You would think google, microsoft and apple would be having kittens over this. How will any government or large corporation trust their goods and services if they can be disabled at will because the USA government takes offence to you, or someone in your department. Good for linux I guess but pain for the rest of us.
An official iphone screen for self repair costs more than my entire android phone. That's why people still steal them even locked and unusable. My miele washing machine will last twenty years, possibly indefinitely but every seven years it needs a repair costing £300 from Miele... Repairable is a start, economically repairable is trickier.
Writing this on a 2010 pc bought cheap in 2012. Upgraded ram, ssd added, windows 7 to windows 10 with extended updates. Yes it's time to replace but they do last.
To get paid for export you will nearly always need an MCS number to show it was installed by accredited professionals. Doing it yourself, or by your local electrician or plug in solar is not something they accept. It's a bit of a racket, but in practice pay up for the professional install or no export payments.
In Uk, If an old (rare) mechanical meter the meter will go backwards, the ideal. If a dumb digital meter the meter will simply pause counting up. If a smartmeter again the import reading will pause but a separate export reading will count up, for which you get no credit or debit but its nice to know. Ideally as battery prices drop you end up buying a battery that soaks up any surplus for later and so you don't lose any back to the grid. If you pay up for a commercially installed solar you can get paid for what you export but with plug in solar you just give it away.
Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)
Equator, poorest countries with 12 hours of sun 365 days a year. If batteries really fall in price it may rapidly have the cheapest, cleanest energy on the planet. The future of energy intensive industries may be Africa, which would be nice, they could use a break. Not to mention the cheapest place to launch your rockets into orbit.
Weirdly themselves. Makes my head hurt but the central bank, the social security fund and some other bits of US government basically own most of the national debt. Then it's the Japanese, British, Chinese and Warren Buffet. But less than you would guess.
People leave out that when the wholesale electricity prices are above the Government guaranteed price the Government makes a profit on selling the wind electricity. So in this example when the grid is full to the brim with wind energy but there is still a demand for last resort gas backup generators the wholesale price of electricity must be high and the government is minting money from the wind turbines, even while paying some to turn off... This is not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear, taking into account the high electricity prices since the Ukraine energy crisis, how much the Government makes from selling the power at a profit and renting the sea floor to the turbines, minus the subsidies paid when prices are low or the wind turbines have to be turned off. It's hard to make a judgement on the economics of it all without knowing this. We may be paying far less for subsidised wind power than we think.
"The “pop” won’t be a single day like a stock market crash. It’ll be a gradual cooling as unrealistic promises fail, capital tightens, and only profitable or genuinely innovative players remain."
https://archive.ph/e0bZK
In low income neighborhoods they make it easy to turn money into bitcoin but with high transaction costs and hard to turn the bitcoin back into cash. It is not a perspective that had occurred to me before.
Data is working on Vodafone mvno. Can't call Out or text, Can't make calls On o2 or EE either. Edit EE working. Edit all mobiles now seem to be working OK.
Mobiles are made by Asian companies to Asian tastes. They like big screens so that's what we get. The two exceptions are apple iPhones and Google pixel. The two American companies making phones for American tastes. Shame as the old 4.5" mobiles had such large bezels they could have accommodated 6" modern screens...
Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...
If you are young and give the silence a decent go it's OK to fall back on a book after a bit, or if you are too young to read yet, quietly working on some lego under your seat will not bother anyone. Adults are a little trickier but comtemplating a bible or Faith and Practice works. And, you know, it is meant to be voluntary.
What people tend to leave out is the government guarantees the price wind turbines receive for electricity at say 7p a kwh. So they lose money if the wholesale price goes less that that. But they make money when the price goes above that price. So in the bbc's example while turbines where paid while turned off at one end of the grid, at the other end of the grid the gas booster generating plant was turned on and set the market price quite high, perhaps 15 or 20p a kw. So the wind turbines that were still running flat out made the government lots of profit offsetting the losses from the turned off ones... This produces a head splitting mix of incentives between government costs, taxes and electricity prices to consumers. But overall since the Ukraine energy crisis renewables have probably not cost the government/tax payer as much as people think.
Is every memecoin just a scam? Experts on whether Andrew Tate and Trump are fleecing their followers.
After I was turned into a memecoin, I looked into the hype behind the crypto that only a tiny percentage of people profit from. Matt Shea
Denmark, 6 million wealthy people, 4% economic growth, 1.5% inflation, 2.9% unemployment, national debt of 25% of GDP and budget in surplus. How did it all go so right?
And yet sometimes I wonder. In the Uk you need most of your energy in the cold dark winter. So if you require enough non solar renewables to get you through the winter with net zero and those renewables are still available in the summer time are large scale solar not a bit redundant? Sunnier countries that have high electricity demand for air conditioning during the sunny periods would seem to have a better match mind.
Ah but consider if the rich own 87% and the poor 13% and pension funds 40% and foreigners 17% then there is 157% to go around! Or maybe it's 87% of the rich directly own equities? Or maybe this is a wind up for clicks and gibberish. (I am also commenting ignorantly).
Perhaps, thought blu ray is looking a little laserdisc like. Never quite got the mass adoption to stay around and now fading away. It's now hard to buy a cdrom drive without dvd support. But ones without blue ray remains common. Notmto mention second hand dvds are available for pennies on bulk for hoarders ...
I think it's the resolution that will kill dvd's. 55" TV's are now entry level. A cinefile in ten years may well have an affordable laser projector filling and suddenly see the merits of 4k.