Keep in mind the standard of living. If you’re in a country that experiences routine long power outages, having a solar panel that you can use to charge your phone during the day is pretty great. Having to get ahold of and burn diesel fuel is not so great. Doesn’t produce at night? Doesn’t matter much, it’s better than nothing.
> Does Canada not have progressive taxation? How do poor people pay more than rich people?
It’s not that they’re paying more than rich people. It’s that even with progressive taxation, tax(everything the government currently spends money on) < tax(current spending + solar subsidies). That is to say… giving solar subsidies to rich people causes the tax paid by everyone to increase. Those making more money pay a larger fraction of the increase because of progressive taxation but everyone who is paying taxes pays incrementally more when the government spends more money.
That's also not a perfect recollection, but is what my recollection was until I was looking up this history in the past week and found this nugget and posted it elsewhere. Quoting myself:
>So we know these were originally called PCMCIA cards, then later PC Cards, right? Well, I think I might have found the first mention of PCMCIA in PC Magazine. It is in a Dec 1991 column by Dvorak where he "introduces" the "PCMCIA PC-Card". Here's a quote, "In fact, the card should be referred to as the PCMCIA PC-Card, or the PC-Card for short. PCMCIA is the Personal Computer Computer Memory Card International Association (Sunnyvale, Calif., 408-720-0107), and it's the governing body that has standardized the specifications for this card worldwide. JEIDA works with the PCMCIA; it's specifications are identical."
>So at least according this Dvorak column, these were ALWAYS properly called "PC-Cards" (he used a hyphen), but early on people definitely were calling them PCMCIA cards and I remember the shift to everyone later (much later than this 1991 column) calling them PC Cards.
Neat, definitely a part of history that I'm not familiar enough with myself since I was only ~6 or so around then when the article was published.
It definitely seems to reinforce the joke backronym of "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms" for the whole thing given how badly it was all refered to. It's a lot like the whole Clippit/Clippy situation with the Microsoft Office assistants. Originally it was only named Clippit but Clippy got coined by everyone else and even Microsoft ended up giving in and using it in marketing materials not too long after the fact.
Came across this a few months ago on HN here and there’s a fair bit of exposition on things you’ve mentioned. My personal takeaway from it was to try Todoist, which has been a complete game changer in my life. I’ve used other systems before but something about Todoist worked better for my brain (plus the mobile integration is awesome… my second best over the years was org-mode but the mobile story is way too clunky)
+1, Todoist has changed things for me drastically.
I was diagnosed with ADHD a year and a half ago in my ~mid 30s. The meds (Vyvanse) help somewhat, but the real key to improvement for me has been using Todoist.
IME the real trick is using it consistently, and for everything. My routines (e.g. morning routine: meds, eat, coffee, brush teeth, brush the dog's teeth, etc etc) are all in Todoist, not because I struggle to focus on getting that stuff done in the morning (well, sometimes, perhaps) but because starting the day with do-easy-thing, mark-it-done, repeat, sets up the rest of the day to be run by Todoist instead of the bit of my brain that goes "I know we should be getting ready to leave but WHAT IF YOU WROTE AN APP TO DO THIS COOL THING, JUST QUICKLY TRY THAT NOW, YOU CAN LEAVE AFTER".
I had a similar experience with org-mode too. It was great at work where I'm at my desk all day, and made a huge difference, but not having a good mobile experience makes it impractical for day-to-day home use.
That was 100% the key for me too: put absolutely everything into it that I can’t address immediately, both work and life.
I did use org-mode like that too (all of life into it, not just work) when I was working from home but both capture and viewing when away from the laptop just had too much friction.
There’s a lot of nuance to the answer and I’m not a nuclear engineer, just an EE and occasional nuclear enthusiast. The biggest issue is the cost-effectiveness of reprocessing the “waste”, which you are completely correct about still having a ton of residual energy available, back into a useable fuel for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.
