I think you misunderstand the economic choice that smaller farms are making. When you can get a 50 year old workhorse tractor for 20k that you can actually maintain yourself, it makes far more sense than any 200k+ tractor whether diesel or electric. Additionally folks are used to diesel, they’ve already got a big tank on the property that they refill every few months, and they might not have sufficient electrical connection to get several of the giant swapable battery packs for their tractors and keep one on the charge while they work.

If farmers were starting from scratch, sure it might make sense to go all solar and all electric, but these are folks who are constantly squeezed for cash, constantly relying on crop insurance and well-timed loans and subsidies to stay afloat living on 200 year old farms that have been in the family since the land was stolen from the native Americans, and probably still using the equipment dad bought in the 60s and 70s because that’s the most financially viable option.

Dude two of the colleges I toured when I was a high schooler ended up shutting down and losing their accreditation. Only reason I didn’t attend either of them was my parents told me they were too expensive and I was just a high schooler with zero concept of money who had yet to work at all (and honestly I had a bunch of other contributing problems but that’s well outside of the scope of this discussion)

That’s the dumbest part of it all is that pirates seriously get the best movie/TV experience of anyone. I mean, maybe if you spend a shitton on DVD and BluRays to rip you can match that experience, but even that can be legally dubious depending on the jurisdiction

I’ll take a pair of rubber feet too!

Honestly I love the idea. I wonder if they’re planning on the obvious next step of adding a media player that will work similarly, turn it on with a disc or SD card inserted and it’ll play the DVD or music

That argument suggests you bought the lie of what the age verification is for. When every service is required to perform age verification, it quickly becomes not about porn but control.

They’re trying to close the Pandora’s box that is the internet decades after the fact, and they’re learning the hard way how impossible and unpopular that is

I mean it’s all licensed by the frequency and antenna transmit power, so long distance is possible with the right choice of protocol, antenna and frequency you can get a surprisingly long distance with unlicensed spectrum. Ubiquity makes some directional antenna for wirelessly connecting 2 sites that operate in the 2.4 and 5ghz ranges that can connect over distances of multiple kilometers

Flash drives of banned foreign films are the one method of accessing foreign media that north Koreans realistically have. It’s extremely hard to prevent people plugging a flash drive into their computer in their home to view some media

I’ve seen deer just wander through my yard in town

My aunt is a teacher at one of the poorer schools in LA. She says every once in a while they’ll arrange a plow to bring a load of snow down from the mountains and dump it in the parking lot for the kids to play in it for the afternoon until it melts

Oh absolutely not realistic as a whole (at least not currently, maybe after another decade or two of increasingly destructive hurricanes, wildfires and floods there will be the political appetite), but I do think some of the individual pieces of legislation have a chance.

The remote work one would be the easiest single piece of legislation on my list since the only people hurt by it are commercial property investors

The railroad nationalization almost happened once already following the second largest bankruptcy in US history and the railroad industry is far more consolidated now than it was in the Penn Central and Conrail days (there’s literally 5 major railroads: Canadian National, CPKC, Union Pacific, BNSF and Norfolk Southern. And to top it off UP and NS have announced their merger which is pending government approval) so if one of these major railroads goes bankrupt we could very well be looking at nationalization again

Carbon taxes have been tossed around as an idea for quite a while, and it’s been partially implemented in some areas (usually in conjunction with a carbon credit marketplace so polluting industries and buy carbon credits from negative carbon industries, similar to how automakers currently buy CAFE credits from Tesla to avoid paying extra penalties for their gas guzzling trucks and SUVs)

Easier ADU permits and easier multifamily zoning have been passing piecemeal city by city and state by state across the country, so that’s already a thing in many places

Right to repair legislation has been gaining steam and several states have already passed right to repair legislation

Many cities have been creating ebike rebates because the more people who bike the less the city has to spend repairing roads (road wear grows exponentially based on the weight and number of wheels on a vehicle. A single small car making a trip down a road does a much wear as thousands of bicycle trips, and a single semi truck trip does a much wear as thousands of large SUV trips, so there’s real maintenance cost savings for cities in decreasing car trips, not to mention how reducing car trips reduces traffic thereby saving the city on costly road reconfiguration)

The EPA was created under Nixon because air quality had gotten so bad that whoever was in power at that point would’ve done something. It’s honestly foreseeable that the state of the climate will get bad enough to force even the most reluctant government to change. China for example created huge subsidies for electric vehicle and solar panel production because the air quality in Bejing and other major cities became so terrible

The current Amtrak Connects Us plan is a much smaller but still ambitious expansion plan, and the subsidies that were created for it give it a solid chance of surviving Republican legislature (it’s dolled out as grants to meet specific milestones, so by the time any government starts trying to claw back money they already have studies into the viability of the given rail line so it’s already known just how much demand exists) additionally the first couple of services are already in place and have been greatly exceeding ridership projections so there’s absolutely appetite for more passenger rail options

