Back in the day, many were so enamored with the how and why of things that their insatiable curiosity often led to pursuing tech-oriented hobbies and careers. Not just "doing IT", but embracing problem-solving, taking on new challenges, constantly deep-diving into new areas of study, etc.

People have instant access to all kinds of knowledge literally in the palm of their hands, spoon-fed to them with little need to face the mental challenge of working to get information, synthesize it, and understand it. It's the cycle of look it up, read it, move on, rinse, repeat. No depth. No retention. No real understanding.

Curiosity is seemingly no longer encouraged or desired. How do we get this back?

I'd think that under the circumstances, replacing Donald with Daffy would make sense. And in the one sequence where he's turned into a baby, use Baby Plucky from Tiny Toons.

The VA uses a form of 2FA that's provided by a third-party (I've run across it on other sites once or twice.) that will use either text messages or email, your choice. What you get by text (I've not tried email.) is a six digit one-time code that you use to confirm your ID. If you run across a site wanting to use ID.ME to authenticate you, it's safe to use. I've been using it for several years and had no trouble.

Nowhere did I blame renewables. I was replying to someone talking about the huge price spikes pointing out that they applied to people lucky enough to have power.

We were out 5 and a half days for the derecho. We were in a hotel out in Sealey.

We had a generator for Beryl, but hadn't had it wired into the house yet. We had a lot of extension cords.

Later, I got the inlet and subpanel wired in. We ended up powering the house on gasoline pretty regularly without any named storms until we moved away from Houston.

It'll be Turtles All the Way Down. :-)

I wonder what Great A'Tuin thinks about that.

Back in the '90s I was chatting with a skript-kliddie who actually had an AOL logon like that. He figured that none of the CS drones could type it in right to nuke his account. You should have seen his face when I said the magic words: "copy and paste."

*** for customers who can still receive power.

During the freeze in 2021 or so, we had rolling blackouts. Myhouse was without power for 26 hours, 14 hours, 11 hours, 5 hours, 5 hours, 7 hours, 3 hours, 1.5 hours, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 12 minutes or so that week.

Also, wind turbines kill approximately zero humans per gigawatt-hour. That cannot be said of coal or natural gas plants.

Last estimate I heard said that the contamination in Oak Ridge from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War would not be cleaned up until 2050 -- 100+ years after the end of WWII.

You think that's bad? That's nothing compared to Zone rouge in northern France and Belgium. It's been uninhabitable since about 1919, and is expected to stay that way for at least 300 years, possibly as much as 700 and not because of radioactivity. No, it's because of heavy metal contamination, unexploded ordinance and poison gas shells that didn't (yet) go off.

If the long press isn't working, pull the plug. HTH, HAND.

Also, people who aren't good at negotiating also deserve fair wages.

I'm not saying that they don't. And that's why sports figures have agents so that they don't have to be good negotiators themselves. My point is that being in a union doesn't stop you from negotiating if you think you can do better.

Why, then, does Major League Baseball have a union? These are very high skilled jobs, very well paid. The highest performers make FAR more money than the middling ones - having a union doesn't prevent that.

My father spent most of his working life in union supermarkets in Los Angles, most of the time in management. Except when he was just starting out, he never worked for union scale, but negotiated a higher rate because he was known to be good enough to deserve it. No matter what the unions say, you can always get more if you can make the boss believe that you deserve it.

That is the completely-unfounded religious axiom of every scientist: that the universe is as it (roughly) appears to be, so that the nature of reality can be inferred from observation.

There is one objective fact that supports that axiom: no matter who makes the observations, what direction they look and when, they get the same results. This strongly suggests that what we are observing is objective reality, not some subjective vision that can vary from one observer to another.

Please cite a time when any European country has held a CEO personally and criminally liable for something.

It won't be. Facebook will just cut a check for $79 million and go on with life.