrification, renewables, nuclear, and synthetic fuels to reduce burning of fossil fuels, carbon recapture, especially at high-intensity carbon sourced (e.g. cement plants), but also from the atmosphere, and geoengineering to directly cool the planet and increase ocean pH. And we can... but the laser focus on renewables and electrification and renewables is harming the future.

That seems like it would be relatively easy, and safe as long as no one makes a suicide cord and tries to use it to power the house. I don't know if any of this class of equipment provides it.

Why the fuck would you embrace pain that you can easily avoid? Jesus.

Because we have to believe there will be a future. And currently our kids are not sure there will be. And I don't blame them. I felt the same way in the 1980s about nuclear brinkmanship. The difference, unfortunately was Reagan and Gorbachev got their shit together and hammered out a plan that everyone agreed was a good idea. I see no evidence of anything like that happening with climate change.

The thing is, its not THAT painful to make the changes. We know we can sort the energy bit with a combination of solar, wind, and with a bit of planning nuclear. We can transition to electric vehicles. We can reduce our carbon to essential plastics, chemicals, and food production. Theres things we CAN do but aren't. It won't save us from that 1.8c, thats a bigger more complicated project. But not making shit worse, thats entirely doable.

(Keeping in mind theres a 20-ish year lag on CO2. We're really currently doing 1990s carbon right now.)

Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

They did make as good an attempt as anyone... but still had to restrict emigration to prevent their population fleeing the workers' paradise.

Fair, many people do use the term imprecisely.

I doubt it. Which is why the cheaper devices being discussed won't provide backup power during an outage.

The discussion is about equipment that is designed to plug into the house wiring via an outlet, not a standalone battery that provides its own outlets. If you want to discuss an entirely different sort of equipment, then obviously the conclusions change.

I saw an interesting proposal from a film industry guy today proposing that laws ought be put into place specifically denying copyright protection to AI shit. While currently its not available mostly, there are loopholes that can be exploited to get around that lack of protection.

Its an "everyone wins" scenario too. AI companies can do their nonsense. Researchers can research. You can even make AI imagery and texts as before. But it forces companies to hire people to actually create IP, so it also protects workers.

The only people that would lose out are those who plot to enrich themselves by stealing art. But as a society we've always been comfortable denying criminals the proceeds of crime. So theres no moral patient to worry about in that respect.

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".

I wonder if the GOP has just forgotten what decade it is with a lot of their voter suppression stuff. Yes, they're absolutely working to suppress the vote... but it really looks like most of the people they're going to stop from voting are their voters.

For a long time, the low-income and minority vote was overwhelmingly Democrat, and those same categories were also "low-propensity voters". Make voting a little bit harder and you'd reduce Democrat vote totals, while Republican voters were rich white people who were well equipped to jump whatever hoops you put up.

But there's been a realignment in politics. A lot of the low-propensity voters are now voting Republican, while the wealthy, dedicated and (especially) educated voters are now leaning strongly Democrat. Make voting harder today and you're likely to block as many Republican votes as Democrat votes... maybe more! I don't think they're going to get the return on their voter suppression that they expect.

What would democracy without capitalism look like? Democratic socialism always ends up quickly abandoning either democracy or socialism. Social democracy (e.g. the Nordic model) works pretty well, but that's still fundamentally capitalist.