The previous owners of my house are, from what I hear around town, in hiding from the EPA for kinda similar reasons. All kinds of interesting mail comes for them, only to be returned to sender.
More bumper damage sure, but even at a couple miles per hour, a car where the bumper bolts straight to the frame moving at a couple miles an hour has to dissipate that energy. I'd expect to see some bent metal. My 82 bronco actually has a foot of steel bars that act as sacrificial bumper mounts so the frame doesn't take that impact.
So the whole rigid box thing is kinda a "they dont make em like this anymore" myth. Here's a 1959 Chevy crashed into a 2009 Chevy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_r5UJrxcck. They both crumple, but the 2009 only crumples in the crumple zones. The crumpling on the 1959 impala is more spread out and you can see includes more of the interior
The best move is startups that are profitable while being small. I went to a 13 person company out of college that was profitable when I joined. Rode that train till we got bought by a company that isn't profitable and is now doing layoffs to try and fix that. Now even so I'm still in the division that brings in more profit per programmer than almost any part of the company, but I still don't feel as safe as when we were a 50 person company that was still profitable after almost quadrupling in size.
God damn, thanks for all the info. My original intent wasn't actually even fighting desertification, but rather carbon capture, I kinda saw it as a two birds one stone kinda thing. But this gives me a lot of ideas for a multistep process. It seems like jumping right to peat isnt feasible, but maybe some microclimate engineering could be a first step in anticipation of the bogs.
Even the coal price is super outdated. If you get a reaaaaaaly awesome deal, a ton of anthracite is at minimum $350 a ton now. Those are like 2010 prices.
Entirely possible, but the amount of people who moved to Mastodon after Twitter got lit on fire gives me hope that people might explore options if things go a step too far
I'm actually expecting AI training data to turn into a snake eating its tail. I've been spending the last month not sleeping so I could try to get up to speed on deep learning, and my understanding is that AI trained on AI generated output becomes crap surprisingly quickly, and AI generated content is already starting to proliferate. I have no idea the extent to which this will hinder new models being generated, but I could see it becoming quite the problem.
Coalpail is a really handy site. They've got all the hookups on the cheap coal distributors. The guy I buy from isn't listed, you just call him and ask for an appointment to meet him at his coal shed.
My understanding is that desalinization should be a method of last resort, since it produces a lot of brine that is hard to deal with at scale in a way that isnt bad for the marine life. Depending on the desert, dew collectors might work, although I havent looked into how much water sphagnum moss needs over a year, now much a dew collector can produce, how much evaporation would happen, etc.
I'd have to find somewhere with water near a desert, that's why I specified the edge. My understanding of how some deserts form is that farming techniques or other forces can cause a region to stop retaining water as well, and if this happens in a large enough area, it can lead to less rainfall etc. I remember reading about how herd animals trampling prairie grass and shitting all over it causes it to retain significantly more moisture during dryer times. My thought is that moisture regulating bogs could possibly at least stop deserts from expanding
Fun fact to add about carbon sinks, peat bogs can sink 4-17 times as much CO2 per acre as a forest and acts as an incredible moisture regulator. One of my more out there dreams is to start a big man made peat bog at the edge of a desert.
Relating this back to social media, I've noticed that at times younger people almost exert a social pressure to link all behavior to anything remotely traumatic. I've had some shitty stuff happen to me, life has had it's rough points, but I've always felt pretty lucky overall. I've noticed in arguments with roommates/friends/etc who are younger by a few years, there is significantly more forgiveness towards anything that can even be tangentially linked to something that can be identified as a trauma. I noticed it because over time it led me to start slowly reframing experiences and actually focusing more on the damage they'd done. And its funny, the most traumatizing experience of my life has probably been the push to open up and focus on my traumas. My mental health has improved a lot since distancing myself from people who are too eager to focus on trauma. I wonder how that plays into the whole social mental health conversation. Like when does starting a conversation and destigmatizing a topic turn into feeding it and enabling it? Not to say by any means mental health was handled well before, but I think we might have made something of a deal with the devil in how we frame mental health on social media.
I've found that sometimes the hardest issue is getting mentally unblocked enough to find a problem that seems approachable. One of the best ways I've found to prompt you is to start browsing libraries till you find some that imply a goal you might enjoy. My last fun personal project was making a command line AppleTV remote with a lib for doing such. I'd been so burnt out till I saw a random link to the lib, and it just sucked me in.
Once more start getting thrown out I'll have to pick a couple of trashed ones up and see how hackable they are. I wouldn't be surprised if a good amount of the parts besides the control board ended up being interchangeable just due to sourcing parts from the same suppliers. I'll feel a little more confident in them after that.
I grew up in Maine and have memories of losing power for 10 days in a row. Supplementing with wood is already fairly normal just to save money. Even people who don't regularly burn wood or coal still keep a stove on hand for emergencies. When the power would go out we used to have a fire tending rotation to keep the temps high enough to stop the pipes from freezing. Heating your home is definitely of interest to just about every Mainer.
When I saw futureproofness I thought you were going to talk about repairability. Thats probably my biggest concern. My heating system is largely made out of commodity parts. Aquastats and zone control boxes form the control system, copper pipes soldered on, pex crimped on. All parts you can buy at any hardware store in the country, and all interchangeable. As long as the actual tank and fire tubes in my boilers are intact, I can keep them running as long as there is oxygen. While I know the basics of refrigeration, I don't actually know how interchangeable any of the internals are, but I kinda expect them to be less interchangeable than my old boilers.
My dad is a retired heat and power engineer up in Maine (20something years at a paper mill). We probably spent half of Christmas talking about his new minisplit. He has been tracking his electricity bill and heating oil bills in spreadsheets for years. He still has the old oil boiler in place for emergencies, but as far as I know he hasn't had to use it yet this year. He said he wanted more data before he made a definitive statement about the savings, but initial results seemed pretty promising even in the cold spells we've had