Another good reason to invest in distributed power. Buy your own solar panels, inverter, batteries, windmills, et al. Imagine if every home was responsible for it's own power generation. How quickly we would either stop using so much energy, or add capacity? Guy next door can't afford enough panels? Lend him some juice from the neighborhood until he can. Support local autonomy. Talk to your town.
In the '90s-'00s I worked on a seminal ecomm product for 9 years. It won several awards, blew the competition out of the market, and sold 50K units in the first 8 months. We were bought by a clueless (Canadian) company whose first move was to fire all our graphic designers and stop development of the product. Our doors closed less than two years laters. Bomb Canada. (jk, but I still rue the day my friend (CEO) came to me and said the sale was a good idea, and that I, as employee number one, needed to let him know what I thought. Had I known the eventual outcome, I would have said no.)
-- veteran of the psychic wars :)
Problem: No spider that size (or, really, anything far larger than it's "normal" size) could even move itself around. It would have to have wildly different body structure, and would probably not resemble a "spider".
Which is why there should never be a "cannabis industry". We created a food industry that produces sub-standard food and much of it goes to waste. Applying the same obviously flawed principles to cannabis is another mistake. Pot should be legal to grow/possess/use, but not to buy or sell. There's no point. It's so easy to grow. Just plant some in your backyard and smoke it. Or give it away. That's what it's for.
Every number in this story, from the half a million dollars, to the 10 engineers, to the 1600 hrs, is basically nothing compared to the full goings on of our military. It's like pulling your toothbruch across your front teeth one more time before spitting. An equivalent amount of time, money and effort are probably spent daily, on even less interesting things.
One word: hypnosis. Worked for me in a big way, when I had lost something very valuable and was going nuts trying to remember where I left it (in a drunken journey on foot through a city). I found it, because somewhere deep inside, one part of my brain knew exactly where it was, and the rest of me had forgotten.
People who don't realize that they are alive today because their parents trusted doctors and took the vaccines. These things sort themselves out, over time :)
I started programming in the 70s, on Z80s and a PDP-11. Then I moved to the Apple IIe. Also got a bit of early exposure to MS-DOS in the early 80s. When I first was able to get my hands on an Amiga 1000 (my friend got one as a graduation present), it completely blew my mind. The Amiga is still my favorite, and I have several that still boot up and work fine, even though they are quite a bit older than my kids, who do not always boot up and work. :) There are a bunch of things I still miss when working with Windows (for "work"), even though it is well documented that Microsoft ripped off a bunch of ideas and features from the Amiga (and early Macs). There are, of course, some things I've gotten used to in the intervening years, like increased CPU speeds, but the UI of my old Amigas is actually sometimes more performant than a brand new machine running a modern OS with thousands (or millions) of times the available resources. Go figure.
In the late eighties, we'd render scenes on an accelerated Amiga 2000 that often took over a week - at resolutions that were so low, they'd be useless toady. Waiting..
Around 1992, my friend and I started doing desktop database apps as a side gig while we worked at a consulting firm doing IT. We decided to do this full time. With connections in the music industry, we started doing websites and online stores for some big names like Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Phish, and others. By then there were about 5-6 of us, working out of my friend's house. We weren't real employees, and only got paid when my friend walked into the room and started handing out $50 bills. Our online stores morphed into an award-winning product for small and medium-sized merchants, that you could pick up for $19.99 at Staples, CompUSA, etc. In 1996 we incorporated, and I was hired as the first official employee/lead programmer. I think I was making about $50K by then; we had grown and moved into a real office. A couple of years later, we had the first single-shopping-cart online mall. I was making $85K. We had almost 70 employees. In 2000, a Canadian company bought us for $45M and I was given another raise to almost $110K, but then things fell apart quickly. The last 6-8 months I was basically paid to drink coffee and sit around. By 2001 we were kaput. My 60,000 stock options, when I could finally do anything with them were worth about $1200, down from an initial value of ~1.8M CAD. I had bought a truck, and had put a downpayment on my house, but that was about it. I flailed around for a few years looking for programming work, and then got the job I have now, doing IT at a local University. I'm making about $50K again :/ It was a lot of work, with (mostly) great people, and for a while we were on top of the world. In some ways you could say we were Amazon before Amazon. If we hadn't gone under, Amazon probably would have bought us. Perchance to dream..
I agree. I use FF almost exclusively on every system I use, both at home and at work. Other browsers are only for testing whether my web stuff works acceptably in their twisted environs, more or less. Whenever I mention anything related to this to my boss, he replies with some sort of (knowledgeable to the point of dangerosity) glib comment like "Chrome! It's the Future!". If that's the future, I want none of it.
Studies have estimated that the ideal Earth population, living sustainably at an average Western standard of life, would be less than 2BN people. The numbers vary, but the suggested populations are all well below the current.
In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.
I had had two fairly good long term relationships before, both of which ended abruptly, The first time, I got kicked out, the second, I initiated the breakup. I said to my self, "the next one that comes along is going to be the one". I was playing guitar in a cheap bar one night and a friend's friend walked in with her friend. As they walked in, through the smoky, bleary light, that girl turned and smiled at me. End of story.