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> Remember when you could text Dave from the office to turn your PC on because you were stuck in traffic?

I honestly don't. This was a thing? Why?

> So if you decide to take a "working lunch" and connect to "Starbucks_Guest_WiFi", your boss sees it instantly.

I would have a lot of fun with "creative" names for my Wi-fi network.


Seriously, this is not a thing. It doesn't even begin to make sense. It's made up.

If you work in a factory with time cards that need to be punched in, and you punch in a buddy's who is late, that's a thing -- a very risky thing if you get caught, since it's fraud.

But the idea that you'll give a coworker your password so they can boot up and log in and somehow make it look like you're online...? Not a thing. And doesn't even make sense today when you can just open your chat client on your phone anyways and be present there. We've been in an era of remote work for a long time now.


This doesn't make any sense. In any organization with a remotely capable IT, you'll still need to log in with your own account. If you give someone else your password to log in... there is a bigger problem.

I think they would have thought of that and are likely using MAC addresses and a lookup table tied up Active Server, etc.

Yes, MAC addresses can be spoofed, but that isn't going to be what most employees will do.


No I just meant prank names for the network.

"Huh, looks like Ted's working from 'Kiss My Ass, Stalker' again."


Agriculture ships water away in the form of crops. It loses water from evaporation. I think data centers use closed-loop cooling. They use water but they don't lose it.

They use evaporative cooling towers because you need far fewer of them. The evaporating water can be separate from the main cooling loop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower#Heat_transfer_me...

A few, most don't. If it's cheaper to use an open system then the closed system are only built for show, to soothe the public.

Charge them more for water and electricity until they're using the amount of water you think is right.

The fundamental problem here is municipalities getting into cozy, sweetheart deals with corporations.


I don't know any city with amazing public transport where driving a private car isn't nightmarish.

I don't know any city with amazing public transport, except for the lucky ones that can afford to live directly into the city center.

Singapore.

But anyways, the order of causation is probably reversed. Cities with high density are forced to invest in good public transport by sheer public demand and pressure.


The nightmare there is paying for the car.

Singapore has an expensive plate tax that has to be renewed. They make owning a private car very expensive.

It appears that driving a private car in the Netherlands isn't near as nightmarish as elsewhere.

The Netherlands is peculiar in that cyclists reclaimed their rights to the cities by kicking cars out of them.

Cars haven't been kicked out of cities in the Netherlands.

Yes, especially since they're talking about wiping about most or all white-collar jobs in our lifetimes. What's wrong with that?

Why drag your dead ancestors into the debate?

On that note they say oil is dead dinosaurs, maybe have a word with Saudi Arabia...


Oil comes from algae (and other tiny marine organisms) not dinosaurs.

Was this reply intended for a different comment? Or do I need more sleep?

> climate change scientists

They aren't known for making a lot of money, but I guess "I'm saving the world" is an attractive quality in a mate.


> As for funding, Trump raised substantially less in 2024 than 2020 while Harris raised more money than any campaign ever has, by a wide margin.

Does that include the $44b spent on the Twitter acquisition?


An automatic breadmaker costs less than $50 and makes perfect bread every time for 30c of flour and electricity. It takes 5 minutes to set up and you just wake up to fresh bread. That's less time than you'd waste going to the grocery store every day.

I take your point about everything else, but bread is the wrong example.


I work two part time low wage hourly jobs, where am I getting $50 for a bread maker?

Plus the Great Value white bread is 99 cents, and the packaging tells me it’s healthy.

Why am I motivated to spend my scarce money on making my own bread?


> where am I getting $50 for a bread maker

Save up? Buy it from a thrift shop? Whatever it is, it's cheaper than your previous assertion that breadbaking is impossible without a $300 stand mixer.

> Why am I motivated to spend my scarce money on making my own bread?

To save money and eat better.

Again I take your point. Being poor is mentally taxing and is the result of many things having gone wrong in one's past. Often things out of one's control. All I'm saying is bread is the wrong example to illustrate that point. Try literally any other food.


Just save up, bro. lol

I literally witnessed someone just a couple days ago try to pay for some food at my corner store with EBT, was told by the cashier it wasn’t accepted, so she emptied her basket of all the stuff she wanted and bought a single food item.

Except the item was $6 and change, and she only had 5 single dollars in her wallet. So the cashier out of sympathy just took the $5 and let her have it.

The fuck your mean, save up?

