Mad Max the musical now on Broadway

It would be easy to find enough solar panels to charge an electric vehicle in most sunny areas, though it would probably be easier to just look for a large enough existing install and skip all the DIY. (Just look for the shiniest roof.)

But I think the real problem is in the EV itself. Batteries self-discharge and chemically degrade over time, so unless the apocalypse was recent, a lot of EVs you find might have damaged batteries, especially if fully discharged to begin with.

You could cannibalize one or more EVs to cobble together enough good cells to get past the safety cutoffs, but it would take a while and you would need to be careful since internal voltage in EVs tends to be high (like 400-800 volts).

TLDR: if this is a movie depiction, definitely use a montage.

This and the following thread are great guidelines for would-be PMs.

Personally, however, I will avoid the role for the rest of my life, because it’s too much work.

She sent you on a Costco run alone. She knew the score.

Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

• Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
• Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
• Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
• Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
• Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
• Telemetry refers to the data harvesting apparatus. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad but it is easily abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is a precaution.
• MS = Microsoft
• OSS = Open Source Software
• Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, software and file system access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
• Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing only what they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, the resources they need, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge the only equivalent for Windows to date is Wine and its successors like Proton.

Many of these concepts are IT-related, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple to use if you pick one of the premade playbooks. (The AtlasOS playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

Edit: added docker

Just a tip: if you must use consumer editions of Windows regularly, consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.

The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.

The most popular playbooks strip out AI components and services (there are many more than just Recall) but also disable all telemetry and cloud-based features, replace MS bloatware with preferred OSS, curtail a truckload of annoying Windows behaviors, setup more sensible group policies than the defaults, and so forth.

I have a few custom playbooks for recurring use cases so that, when one presents, I can spin up an instance quickly without the usual hassle and risk.

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I never figured out how, but it tended to feel impossibly early in the game too, as if the opponent had already been developing their economy for at least as long as I had before the game had even started.

I agree, and once would have dismissed the sociopolitical pragmatism described by the commenter above as “lowering our discourse to their level” or something of the sort.

I eventually realized that this instinctive criticism was valid only if they were still growing as people, and capable of more than what they are now. The assumption is that setting higher expectations might convince them to “elevate their discourse” if only to save face.

But what I’ve come to realize is that this was far too much to expect. By all the evidence available to date, these folks never advanced far beyond the emotional maturity of the average middle schooler. At this level of maturity, superficial and public humiliation is quite literally the most serious attack, as it bloodies waters presumed to be infested with sharks.

Yes it’s pathetic, and yes “stooping to their level” feels gross, but Republican voters are only enthused by policies which benefit them directly or hurt others they feel deserve it. Perceived power matters a lot to them, and seems to be attached to explicit expressions of it that are similarly pathetic— as in, truck nuts, “I am very smart,” “I have a great brain and concepts of a plan,” etc.

So public humiliation of trump for an otherwise petty and irrelevant issue (especially by someone he can’t touch without losing a chunk of his base) absolutely succeeds in making him look weak, and making Trump look weak is directly correlated with his voters’ loss of motivation to vote (see RWA personality type/disorder; it’s fascinating).

Enough of these successful offensives will cause his most die-hard voters to lose faith in him (caveat: to seek out somebody stronger) so to de-motivate a current right-wing conservative voter, likely we must accept that petty “mean girl” tactics are the only language they understand, due to their arrested emotional development, and robbing them of their “strongman” is both easy and effective. Ridicule the emperor with no clothes and his voters, who are themselves unclothed, might go home and rethink their fashion statement.

TLDR: It sucks but crass pragmatism may be warranted in this case. The first language of Trump voters is small-mindedness, and it’s often the only one they understand, so we might consider rolling our sleeves up and speaking it if only so future generations don’t have to.

Edit: corrected swype errors.

“But the blue suit is MY BRAND!”

That’s fair. It certainly does feel like regression. There are all kinds of social values gen x and y remember being taught that somehow were forgotten by the very people who taught them.

“Somehow” is not terribly difficult to work out once we start pulling threads. This well-oiled machine of right-wing propaganda we have today took decades to evolve. Right-wing narrative framing grew in popularity during the mccarthy era, and expanded continually after Raegan’s repeal of fairness doctrine with the rise of [neo]conservative AM talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of Murdoch-style tabloid journalism, digital platforms, the algorithmic feeds, tea party, brexit, etc. The onslaught of reality denial and fear is breathtaking.

