not what I was referring too. The South West has multi-century wet/dry cycles and we've recently discovered the last 100-200 years has been the peak wet period. It's only getting drier for a long long time.

Record heat + severe snow deficit resulting in record low snow cover is anything but surprising.

Gonna be fun when the natural cycle is already dipping into extreme drought, such that we are now erasing the one thing that can mitigate it.

"Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities."

Anyway, we're all saying the same thing here. This is all Torment Nexus stuff. We know how this ends.

The worst states by almost every measure are GOP run. AL, MS, OK just to drop a few. Dem states are significantly better off on average.

But our problem is, you note correctly, the binary choice we have. Bad actors on both sides know that they will be handed the reins when the other side inevitably fails at something.

Support Ranked Choice Voting so we can have true 3rd party candidates with a chance to win elections.

ask yourself how much pain red state MAGA needs to feel before we see a Nixonian level shift towards Democrats...for a generation.

That's a high high bar and we aren't anywhere close to it yet.

oh Comcast and friends will entirely pay the bribe to continue using shitty routers.

But the option to have a 'separate' router from the modem will certainly disappear.

quite a few will pa$$ the test.

Certainly an improvement but chip level backdoors still exist...and are even more likely built in China

the only secure windows is CE/ME/NT

1. Fertilizer is made from methane, so that's also stuck there. This is a HUGE problem for countries like India.
2. Poor countries are already switching to 4 day work weeks to save fuel.
3. Iran is letting ships whose balances are settled in Yuan leave. That means the power of the petro-dollar is under serious threat.
4. Countries that can no longer get Iranian oil are now buying non-Iranian oil, which drives the price of ALL oil up. There's speculation that it will hit $200/barrel. That's more than 3x what it was over the last few years. That will affect the price of literally everything. All transportation costs go up, so costs for all goods go up.

At some point, the price will get high enough that some countries won't be able to buy it at all, they'll give up. At that point, some interesting things might happen, since the demand drop-off vs. the price drop off will cause a wobble in the price. People will start looking elsewhere for energy.

Solar and small-battery vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters) might start taking off even more. You might not be able to buy petrol for your car, but your e-bike charges quickly and can still tow a few hundred pounds worth of stuff. Maybe BEVs adoption will become even MORE popular, since it's one less way you have to directly pay for petrol.

But this war is all con. 100%. Like, Trump didn't even fill up the oil reserves before going to war. China's been buying oil for MONTHS at low rates now, so they're actually the least impacted here, despite the fact that they get a lot of oil from Iran. That means they have zero impetus (not that they had much previously) to do anything about this. This is purely punishment for the USA. Those are expensive weapons being wasted on Iranian targets (in some cases, planes that are actually just paint on the ground). It might be possible for the USA to open up the strait again, but the second they leave, Iran can just close it off again. This might be the most forever of the forever wars, or it might just be an outright defeat for the USA.

This whole thing is such a mess on so many different axes. I didn't even get into how Israel is driving a lot of this, and it's all because Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He's firing in all directions, and he's relying on the USA to protect him.

It wasn't just to maintain value for their corporate properties, it's because they love seeing people in the office, doing their bidding. They'd be able to save so much on capital expenditure if everyone worked from home, but they keep people in the office because they looooooove to see who they're oppressing.

Yeah, there was just fuel rationing and it FUNDAMENTALLY changed the car industry for decades? Big cars went out of style and Japanese econoboxes became a thing because people wanted to spend less on gas?

I get it, you were a KID in the 70s, so you didn't really understand what was going on and what the challenges were. But you could go and read about them now if you want--you're probably north of 50, I think you're ready to learn the truth.

That's a societal problem we haven't really solved yet. AI/DataCenters are using VAST amounts of energy and potable water...and aren't passing the full costs on to their users directly.

I'm in NoVA, Data center capital of the world, and we're seeing power bills jumping by 20-30% per year at this point. My usage hasn't changed...the only thing that has is the massive overbuild being done.

My house will have 14 data center complexes within 1/4 mile.

Doubles your productivity....probably increases the power/energy used by multiple orders of magnitude.

A comparison of power usage before and after would be interesting.

TouchID is a nice-to-have, not a must-have. I have a Mac Mini and I have no way to get TouchID on this thing and it doesn't make it a bad computer with no security.

The extra storage is the REAL thing you want for MacOS. 256GB is almost unworkable, IMO. It's what I have on this Mac Mini and I've had to fight pretty hard to keep my disk space free, even with a bunch of external drives hanging off of it.