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.

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....

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?

Worried about the news cycle moving on from AI, are we guys? Realising that's achievements are vastly outweighed by its costs still, and desperate for a use-case, much like IBM were in the Watson days when they literally had to ask people to suggest things it could do for them because they're run out of things that it could actually do?

Yeah, keep trying. Keep pretending that it's conscious or real intelligence or "looks like a human brain". Because someone's gotta pay those trillions back and you don't want it to be you, right?

Put it this way:

I've stopped bothering to see whether my ~2000 games on Steam are "Linux-compatible" on a standard Ubuntu install.

I've also supplemented my entirely-Linux network with a Linux gaming laptop onto which I've put... all my old favourite Windows freeware.

Last night something reminded me and I wanted to play WH40K:Space Marine. Double-click. Install. Play.

A few weeks prior, my daughter was talking about RDR2. Double-click. Install. Play.

I brought across my Wreckfest too. Double-click. Install. Play.

My default photo viewer is not the trash that it's in Ubuntu by default but my old favourite of Irfanview.

I even went to the effort of downloading all my old GOG games and installing them (no, not all of them are DOSBox, there are many old Windows games in there), and even got Castle of the Winds (a very old 16-bit Windows 3.1 game that doesn't even run in modern Windows) working by just substituting the Ubuntu 32/64-bit only install of Wine with the stock Wine from the Wine website.

It's not perfect, but you know what? It's so damn close that you can just think "Hey, this just needs an update" whenever you encounter something unusual that you want to run.

Wine is good. Proton is AMAZING. And it only ever trips up on pathetic stuff - like things that have deep ActiveX/IE integration (e.g. OrcaSlicer variants produced exclusively for FlashForge do that to load the proprietary camera view... fortunately OrcaSlicer itself is open-source, and the camera view is not important at all, and there are other ways to access it)

The problem is that you're focusing on the tech and - over time - you WILL lose track and get tired of the tech, because it happens to literally everyone. I'm extremly techy. But there are some things that are entirely in the realm of tech where I think "Oh, come on, this is nonsense, why can't I just do it the old way?!" (e.g. systemd, which I find to be the universal bane of anything I want to achieve).

That will come to us all. We're already doing it. Why do I have to ID myself to access this website? Why do I have to jump through MFA hoops just to sign in to my email? etc. etc. etc. All with good intention, good reason, and with purpose, but increasingly we, the users, will get frustrated with it all while the 20-somethings will just treat it as normal because they grew up doing it, and then get frustrated with whatever comes after when they are 50-somethings.

The tech is not the problem here. The problem here is sheer, utter, idiocy. Maybe in the form of someone far outside the normal mental bounds being solely in control of their finances (for example), but idiocy nonetheless.

And the cure isn't tech-training. The cure is "being a suspicious / paranoid bastard". I'm a suspicious / paranoid bastard. Good luck trying to scam me because even when there are legitimate processes, I am happy to just stop and say "Nope. I'm not going to do that." Look at the nonsense in your posts and the OP - buying Amazon gift cards, buying gold and giving it to a courier, etc. etc. etc.

It doesn't matter how sweet-talking someone is... I ain't gonna do that. Letting people take over my computer remotely? I don't even let people I know and love TOUCH my computer (and they know that). Nobody touches my computer. Nobody logs into it but me. Nobody knows that password. And no, even my kid, doesn't get to "just browse" on it, nor on my phone. I have other devices if they want to do that.

Scam-prevention isn't about learning the latest tech and keeping up to the date, it's about being an entirely suspicious bastard about everything. It's why my dad distrusts electronic transactions. He'll do them but you know what he does? He gets me or my brother to CHECK first. Others in my family have been scammed - credit card cloning in restaurants (good, luck, that card doesn't leave my sight... and, yes, I've had that argument with restaurants and pubs... card reader behind the bar? Okay, then bring it here? No? Then I come there? No... oh look you CAN do it in front of me but you just didn't want to...), mum accidentally signed up to a new electricity company on the doorstep (but UK contract regulations mean we shut that down once we heard about it), I've had a guy at my door trying to insert a key into a pre-pay electric meter in my house who said - explicitly - that he was "from your electricity supplier". He wasn't. He was from a rival, committing fraud on my doorstep, trying to force me to switch supplier to him without me noticing. And me, being the suspicious bastard, refused to let him do so, and warned the rest of the street (the police came along eventually, shut them down, and asked for evidence, but I didn't have any CCTV recording audio near the porch or I would have nailed him to the wall). He looked all official in his little hi-vis, and they were blanketing the whole street the same way... and people fell for it.

My dad REGULARLY asks me if "that was you on the texting again the other night" - because he gets texts with the "Hi Dad, I lost my phone and have no money...." He never responds but he always checks in with me afterwards just to make sure. And I think him realising how often it's NOT ME makes it clear just how widespread scams are so he's even more suspicious.

We just need to teach people to be suspicious and make official processes official enough that they are NOT suspicious. This requires absolutely no fancy tech or tech-training at all.

It just needs people to think "What the fuck am I doing buying Amazon gift cards to pay my tax bill?"

Everyone caught onto the fact that it's nonsense that's nothing to do with AI.

600km is 0.0020014 seconds at the speed of light.

Or 2 milliseconds.

Birth rates are at record low since WW2:

www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

So there are fewer people, but they are living longer.

Which is probably the balance required, and probably explains WHY they're living longer too.

Gosh, that must be worth at least a trillion dollars.

Better scramble and invest in their hype of... a handheld box that can run AI... like... phones do.

So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.

But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?

It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.

It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.

Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."

30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).

Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:

£

(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).

A problem that not one other developed country has had to deal with in years. Decades, even.

And are you seriously telling me that if the recipient AND the sender were to acknowledge that it was fraudulently cashed that the bank couldn't do anything about it? That the security is on an inked name alone? What ridiculousness. That's just awful consumer protection.

Maybe - yet again - wake up, get into the 21st century as a country, and start putting laws on the side of taxpayers and consumers rather than corporations.

"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.