If you think bread is the wrong example then I’ll just point to the obvious high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables. An entire pound of strawberries has less than 200 calories. If you are counting pennies and dollars these kinds of healthy foods make zero logical sense to buy.


> The fuck your mean, save up?

Advice that doesn't work for everyone isn't automatically useless.

What else can a person in that situation do? I'm not asking what we as a society can do for them (plenty). I'm asking what they can do themselves, if they want to do something (and many don't, because poverty is exhausting, like I already acknowledged).

Poverty has solutions on an individual level and on a societal level. I won't judge anyone who can't or won't implement the individual choices to themselves get out of poverty because I don't know them or their situation. Even as a massively privileged person I struggle to make good personal lifestyle choices. Everyone's doing the best they can at that moment.

But equally, ignoring the existence of those choices is unhelpful.

> I’ll just point to the obvious high cost of fresh fruit and vegetables

I completely agree. It's a travesty. We should subsidize more vegetables and less corn and soybeans.


Can make flatbread in any crappy oven. You should be able to get a used dirty one for next to nothing. Don't even have to clean it, just let it burn empty for 45 minutes. 75C (167F) should be enough but on the highest settings it doesn't take as long.

Baking bread in a pan/pot on the stove is also doable. Research the recipes a bit.

Also, there is nothing wrong with pancakes.


White bread can't be made healthy. It's white bread! Try wheat bread

I didn't downvote you. However, there are ethical and moral quandaries to doing that. What if you accidentally wipe out existing, undetected life on that planet?

You aren't going to see anything "take hold" on a human timescale. Evolution takes place over geological time. By the time there's something to observe, there might be no one to observe it. Or all knowledge of the experiment might be lost.


There is no other civilization in the solar system.

If it's humans vs alien slime mold, I stand for humans.

> ou aren't going to see anything "take hold" on a human timescale

Right. Seeding life onto lifeless planets takes a long time, but it is a moral imperative. We are the only life in the solar system, and maybe even in our galaxy.

BTW, the Earth is going to fry in 100m years. We'd better learn how to colonize the other planets.


More like 1-4bn years actually.

What? It isn't a moral imperitive because it doesn't matter at all from a human perspective. It's not human vs slime mold, it's weird-specific-extremeophile-bacteria vs slime mold.

The purpose of life is to spread and thrive.

The purpose of any particular arrangement could be said to be to proliferate and dominate others, insofar as if it doesn't do that then it doesn't exist and will be overwritten by other arrangements. In this case we humans wouldn't want to spread an extremophile bacteria, we'd want to dominate it and minimize its presence. Human colonization is different from what you're talking about.

If you can get extremophiles to live on other planets, it becomes much more possible for humans to. It's a necessary precursor.

Life is a name we give to arrangements of matter we prefer over others.

There is no intrinsic "purpose".

The universe itself is perfectly content with dynamics over timescales we cannot even approach comprehension of, and never will. The only driving force in the universe is an evolution from a state with heterogeneous energy densities to one with homogeneous energy density. "Life" isn't even in the equation.

Interstellar travel is not possible for humans. Even if we could somehow induce perfect hibernation, scifi style, how do you maintain an engineered vehicle in the abyss for centuries?

Meanwhile, we can't even take care of the abundance of resources here on earth.


What a sad point of view.

Consider that the only reason you exist (and have wonderful things like air conditioning) is because your predecessors did have a purpose.

> Interstellar travel is not possible for humans.

Yes, it is. Transcribe DNA, put it in probe, probe goes for centuries, orbits a promising planet, then employs nanobots to build humans from the DNA. I.e. a seedship.

> abundance of resources here on earth

Our solar system is brimming with resources. All we've exploited so far is just pond scum on the Earth's surface.


> Why is taxing households together the correct thing

Hypothetically if the household splits up due to a divorce its assets are divided 50:50 (this varies by jurisdiction). Usually (again depending on the jurisdiction) the lower-earning spouse also gets alimony to even up the difference in income resulting from the new situation, at least for a few years.

Clearly then the state believes assets owned and income earned by either one of the couple belong equally to both (something I agree with personally: it's called a partnership). If that's the case, how could it be wrong to tax the household as a single entity?


The fundamental question is whether the primary unit of the society is a household or an individual. If you assume that the society consists of individuals, people should be taxed individually, spouses should be allowed to choose in advance how their assets would be divided in a divorce, and alimony should only be paid to support underage children.

I think the currently prevailing view is that a household (or a family) is the smallest social structure and the individual is pretty much the opposite of society.

Exactly. Economists usually regard households as basic economic units for good reason.

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