So in short, yeah my policy vision isn’t likely as a single unified vision, but many of the policies are already showing promise and being implemented on a smaller scale, so there’s a solid chance of some of these policies becoming reality for more of the country

This response is focused on the US since that’s the place I already have a very good idea of the current laws and challenges affecting climate action. I’d start by passing the following legislation immediately:

• Mandate remote work options for all positions that can be performed remotely. We saw during the pandemic how much commuting to the office negatively impacts the environment as well as people’s lives.
• Carbon tax with a gradual but short (say 4 year) implementation period where it rachets up to the full tax value for carbon emissions directly created by the industry. The carbon tax is intended to make polluting and wasteful choices far more expensive than cleaner alternatives as well as raise tax dollars for significant infrastructure redevelopment
• Create new taxes and tax breaks plus subsidies for rental properties with poor insulation to encourage updating all rental properties to have modern insulation (and similar tax breaks and subsidies for homeowners to upgrade their insulation)
• Federally allow the construction of ADUs in all residential zone types (likely also creating a more relaxed permitting process and building code for ADUs to reduce cost and encourage their construction)
• Federally allow 2 family housing in all single family zoning (meaning a single family zoned lot can now have the main dwelling converted into a duplex plus an ADU constructed, tripling the permitted density)
• Federal tax break and subsidy for the purchase, maintenance and use of bicycles including ebikes and bike trailers (many places are bikable but people just don’t choose to bike. For example, every small town is mostly bikable within town save for any highways that cut through them, and residential streets are very safe places to bike even if they don’t contain dedicated bike infrastructure)
• Gradually but significantly increase annual vehicle registration fees, racheting them from the current ~$120 per year to ultimately cost several thousand dollars per year, with some discounts available to those who do not live in an incorporated community, NEVs and classic cars, thereby greatly discouraging vehicle ownership and car commuting. Also instituting significantly higher registration fees for heavier vehicles

In the longer term I’d also take the following steps:

• Use carbon taxes to fund a massive transit shift away from private cars to build more railroads and better bike infrastructure
• Nationalize the north American freight rail network and turn all railroads into rail operators, and either an existing federal agency or a new agency takes over maintainance, dispatching and expansion of the rail network, significantly lowering the bar for new railroad services and companies to be created
• Massively expand Amtrak services with many new routes and expanded service on existing routes

And for an even longer term cultural shift to encourage slower growth I’d pass the following legislation:

• Impliment UBI as an eventual replacement for all social safetynet programs. Probably a value of around $1k/month per adult and $3k/month per retiree/disabled adult would make it enough that creative individuals could live entirely off of the UBI but low enough to still encourage working. Most importantly this UBI would be decoupled from the stock market so stock market crashes would not affect people’s ability to retire. This fits into climate legislation as it removes one of the primary incentives for infinite economic growth (saving for retirement)
• Strong right to repair legislation combined with minimum warranty terms of 5-10 years (plus minimum expectations for warranties such as limiting how long a repair/replacement may take to receive) for products to ensure higher quality construction
• Greatly expand the EPA’s powers so that a nimble agency can forcibly stop companies from finding new ways to legally pollute our world, as well as providing a second mandate to the EPA to help consumers live more sustainably (this could come in the form of EPA-funded repair workshops and tool libraries for example, probably also EPA-funded vehicle rentals including ebike and ebike trailer rentals so that people can more easily go car-free)

And that’s what I have off the top of my head. Start with the changes that will make a big impact without requiring individual lifestyle change, and in the longer term financially encourage a more sustainable lifestyle. Removing the financial forces that encourage wasteful resource consumption can be all of the incentive needed for people to live much more sustainably and can be enough to put the world’s climate goals within reach

Office 365 requires an account to validate the license. Potentially it might work differently for the long term licensed versions (which features released to O365 now wouldn’t reach until the next LTSC release), but I’ve not performed the initial install and licensing of those for clients yet

Or for home users who aren’t already invested in a Microsoft ecosystem your best bet is to just use Libre Office

Edit: I accidentally made Office exclusive to leap years!

My understanding is their economic model has every creator being a part owner of the platform

Is there a good guide to passing cookies to yt-dlp? Its one of those things I’ve been meaning to learn but never quite got around to yet…

Once you have stuff running on an old computer you’ll get to know what you actually need and can spend your money more intelligently. If you do buy anything, buy an ~8 year old corporate desktop. They’re cheap as chips because they’re close to ewaste, but 4/6th Gen Intel systems have enough performance to really do a ton with in the homelab scene

“They’re” is a contraction of “they are” “Their” is possessive “There” is a directed place

“The problem with the MTV generation is they are kids” wouldn’t make any sense

Relevant XKCD

https://xkcd.com/973/

Yup post ride ice cream to as a treat to cool down and replenish sugar after sweating a bunch. I otherwise avoid treats/excessive sugar, but something about ice cream after an intense workout just is amazing

Both of these were in the last couple of weeks, so…