My uncle has lost 4 Google accounts. Two to password loss, one to a fire, one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
The issue isn't the phone, it's that a __government__ is depending on an unregulated private enterprise.
> one to being banned for crimes against currency (having the audacity to live in several countries with different currencies)
What does this "crimes against currency" mean? I live in several countries at once with different currencies, and I never had a problem with this. And top of this, I travel a lot. I have accounts in 5 countries, in 6 currencies. Should I pay attention to something?
I think the point is rather what percentage of people will continue to need to have a phone that is Apple or Google, due to death by a million decisions like these.
This feels like arguing that people wouldn't object to having a shock collar padlocked around their neck because it's not currently shocking them. You don't have to see very many moves ahead to guess what happens if you don't object.
Whereas if the collar is touted as fashionable and the lock is hidden until it's engaged, now your problem is not that people don't care, it's that they don't know, which is different.
So cementing a dependency on paperclip-optimizing foreign megacorps to intermediate all your purchases and communications doesn't allow them to influence your behavior?
So getting shadow banned into a depression spiral that causes you to commit suicide because you think everyone in the world is ignoring you, or locking the account that all your other accounts at all other companies and even government services are tied to with no recourse, or constantly spying on everything you do with all of the corresponding chilling effects... is your point that it's actually worse than a shock collar?
Are you saying there's a threshold percentage somewhere below which you're happy to
A: exclude these people from society or force them to switch to big tech, and
B: accept the consequence where a single other country holds access to everyone's identity information for convenience reasons (because it works for the 99% that are too tech-illiterate to install software that they control instead of the other way around)
We got panels on our house, and a year later I posted the results, costs, savings, etc on the community facebook page.
Tons of people calling me names and saying I’m just virtue signalling.
My reply was that I spend $0, and over the next 20 years I’ll pocket $25k.
Who cares about the environment with free money.
> It takes ~10 years to build a new nuclear generator from breaking ground to first kw to the grid
There is only one country on earth that can currently build a new nuke in 10 years. They are currently building more than the rest of the world combined.
For everyone else it’s 20 years at the absolute minimum.
There are two types of balcony solar. One is bidirectional power flow, i.e., classical balcony solar, and the other is called "zero export", in which a current flow direction sensor on your mains throttles back your inverter if you start to reverse the current flow and export power.
Where I live, in the US, National Grid is okay with balcony solar as long as it's a zero-export balcony solar. Your power utility may take a similar approach. They might also take a "if it doesn't cross the meter, and we can't tell what you're doing, then we can't tell you not to do it"
Anything that requires an electrician to come and modify your mains connections (followed, presumably by a municipal inspection), defeats the main benefit of balcony solar, which is that it is a commodity unit that can be installed by non-experts without any red tape.
Further, the utility's safety concerns do not require any shut off on the mains. Their safty concern is not a new backflow of current; but a backflow of current into an otherwise non-energized grid. Grid-tied inverters will not do this. If the grid goes down, they shut themselves down without any need for an upstream shutoff.
The utility's may have a reasonable business object to back-flow if their meters are such that backflow forces net-metering. Around here, that is a non-issue because net-metering is the law for residential connections anyway. Even in juristictions where net-metering is not the law, I don't find this convincing. The limited capacity of balcony solar means that it won't actually happen in any significant amount, and if it does become a problem, they can shoulder the cost of upgrading their metering equipment.
The simple plug-in and go balcony solar is going to be constrained in many ways. Zero export solar is more sophisticated, yes, does require electrical inspection, but given that it lets you add extra solar panels, battery storage and keep all the power you produce on the house side of the meter. There is some win there. Additionally, if you live where there is time of day rate changes, you can store up cheap energy at night and use it during the day when it's expensive.
Net metering is common, but not everywhere and frequently there's a pricing differential between what you buy and what you sell. My mother leased her solar panels from SolarCity/Tesla. She buys electricity at $0.12 a kilowatt hour, but sells at $.09/kwh. Some of the regulatory shenanigans I've seen regarding balcony solar include no net metering. If you produce excess power, you get no credit for it.
Fly thousands or tens of thousands of $400 drones at the carrier, Chinese light show style, while the carrier uses up all its anti-drone Defense ammunition.
> Sure, but keeping the straight open is not really important, sure gas, fertilizers and a few other commodities are going to get more expensive, but there is no need to put thousands of sailors in harms way.
What is the point of having by far the worlds most expensive military if it can’t be used to at least ostensibly improve the lives of citizens?
So yes, it sure does!
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2503532-australia-is-ge...
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