They'll try to say that it's only AI that's providing the monitoring and filtering. They'll conveniently omit the part about the AI training itself on your kid's dick pics.

The solar compatible meter does a couple of things. First, it allows solar generated power to go back to the grid if on-site usage is below generated power levels. Second, it communicates with the utility company so they can manage the entire grid. Third, I *think* it both prevents consumer-generated power from leaking onto the grid during outages, and notifies the utility that there is on-site power generation. The last point is critical for safety - If your house is "hot" during an outage, that power can't be permitted to leak onto the grid otherwise it would be extremely hazardous to workers that are restoring service.

The balcony solar kits are supposed to monitor grid power and they're supposed to shut off the power if grid power goes out. That's a lot of *should*. A certified solar compatible meter and panel solves that part of the problem, but it's stupidly expensive due to the regulatory requirements for permits and electricians to do the work. A homeowner can't simply ask the utility company to put in a solar meter. There's more to it and it makes the costs skyrocket.

I've started getting ads in my area (southern california) for "legal" balcony solar add-on kits. Under 2KW systems that as you say, just plug into a socket. Unfortunately they still require the solar meter which requires permits and an electrician, all of which is several times the cost of the actual balcony solar kit.

For an owner like me with a regular meter and panel, I can't just buy one of those kits. I'd have to get the meter and panel modified first. And that's very expensive.

Yes, it'll just become mandatory with credit card or ID age verification even for free accounts.

I foresee almost all online services requiring an age verification (the kind everyone hates when porn services use it) and then an age tiered product being offered. I could easily see a 2 or 3 tier youtube, for example.

Tier 1 would be full adult access no different than today.

Tier 2 would be very limited youth access, utilizing big data to identify when kids are trying to cheat by using multiple accounts. This would have both content and time limits, but the content filters would be fixed based on the most restrictive criteria.

Tier 3 would be "premium" youth, unlocked with a subscription of course. It would by default permit both the restricted youth content, but also educational content that might have otherwise been automatically blocked by the generic tier 2 standard (things like biology class videos, current event discussions, etc). It could also have parental controls that permit modification of usage time limits and various filter settings to allow or block content such as "biology", "politics", "violence", "religion", etc.

They could monetize the crap out of this, especially since many school districts have standardized on google classroom and you can't block youtube without also blocking google classroom, which can't possibly be an accident. Schools using google classroom would have to pay an additional premium to first authorize registered students into the age restricted service tier, and then they'd have to pay AGAIN to unlock educational content that would be somehow mysteriously blocked under the free tier 2 service.

I hate to say it but until it can install solar onto an expensive "100 year" tile roof that is somehow also extremely fragile, I can't be bothered. My stupid 100 year tile roof would cost over $80,000 to replace, and "market rate" maintenance is about $150 PER TILE.

Until solar can be safely installed on THAT kind of roof (very common in my area), it's just something that other people do.

I'm interested in "balcony solar" since apparently it's kind of legal now in more areas, but I don't have the correct meter and installing a solar meter would cost 4x what a top of the line balcony solar kit would cost. If the utility would install a solar meter and associated panel hardware/wiring for free, I'd max out balcony solar tomorrow. As it is, there's zero payout ever due to the up front costs and outdated regulatory hurdles.

Can that robot install a solar-rated power panel and meter? That would be useful.

I've read the book already and I'm re-reading it prior to going to see the movie. The book has about as much "real" science as any Asimov or Heinlein or Pournelle book, and meshes that fairly seamlessly to the "what if" science and plot portions of the book.

My big challenge is to see if I can get my kids to read the book before going to see the movie, and if I can get them to do that while it's still showing in IMAX.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

While that's true, a responsible generation aims to boost the next generation to a *higher* level than the education they received. The world has become more complex and faster-paced, and even if that weren't true, the consequenes of aiming high and falling short are better than the consequences of aiming for the status quo and falling short.

So while I'm 100% onboard with skepticism that technology will magically make education better, I think the argument that "the education I got worked for me should be good for them" isn't a strong argument. What we need is a better ecducation that would have been a better education fifty years ago: stronger math, science, and language skills, general knowledge, and, I think critical thinking and media literacy. Possibly emotional intelligence -- it's kind of pointless to teach people critcial thinking skills if they are carried away by emotions.

There are no economic or security reasons to blockade Cuba, so that leaves *political*.

It used to be believed that bullies were low status individuals who are lashing out out of frustration. But research has shown that bullying is an effective strategy for achieving and maintaining social status. In other words it's a political winner. So the focus of research has shifted from the bully to the people around him who enable the bullying. The inner circle are the henchmen -- people without the charisma and daring to initiate the bullying, but join in when the bully gets things started. Around them are the audience, the people who wouldn't risk participating but enjoy the bullying vicariously. And around them are the much larger group of bystanders, who don't approve but are waiting for someone else to stop the bullying. Then off to the side are the defenders, who stand up to the bully.

Perhaps the least appreciated supporting factor in the phenomenon of the high-status bully is the silence of the bystanders, which is dependent upon the perception of widespread approval. Since you can't visibly see the the line between the approving audience and the apalled bystanders, the silence of the bytstanders is absolutely essential in sustaining the bullying.

