Shog9

This particular misanthropy does not seem to have a particularly strong affinity for either conservative or progressive groups; it is an opportunistic predator that attacks the weak and stupid in both camps, and has for generations.

Be wary of anyone who argues the poor should go without food or protection from the elements, regardless of what flimsy justification they give for their cruelty; the most dangerous to each of us are those who appeal to our own beliefs.

That's not actually a problem, it's just good ol' pessimism of the devil-you-know / why bother locking the door when the next thief has a brick variety.

The OP here isn't describing a hypothetical - folks are prosecuted for doing these sorts of things, just like folks occasionally get prosecuted for breaking & entering. If that goes away, we're left with the impossible task of creating unbreakable windows or - far more likely - we don't get to have nice things.

The concern is not that you make a mistake. The concern is that you absolutely cannot trust a significant portion of the advertisers who would be your market for these ads, and who would cheerfully hammer you with attempts to get around compliance until they succeed.

These are also the folks this law is actually aimed at. So mission accomplished...

Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.

You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!

What smelendez is alluding to is the matter of who is liable while fraud is being resolved.

In the US, a charge on your bank card results in at least a hold on your bank account - money you can't spend on anything else until the hold is lifted. Worst-case, there can be significant fees associated with this (overdraft, declined payments, etc.).

For most of us, that's a much bigger problem than a debt we may or may not end up paying interest on.

From personal experience, getting a credit card company to quickly resolve fraud cases is also much easier than getting a bank to do the same, even when it's ultimately the same institution.

Well... Book clubs, study groups, fraternal organizations, etc. have agendas that structure conversation. I've found this useful for even 1:1 conversations with friends.

Naturally, it's possible to take this too far; letting the conversation flow naturally before occasionally snapping back to the agenda is both more enjoyable and often more productive.

...this is also a common podcast format.

I have never heard the phrase "private podcast" used in this sense before (vs the group / company internal sense), but... I kinda like it; sets up some potential useful expectations!

Because cameras alone do nothing useful, and there's precious little evidence these are being used to help address petty vandalism.

The UK already went down this road years ago - cameras everywhere, public restrooms nowhere, prompt and automatic ticketing for parking violations but precious little in the way of assistance from humans should you need it. The shut-in dotage of a former empire too afraid to leave its house.

I can't speak to your specific scenario, but in general a "balance" that is missing in many communities is a clear line between pedagogy and research (or debate). Often this is because _initially_ the community is small and the distance in knowledge between members is minor - debate and knowledge-sharing go hand in hand. As the community grows though, the number of people joining who have little or no baseline knowledge compared to the founding group grows larger, until eventually it dwarfs the size of the core group.

This is when co-mingling becomes actively dangerous. New members may (often, will) lack the necessary knowledge to identify core vs. fringe beliefs, to contextualize debates, to recognize insider "shorthand" for what it is, etc. They need (and are possibly even looking for) a useful education, not to become test subjects or disciples. They _cannot_ be engaging in useful research at this stage, even if this is what they wish to do (there are some unfortunate status-seeking behaviors that can come into play here).

Also coming with this scale are a crap-ton of meta discussions concerning basic community governance, including those around "how quickly do we have to kick out crackpots to keep them from recruiting here?" Those discussions _also_ shouldn't be co-mingled with the educational structure, although it's good for new folks to have some visibility into them and at least know that this sort of governance _exists_ in a tangible way (because if it's opaque, that thing you noted about crackpots playing victim becomes a LOT more effective).

This is all a huge amount of boring, tedious work, and... An awful lot of communities start in on it waaaay too late or don't bother at all. What if it stops being fun and exciting and everyone leaves? Of course, there are worse ways to go, but folks tend not to think about those until after they've happened.

> If we can be accused of anything in this context, it's not kicking bad people out aggressively enough, which seems very different from fostering bad ideas.

It's not very different. It's barely different at all.

Right now, I have five tomato plants growing in my garden. Two of them I planted; the other three grew from seeds left in the ground by tomatoes that dropped from plants growing last year. All I did was refuse to uproot them when they sprouted. Five healthy plants, with different origins, but the differences are largely insignificant.

Groups and behaviors are much the same way. I've worked with hundreds of moderators over the years who wished to keep their hands clean and yet express some sort of dismay as to the sorry state of the communities they were nominally responsible for... Such moderators, like a gardener who does not want dirt under their nails, are best encouraged to find other hobbies.

A lot of these designs are an artifact of a time when the panels themselves would have been far and away the most expensive component in the system. The place I'm in originally had 10 125W panels that probably cost north of $8k when installed, and they were mounted on a rotating, tilt-adjustable post. Also the entire house was wired to run off DC as much as possible, with three different wiring schemes throughout and rare & expensive appliances. It reminded me strongly of RV power schemes, and maintenance was probably a huge headache.

I replaced it all with 9kW worth of panels (about $3k, shipped) on 4 simple 60° ground mounts, normal wiring and appliances. Angle is optimized for early spring / late fall - there's effectively no sun in winter, and the rest of the year I have excess power even with fixed, sub-optimal angles.

The diminished cost of panels alone over the past 20 years has transformed "off-grid" from a pastime for wealthy hippies into a reasonable solution for remote living.

In practice, this complexity means you at least have a chance. Most phones and almost all low-power devices will accept power from most chargers and cables. Probably not at a maximum level, but if you're stuck somewhere you can get by.

Power-hungry laptops are trickier, but even so... I've gone a week or more trickle charging a laptop from whatever travel charger I happened to have on hand, using it for a few hours, then putting it in standby and charging it up again until finally the mfg-blessed replacement fast charger arrived. The alternative (and one I was faced with more than once in the bad old days) was "no laptop".

Worst experience I've had to date has been a Norco jump box that will charge via one high-power charger and one cable, a car charger it came with, and ... Via careful back feeding from a benchtop power supply.

Link to that research, please. It would add meaningfully to this discussion.

The folks I know who've been prescribed fentanyl weren't particularly upset about it. It is very potent, and thus measuring the dose properly is very important, but it's not particularly fussy beyond that.

The people you know may be obtaining it from less reliable apothecaries; that can be a real issue.

Funny, you left out "curing" from that list.

All three preservation techniques are practiced today as they have been since antiquity. It is not clear to me where food so preserved are likely to fall on the processed / ultra-processed spectrum...

Sustenance is a health benefit. Shelf life is a health benefit. Convenience is a health benefit.

If you have options when choosing food, a framework that helps you choose the better option is useful. The history of food production is mostly centered around developing options that provide, as a baseline, the three advantages you casually dismiss.