hagbard_c

OK, down-voter, I suppose you don't like some of my other comments and thought to 'take revenge' by down-voting anything I posted recently but, honestly, why this one? What exactly triggered you about my memories of reading Jules Verne? Don't you realise using the down-vote button in this way gives away your game? Some of you even tried to flag me yesterday, such a... sad... spectacle.

No, it is not euro-centric. The previous US regime also spent like drunks, did you forget about all the stimulus packages which pushed inflation up to almost 10%?

Please stop pressing that down-vote button on anything outside the desired narrative. What nbajka says is true, corruption is universal. It is also true worldwide, not just in Europe. Corruption knows no ideological boundaries. Power corrupts, politics is about power, those in power sometimes abuse it. Yes, right-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as left-wing politicians. Yes, left-wing politicians are sometimes as corrupt as right-wing politicians. There's corrupt centrists as well.

You do realise the same is true for moves from the left to the right? The left spends until the coffers are empty, gets voted out by those fed up with the miserable state of the economy, the right takes over and brings things back on track through austerity measures, the economy wakes up but austerity is still demanded due to the size of the mess left by the lefties. Those same lefties point at the blooming economy and complain that only the rich get to profit while we live in austerity, vote for us and everyone gets a free beer and pony. People vote the left in, they start spending like crazy until the cycle repeats. Been there, seen it happen several times.

Drop the labels, preferred victim groups and excuses for your preferred ideology, heap everything together and you're getting closer to the truth:

My big fear about politicians is corruption, authoritarian tendencies and stupidity

There, done, put a pin in it. There's corrupt politicos on all sides of the spectrum, there's authoritarians on all sides and stupidity seems to be endemic.

Dissent from the desired narrative does not equal trolling? I may not agree with some of the west-coast liberal narrative and I am not wont to keep silent out of fear of karma loss but that does not make me a troll.

This is a discussion site, not a karma/likes farm. There are sure to be many others here who do not agree with the described narrative but who keep silent or, at most, create throwaway accounts to say something they know they will be 'punished' for. I think this is the wrong way to go so I just use my regular account even if that means I have to deal with people like you who call dissenters 'trolls' or worse, down-vote or flag in attempts to get dissent out of view. So be it, accounts are cheap.

My first modem, also around that time was... 10 Dutch guilders (around $4.50 at that time). That's 'cause I bought a suspiciously modem-looking (markings, phone line transformer, line relay, etc.) full-size rack-mount board at a swap meet, no documentation on the thing, bunch of switches and leds on the front, S100-like connector on the back, 'sold for parts'. I traced the circuitry, managed to work out its intricacies, figured out what voltage it needed to work, powered it up and started experimenting. After a few days I had it worked out, created an interface to my C-64 to run the thing through the user port - with pulse auto-dial! - and built ye olde wooden enclosure with built-in power supply and a single-slot rack mount for the thing. It worked for years and was my first way to get online with that machine. It was the classiest modem I ever had, bar none.

I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host.

A car battery with reduced range is still perfectly useable as a storage battery for a PV system. I got a high-voltage hybrid inverter when I built our PV (solar) system specifically for that reason: high-voltage EV batteries will appear on the market which I can use to create energy storage. Commercial storage systems are still too expensive for what they offer but used EV batteries are starting to appear at far more reasonable price levels. If a pack which used to store 90 kWh now only stores 70 kWh but costs 1/10 of a similarly-sized commercial storage system when combined with a suitable controller then I'd just get a bunch of them.

He probably just keeps it to remind himself what can happen when the facts about the ${TLA} spying on ${citizens} come out, i.e. make sure to keep it hush-hush this time or you'll end up in ${a_bad_place}.

The first section of your comment does not make sense. I point out the possible proximal origin of the 'everything is political' line and mention that 'We' (which in this context clearly indicates the 'internet population' in a given time frame) did not as a rule throw slurs or label people. There's no contradiction here since these two lines - origin of a line, habits of an internet generation - are not connected unless you (erroneously) assume that the denizens of the early internet were all Marxists. They weren't, that was back in the days the 'Evil Empire' still existed and Marxism was still known to be a bad idea by most people.

Then to the rest:

The first line you quote - Comrade Knee-Jerk - is satire so that is in a different category.

The second is a good example, "useful idiots" of the "DSA" which in my opinion they absolutely are but you're right in calling me out, guilty as charged. They're still useful idiots though...

The third line isn't an example of me labelling anyone, there's no label there.

Let's take a gander at your rather prolific commenting habits, just to see what you're up to:

Their submission history is reminiscent of other motivated accounts that dilute the website's intellectual curiosity with zero-sum editorials. It's certainly deliberate, and their comment history seems to defend the submissions rather than conceding their obvious low quality.

No, you are willfully misinterpreting the purpose of their project and suggesting completely unrelated, insane and unrealistic remediation.

I stopped after two pages. Maybe you need to check the guidelines once more, especially those sections regarding astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like (first comment) and respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith (second comment).

Now that we've both taken apart each other's commenting histories maybe we can go back to the regular program, post and comment about things we're interested in and try to keep the politicking at bay? It has been made much harder by the way the don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle rule is applied but we can still try. Just assume that the person on the other side of the screen might not agree with you whom to vote for but otherwise has many of the same interests. That does not make him or her evil and it does not mean his or her opinion on unrelated subjects is not worth considering.