Solar water heaters definitely have the capacity to boil water, if they are made right (use a high temp transfer fluid, vacuum-insulated tubes, proper solar condensers, etc). It’d be difficult to get them to do it on a small scale without a heat pump of some sort in the mix, but even inefficient solar water heater setups need to be installed with a regular water heater after them mostly to down-regulate the temp as they get far far far too hot for practical use directly.

The greenhouse barrels are just for passive radiant heating, but if you use enough of them in the proper places, and insulate well, you can use them to make a passively-heated greenhouse that doesn’t freeze at all, even up in the frigid northern climates (Canada, midwest US, Siberia, etc.)

That was amazing and made me rethink not watching that show… I have it but had no interest in it. Now I have slightly more than zero! Yay! Positive numbers!

This kind of shit is why I refuse to let people talk negatively about their own skills when they try to compare themselves to the more impressive parts of me. Idk how different their lives are than my own was, but there are lots and lots of things that are totally expected of adults that I can’t do because of how fucked up my childhood was. A couple glowing beacons of brilliance in the muck and mire don’t actually make for a well-adjusted person.

I ain’t done shit with the smarts I’ve got. You might not have the capacity to learn three foreign languages (of different roots, because I found that easier) simultaneously, but who cares? I can’t hold down a job (in any language) to save my life. Sure you might not be able to plan out an entire self-sufficient homestead, but I bet you can actually make moves toward your goals, whatever they are! I can’t, I’ve had the same goal for 30 years and have made minimal progress toward it, other than long long long lists of things that I want to do. I can’t even form proper bonds with people because my childhood taught me to trust nobody but myself, so I’m lonely and isolated.

The truth is we are all a series of strengths and weaknesses based on the environments in which we are raised. I struggle daily with left and right, but I’m masterful with learning new highly technical information well enough to teach lay-people. I can’t tell time on analogue clocks, but I’ll bust out calculations for close-enough answers to weird physics questions, because I find it interesting. The best experts in one field are the worst novices in most others.

All this to say: try to be kind to yourself for the places your education and childhood failed you. They weren’t your fault, and aren’t something you should feel shame about, even if you do make efforts to bring yourself up to speed. There have been various trials of random nonsense bullshit over the years (like the US’ current spiral into illiteracy due to doing away with phonics) that have fucked up generations of people, and those people, just like you, are doing their best with the shit cards they were dealt. We have no control over how we were nurtured, if we even were. And thats ok. It’s part of your story, what makes you the you you are today. You’d be someone totally different if you’d gotten more math and less jesus, and maybe that someone would be better in some ways, but they’d probably be worse in many others.

I think its supposed to represent those doing resource distribution, rather than strictly guards, which red blood sort of does (oxygen at least, maybe other stuff idk)

I tried it once, and found it to be intensely lacking in any sort of… well anything.

My brain told me everything was tiny, and I heard a whomp whomp whomp whomp for a few minutes and that was it. It tasted like smoking grass clippings over a campfire, and I went “well its a fun plant to grow but I wont be harvesting it again”

My point is that if they have less energy density, they aren’t a particularity great choice for EVs, as the increased battery size to get the same capacity makes the whole thing much heavier, requiring even more battery to move it.

I guess for like short range vehicles, it might be fine, but at least around here, thats gunna be a pretty tough sell, because everything is spread out.

It can’t really make EVs safer if its not being used for them due to the drawbacks, is all.

I thought sodium batteries had considerably less energy density than conventional? Is that not a problem anymore? If that hasn’t been solved, I don’t see how this helps make EVs safer.

Probably this

The way that makes the most sense for me is intelligence is related to external learning (books, from others, from detailed study of things, etc) whereas wisdom comes primarily from internal observation (self-reflection, personal experience, situational awareness, etc.)

Clara is a brunette, I just want to clarify that in case people get confused about which meme. :) (It took me a sec)

Not really, no, though there are logging operations and they sometimes ruin large swaths of land by planting shit like a whole forest of pine where there used to be a healthy mixed forest.