Some of the fission products that are produced in reactors are actively harmful for sustaining a chain reaction (neutron poisons), Xenon-135 being a prime example. Xenon-135 only has a half-life of about 9 hours (which means it’s pretty spicy) but it also has a massive neutron capture cross-section. If it doesn’t capture a neutron, it emits a beta particle (electron/positron), which doesn’t contribute to sustaining the reaction; if it does capture a neutron it becomes Xenon-136 which is pretty stable. In both cases, it’s sitting in the fuel but either useless (yay) or actively hurting the neutron economy (boo).
At some point in the future it might be economically advantageous to reprocess “used once” nuclear waste and use it in a second cycle but for now it’s way cheaper to get more fresh uranium and process that into fuel instead.
Is the modem completely disabled? Does it still show the "SOS" option that allows you to call 911 without a SIM? If so, and if it's ever been turned on in your residence, there's a decent chance the IMEI could be traced back to your house just based on pattern-of-life movement.
This works fantastic for building furniture as well, where the absolute dimension doesn’t matter as much as all of the pieces having matching dimensions. A cabinet with drawers, for example. The story stick captures the spacing between the drawers, the width of the drawer, the slightly smaller height of the drawer face, etc.
It feels really imprecise the first time you set the fence on a table saw based on a marking on a stick instead of a precise specific value but the results are hard to argue with.
With carpentry in particular, it is extremely powerful to make multiple cuts at the same time -- set a fence once and then cut everything that needs to match at the same time, or stack multiple pieces together, or cut a board to length before ripping it into several pieces that need identical lengths.
Sure, check your measurements to be sure they're correct, but the more times you can cut based on the same measurement, the less measurement error can creep in.
Was going to mention that too. 100% agree. If I mess up and end up needing to make matching cuts later on, I'll often set the fence using one of the existing pieces too instead of trying to re-measure. The story stick works great but lining up the teeth on the blade with the cut edge of an existing piece works fabulously well.
A similar strategy I've used when I've known that there was going to be cuts that I couldn't sequence like that is to cut "as built" story sticks with scrap dimensional lumber and write what they are right on the board.
Additional Anecdata: I head about BioGaia's Gastrus tablets here on HN a couple of years ago and they have dramatically improved my wife's quality of life as well. She suffered from significant GI problems. We bought a pack of the BioGaia tablets based on an anecdote here. Within about 3 weeks her year-long GI problems were gone. She discontinued the tablets and the GI issues stayed away. About 18 months later, after a period of heavy stress and travel, her GI issues returned and then disappeared again after another round of BioGaia tablets.
The problems was all my fault :-) I was trying to use a port that was not designed for serial data. When data was sent across it was getting mashed.
I think it's because both ports were not uart, therefore when the binary data was sent if they were not perfectly in sync it would get mashed, I might have been able to solve it by sending a clock as well. But the easier option was to just change everything to the uart ports and it magically worked.
It was probably due to the lack of flow control. Serial doesn't work well when it's one-way. I did something similar to send logs waaaay back in the day, and it would constantly flip bits or send characters out of sequence, etc. I had to transmit very slowly to get it to work stably without any flow control. I want to say that I limited it to 9600 kbps before it started to become reliable.
For that matter, why the optocoupler at all? You only need it if the systems are at different electrical potentials, and even then they are galvanically isolated on the Pis by the magnetics in the Ethernet.
But I guess it's not the same as being asked "where's the air gap" pointing at the optocoupler, and saying "there it is"
In the past I have worked in defence, for highly sensitive stuff they wouldn't even allow a common ground between two networks.
That's why I chose an option iolsator, it ensures the two devices are electrically isolated.
It's overkill for this application, but I wanted to set something up right, and if I ever have another project like this that needs to be more secure, it's ready to go.
> In the past I have worked in defence, for highly sensitive stuff they wouldn't even allow a common ground between two networks.
I actually agree very much with this. If you're looking for strong assurance that there is no possible back-channel, devices like optocouplers help significantly. It's not hard for me to think of a way to surreptitiously send data backwards through a common ground, or normal silicon diode, or a magnetic coupler like an Ethernet transformer, but optoisolators make it significantly more challenging.
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