There’s an interesting argument that honey can be vegan, by that criteria.

A bee colony is not generally trapped in a hive. They are capable of leaving, if it’s not to their standards, or they find somewhere between. The catch is that artificial bee hives are amazing for bees, compared to natural locations. The only catch is the “rent” taken by the eldritch creatures. They never take too much however, only taking excess the hive doesn’t need.

Basically bees could be argued to be paying rent, in honey, for high quality accommodation.

I’ve not tried reflashing, but the os seems mostly vanilla android. I’ve had a couple of OS updates since I got my phone, so it’s not just fire and forget. I’m not sure about long term however. You might also have issues with the thermal camera, if you reflash. I don’t know how it’s wired internally, and whether a non custom app will play nice.

They seem to be aiming at builders/workmen as a rugged phone with long battery life. They also seem to be trying to build a proper brand, not just a throw away one. Hopefully that means they will at least do security updates for quite a while. But that’s speculation.

Oh, and it’s a brick, weight wise. I personally like that, but it’s quite polarising when people try it.

I got fed up with this and ran across ulefone. Some of their phones are downright ridiculous but I’m happy with mine.

It’s a waterproof brick with good grip and a 10,000mAh battery. Good for up to 4 days. It’s also got rubberised grips and takes a beating. Oh, it also has a headphone port, and thermal imaging.

It does have a pci-e socket… 😁

Steam’s main thing is that they have recognised that killing the golden goose is a bad thing for everybody. They have consistently played for long term growth and profits, over purely short term gains.

Steam has made mistakes, but their demonstrated values have been shown to be mostly compatible with mine. I can work with that.

Also, them being privately owned means that they are less have seagull investors swooping in and demanding short term gains now now now.

Adopting a rescue dog has various home checks and interviews and welfare checks. Leaving hospital with a baby: “Do you have a car seat for them?”, “Yes…”, “You’re all good to go then!”, “…”

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

Just hard a read through, and there are a lot of problematic flaws in your concept.

In the first section, corruption will be a HUGE issue. The groups deciding on pay rates will have insane power, which will attract bribes etc. E.g the powerful pushing down wages in their field of interest for short/medium terms profits.

On top of that is the inefficiency problem. Very few jobs are equal. E.g. a sawmill worker, working on the outskirts of a big down will want different compensation to one working completely out in the sticks. There’s also no system to adjust for changing demand. If you’ve not got enough builders, tough shit, no pay increase to pull in talent.

Trying to cover these will create an insanely complex and problematic bureaucracy, that will grow rapidly out of control. It’s basically a version of what the USSR and communist China did. Reading up on how they failed could be enlightening to you.

On to the second point. You’ve again got massive inefficiencies. Often the blemished bananas etc don’t go to waste. They are used to make things like banana ice-cream or banana bread etc. You also jumped straight to processed foods. There is no accounting for making something better from cheaper, but higher quality ingredients.

It’s a LOT more efficient to just work out the cost of feeding a person (in a particular location). If it costs $X to feed a person for a month, then just give them each $X. They can decide how to most efficiently use that money. Some will buy basic meals, others will cook using higher quality ingredients, still others will add to it to cover take away each night. All get fed, and efficiencies get maximised on a local level.

As for taxation. It’s a good idea in principle, but would have problems in implementation. It’s already a problem that unphotogenic causes get underfunded. Your idea would be equivalent to America using “Go fund me” to cover medical costs. It works, ish, but is horribly unfair.

A better solution might be a donation match system. You pay $Y and the government diverts $Y of your taxes (up to how much you paid) to a cause of your choice. The UK government does something like it already. Gift aid allows UK tax payers to donate to a charity. The charity can then claim 25% of the amount from the government. E.g. a £100 donation becomes £125 to the charity.

Your ideas are a good leaping off point. A few useful bits of advice.

Check to see how an idea can be corrupted.

Check if it’s been done before, and how it worked/failed. Also look at how inefficient your idea is.