Lot's of Americans are apalled at the idea of using military force to inflict suffering on the Cuban people. But that's only politically advantageous *because* of *them*. Tney are indistinguishable from the relatively small number of people who are thrilled when Trump announced he can do anything he wants wtih Cuba. The gap between actual approval and *perceived* approval is absolutely critical in establishign and maintaining any kind of authoritarianism. This is why would be authoritarian leaders are so focused on punishing and marginalizing any kind of expression of disapproval.

Some areas would need additional legislative work to eliminate bureaucratic hurdles. For example, where I live in California the physical installation of the solar panels requires multiple permits and a structural engineering design, review, and approval process. You can't simply prop some panels up on a flat roof, balcony, or in the back yard because of California's permit-based approach to public safety on private property. A required portion of the balcony solar legislation involves getting approval for installation and use without requiring main panel and meter upgrades/replacement, because that work could cost several times the cost of the actual solar equipment. But the panel mounting itself also needs legislative relief from the existing permitting requirements. A homeowner *should* be allowed to put 4-6 panels pretty much anywhere they want and however they want, but again the engineering design, review, build, inspection, approval permitting process is prohibitively expensive and again can be far more expensive than the actual solar equipment.

In 1790, the US population was 94.9% rural. There is no country. in the world today that rural -- Burundi, which looks like blanks spot in the world at night satellite picturs, is 88% rural.

The largest city at the time was New York, with a population of 33,000. Northern Manhattan was near-wilderness, mid-town was farms and country houses.

In 1790 the US was. country you could "police" with sheriffs and volunteer posses, largely to keep the peace. If you got robbed, you hired a private thief catcher. This works in a 95% rural country with just 3.4 million inhabitants. It would be chaos in a country 87x larger.

8GB is plenty of RAM for what most users use their laptops for, if the OS doesn't gobble it up with background tasks. Probably be a good idea to steer clear of Chrome as a browser on these things.

It's actually more like an iPhone 16 Pro runing MacOS in a laptop form factor. Apple basically rummaged through their parts box and pulled out a mobile CPU that'll deliver 50% more single core performance than what's in a high-end Chromebook with only 80% of the power draw. And Apple's got *massive* economies of scale on those parts, so they can afford to deliver a lot of bang for the buck.

The only place the Neo appears to falls short is in RAM, but this is *not* a power user machine, it's for basic office tasks and multimedia consumption. Realistically 8GB is plenty for many users.

In any case, the desktop isn't the center of most users's universe anymore; the switchboard of their life is their smartphone. This is a gateway drug to MacOS IOS integration, and eventually onto the upgrade treadmill. Users will switch seamlewssly between their iPhones and Neos all day long, with data on iCloud and iMusic etc., and when it comes time to upgrade their phone or their laptop, they won't be *stuck* exactly, but if they leave the reservation they lose a lot. But they certainly could upgrade to a *much nicer* Macbook....

It's no wonder the other laptop makers are sitting up and taking notice. Apple has set up a one way conversion ratchet for people tempted by a really nice and perfectly adequate entry level machine at an entry level price.Nobody else has the vertical integration -- chip foundries to device manufacturing, to software platform -- spanning desktop and phones that's needed to do this.

Anyone who's watched a house go up has marveled at how quickly the framing goes up, then how long it takes everything else to get done.

Framing is about 1/l4 of the build time for a house. The *labor* for framing is less than 10% of the build cost. If the machine cost *nothing*, and framed the building *instantaneously*, those are hard limits on how much faster and cheaper the house building robot could make the process: about 25% faster with about a 10% cost reduction. But the machine wouldn't work instantaneously, nor would it be free.

There already is a better way of doing this. You prefabricate the house in units, ship them to the site, then bolt the units together. The modules could be completely finished at the factory. Savings over traditional construction would be substantial -- 40%. The problem is, can you build houses people want to buy and which local building codes will allow you to live in. If you throw out expectations that a house looks like a house a child would draw with crayons, you can build a really nice. So with prefab houses you either have things that look like mobile homes; or things that look like they were designed by a scandanavian architect. Houses that *look* like mid-range, hand-built homes are a tough nut to crack.

There was a movement among architects to use pre-fabricated construction to solve the problem of housing returning GIs after WW2. It didn't catch on as the kind of democratizing mass produced housing the movement envisioned because people wanted a house that looked hand-built. But if you can get over that, it produced some really great houses. One of the more famous examples (although not completely pre-fabricated) is the Eames House. There's a company from that period that's still in business, but they pre-fabricate million dollar luxury homes, not mass produced housing.

The obstacles to prefabricated houses are regulatory, which is why it can't reach the middle of the market. Anti-mobile home rule discourage really cheap pre-fabricated houses, but high end producers can afford to jump through the regulatory hoops. For mid-range houses, the regulatory burden outweighs the economic advantage of prefabrication. This could allow a framing robot to have a niche, although as I pointed out it won't save much money on the build cost.