The post-truth, “alternative facts” era we’re in now is so chaotic that even the educated who should be well-equipped to tell fact from fiction often find it hard to recognize satire, of all things. Conservative boomers, however, most of whom lived in rural areas and didn’t continue education past high school if they graduated at all, have been heavily indoctrinated. And once they started joining the global forum en masse in the 90s and 00s, their indoctrination was inadvertently converted to radicalism by engagement-oriented media saturation.

This subset of boomers is mostly to blame for the generation’s poor reputation, I suspect. They had already been on a steady diet of right-wing propaganda for decades, even if they weren’t yet fully radicalized. But their salient characteristic was how easy they were to manipulate, since they would tolerate and even dutifully spread any lie that affirmed their existing opinions. They could be motivated by prejudice due to their isolation, fear due to their lack of knowledge, and tribalism due to their economic struggles. Above all they were reliable voters, donators, and consumers, making them the perfect marks for populists, demagogues, oligopolists, and hostile foreign powers.

Sometimes I feel like this group really didn’t stand a chance in the face of protracted psychological manipulation from so many groups. I’ve wanted to see the good in them and somehow bring them back to the light. But increasingly I fear that their radicalization is intractable, and there simply isn’t the time left for the journey back. Regardless, the damage is done, if not yet fully realized, and all we can do is stop the poison and rebuild from whatever is salvageable.

The poison is capital. In spite of the systematic brainwashing of the populous, one of the last moorings to fidelity and truth in US politics were the public servants themselves, many of whom pursued politics as a vocation or calling and believed in the mission of a government for the people, even a few republicans. But we let money into politics by degrees, then all at once with citizens united. With that case, corruption of the government was legalized and representation was officially bound to capital. Until that is struck down, and strict regulation of money in politics is enforced, any and all political progress will be thwarted. Capital will continue poisoning our government until there’s nothing left to save. It has to be removed.

While this is all plausible, may describe your personal experience fully, and may to some extent be true for a subset of the population, it appears that the notion of the baby boomer generation being, or ever having been, more progressive than the generations that followed is unequivocally false, according to any high quality polling data I’ve yet found. If this is something you are reading somewhere, I would be curious to know where so I can discover how they arrive at that conclusion.

I’m certainly not saying there aren’t progressive boomers or conservative younger people. There’s always a spectrum for every group, no matter how you define the cohorts. The baby boomers on the whole just happen to skew more conservative than the younger generations, and it is an especially strong correlation at that.

I dunno, some of them might suddenly have a great deal of potential

Edit: yeah this is misinformation

———

Wait, are you serious? It would shock the hell out of me, but it would be so encouraging to learn that boomers were changing their minds.

Unless we’re talking about a specific national progressive policy that benefits them directly, like improving social security, or local progressive policies they rely on, like increasing agricultural subsidies, in my life I’ve only ever seen that cohort grow more conservative.

Or are you saying that gen xyz are rapidly becoming more conservative, such that they’ve surpassed the boomers?

I’m not disbelieving you, just trying to make this make sense since it defies the trend. I’ll look for these polls but if there are specific ones you mean, I would be interested to know which.

Update: so far I’m finding the complete opposite to be true (at least from anything close to a reputable source, which doesn’t include opt-in online polls). It appears the generational group often referred to as boomers is now polling more conservative than ever before. Part of this trend might be explained by the fact that we are losing the oldest boomers first, and these were the ones who had the chance to identify with the countercultural movements of the 60s and 70s, whereas most of the younger boomers, who were famously outspoken fans of the Vietnam war and Reagan, are still present.

even old data retroactively

My impression is that retroactive opt-out data grifting represents the lion’s share of user data sales today, and that it’s a popular strategy because it works.

The formula: appraise the data and find your buyers in advance. THEN update the privacy policies to include the data you want to sell. That way, the moment new policies go into effect, all you have to do is hit the transfer button.

After that, it’s done. Users that find and flick your new opt-out toggle only stop you from selling their data to additional buyers, and that’s nbd since data brokers only pay top-dollar for exclusive access to stuff that’s not already on the market.

It’s why I consider the introduction of any opt-out privacy policy an explicit admission of data theft.

💙

Ah! Yeah it’s been a while but I seem to recall seeing alkaline batteries in a some freezers or refrigerators sometimes when I was a kid, along with other curiosities like rolls of film. No one ever explained why.

IIRC freezing accelerates the chemical degradation of lithium ion (especially if you attempt to charge the battery at the same time) and tends to lower both the voltage and amperage of most battery chemistries, but it seems plausible that this might

1. temporarily defeat a cell protection circuit, allowing a charging procedure to initialize, or
2. delay a thermal failsafe cut-off of a damaged cell long enough to boot or charge a device

Regardless, for those tuning in at home, best to keep your batteries out of the freezer, especially lithium types, unless spicy pillows are what you’re after.