This area is pretty heavily wooded yet, though. The fields that are here are old, generations back stuff with more natural boundaries, rows of wind-break trees between fields and the like, swampy areas left in field corners. We aren’t really adding new farmland here either, in fact there are incentive programs to reforest former farmland. Often old farmland is used for development.

We do pull stuff out if we are developing the property, sure, but otherwise no, most land is left pretty natural.

That happens in parts of the US that actually have those things, just not in the super flat bits that don’t have anything interesting in them to use as a boundary to begin with. Kinda hard to break things up by rivers or ridges or trees when there aren’t any there naturally. But near me, that stuff is super common as boundaries for fields for exactly the same reason.

Consider: graphics cards pricing.

Shit’s not coming back down to reasonable prices any time soon. At least not without major intervention on the part of governments.

Thank you, I went into the mastodon (I think that’s what that is?) post looking for a link, knowing I’ve seen it arranged like a comic before, and was dismayed there don’t seem to be one.

Considering the delay some stuff has, I extend it to roughly a week.

As someone who just updated from 17 to whatever it’s on now due to that security vulnerability (and who used android prior to this piece of shit), they are definitely still getting worse.

Autocorrect got substantially worse between versions, to the point that I can’t get a single message without a misspelled word that it doesn’t even try to fix, a misspelling that it corrects to something completely different, or it corrects the right word to something else (I’ve turned it off entirely, it’s now actively worse than nothing…). The ui is unusable for me without accessibility options to remove transparency to get rid the bright glassy nonsense they did and change it to ugly gray boxes (headaches exacerbated by bright stuff in my face, ugly was my only option and that fucking sucks because it worked -and looked- fine before…). They also haven’t bothered to fix the glitch in night mode where touching the text entry field makes it glow bright gray (speculated they used the light mode effect by accident), a problem which has apparently been around since 18 first dropped in ‘24. Some phones, like mine, have a glass backplate they don’t go out of their way tell you is glass, which shatters if you nick the glass tubes around the camera that sticks out a foot… why so much fucking glass? Is it to kill resale value? I bet it is!

Plus all the stuff you said. Also I don’t believe them that they support user privacy. Why would they when they can pretend to and still get the money?

My friend has always been on iOS and updates it whenever updates are out, and didn’t notice the creep of how bad it was, but slamming from 17 up to current was almost as much of a shock as moving to iOS in the first place, as far as reduced usability goes.

As soon as moto drops a graphene compatible device I’m getting one and never looking back.

I feel very very bad for my medical teams if that the case cuz I resist drugs until they knock me out, to my perception, and am chatty and inquisitive up until I lose memory. I can’t imagine I’m less annoying after if I’m not just out cold already.

They don’t bother trying to lie to me about my drugs tho cuz I’m asking about them. And the equipment. What drugs are you giving me? Oh this is fentanyl? It feels nice, I get why it’s a controlled substance, yeah. What’s that for? What’s that do? Cool, yeah, tell me more about your job. Oh what kind of gas are you giving me? Sorry for being so chatty but thanks for telling me! (Same shit I do fully coherent, but with situationally acceptable drugs and a group of people invested in responding to me, excellent.)

Didn’t use fertile or follow or falter. Fine folly.

Or you could live in a less urban area, specifically one where transplants are less common than people who grew up less than 30 min away. People who never left their home town, whose friend group also never left, still have all their friends from school and don’t need or want more. They don’t really want to be your friend even if you do click. You can meet them out dozens of times and have running jokes when you see each other, but they’ll never go out of their way to make or keep plans.

Everyone who moves to my current area says basically the same thing about how difficult it is to make friends here. People much more commonly get their friends hired with them than make friends with new people who get hired, so even that hasn’t been a super fruitful endeavor. Only people I’ve managed to make lasting friends with have also been from elsewhere and struggled.

That’s not to say people aren’t nice and welcoming, they are, they just aren’t welcoming into their social circles.

Wild, I refuse to go to packed restaurants because my experience will be markedly worse… my favorite time is between 2-4, because everywhere is dead then.

To each their own, I guess.