A large amount of inefficiency can be worse than unfairness. A split where some get $300 while others get $100 looks unfair. However, if the fix leaves everyone with $80 then the unfair version still wins overall (everything else being equal).

That would effectively create a planned economy. In theory it could work. Unfortunately, the human element cripples it. How do you rank the value of doctors against cleaners? How do you rank bananas against bread? The core elements were tried with communism, and found to fall severely short.

What has been found, in Africa, with micro loans/grants is that people are a LOT more efficient at maximising value locally than a lot of applied rules. Giving them money (e.g. to start a business) is a lot more effective than giving them resources directly. It uses capitalism to optimise on the local scale.

One of the key things with UBI is letting people and businesses sort things out on the small scale. While capitalism has massive issues, it’s VERY good at sorting this sort of problem.

My personal preference would be a closed loop tax based system. Basically, a fixed percentage of money earned (e.g. 15%) is taxed on everyone. That is then distributed on a per capita basis. There would be a cutoff point where you pay more than you receive. The big advantage is that it’s dynamic to the economy. If the economy shrinks, then UBI shrinks with it, encouraging people to work more to compensate. It provides a floor of income, letting people negotiate working conditions, without the fear of homelessness. It also channels money from the rich, where it moves slowly, to the poor, where it has a far higher velocity.

No sane UBI plan will do this. The goal is to cover Basic needs, not replace working. What it does attempt to do away with is the requirement to work yourself to the bone to barely survive. Working to pay for things more than the basics is still expected.

A useful side effect is to rebalance the power dynamics between larger companies and their employees. It’s a lot harder to abuse someone if they won’t be homeless within 3 months if they quit.

If it smells like pork, you’re holding it wrong.

For nieve signal distances, that can sometimes be true. That’s not how starlink works however. It bounces the signal between satellites, each adding latency. Overall, fibre wins in almost every situation.

The bigger problem is saturation. Most things you can apply to radio waves can be applied to light in a fibre. The difference is you can have multiple fibres on the same run. This massively increases bandwidth, and so prevents congestion.

Just checked the numbers. Starlink is up at 550km. That means a minimum round trip of 1100km. In order to beat a fibre run, you are looking at over 2000km distance. Even halving that to (optimistically) account for angles, that’s still a LONG run to an initial data center.

Off the joke topic, but something that made it make a lot more sense.

Scientists have studied this. Women do what are known as IOIs (Indicators of Interest). Most men can pick up on these. When they flirt, the rate doubles, or even more.

The problem lies in the base rate. It can vary a lot, from 5/hour to 120/hour. At this point men are left with a conundrum. Is a 60/minute lady a 10, desperately flirting, or a 100, who’s slightly off put by you. The lady’s friends have an instinctive read on this rate, so it’s quite obvious. Most men have been burnt however, so tend to be over cautious. This can lead to a lot of flirting at oblivious men, who think you’re just being polite.

In the UK, they’ve taken some tills out. About 4 tills become 16 self checkouts. They still have plenty of tills for normal checkout.

It definitely lets less staff get more people through, in less time. So far, it’s not been excessively abused over here. It’s also made my life significantly less annoying.

To be fair, that’s a fairly universal problem. In the UK it’s a basket Vs trolley split. They do have trolley self checkouts, but it’s separate, and mainly intended for scan as you shop.

On a side note, what’s with American supermarkets not having baskets at all. Did I just have really weird luck?

I went to the US for a few days. Their self checkouts seem to be universally awful, compared to the UK or German equivalent.

While the hardware is far less reliable, and more convoluted, it’s the users that seem the main issue. Self checkout is generally intended (over here) to shift the fast, small shops out of the main queues. 1 big line and a dozen or more tills. In the states they treat it as just another till. Built for trollies, and 1 queue per till. Combined with a slow user and it becomes hell rapidly.

I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.

As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.

I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.

I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.

The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.