That talk was inspirational, as was the follow up ~10 years in progress video that came up next. I'm going to give FreedomBox a try. It is sad that I've never heard of this until now.
More clarification on the topic would be nice. When I open the Signal app right now, I am nagged to "Create a PIN. PINs keep information that's stored with Signal encrypted. Remind Me Later / Create PIN".
Would be interesting to know if an app specific PIN resists cellebrite analysis. Screen unlocked, Signal PIN enabled.
No Signal does not ask you for your PIN to access your messages. It is required to transfer your account to a new device, if you don't have access to the old one.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. has 434,164,946 acres of “cropland”—land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion (monoculture). This is the prime, level, and generally deep agricultural soil. In addition to cropland, the U.S. has 939,279,056 acres of “farmland.” This land is also good for agriculture, but it’s not as level and the soil not as deep. Additionally, there is a vast amount of acreage—swamps, arid or sloped land, even rivers, oceans, and ponds—that the USDA doesn’t count as cropland or farmland, but which is still suitable for growing specialized energy crops.
Of its nearly half a billion acres of prime cropland, the U.S. uses only 72.1 million acres for corn in an average year. The land used for corn takes up only 16.6% of our prime cropland, and only 7.45% of our total agricultural land.
Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today’s levels. Corn could easily produce this level—and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this.
I (and many others more qualified) have run the numbers. It's not pretty.
A decade ago biofuels were my first thought. The maths simply don't add up. Our options are far less energy per person, far fewer people, other sources of energy, or, most likely, some combination of these.
The highest claimed yields are for algae, at a rather improbable 1,000 gal/(acre * year):
[Y]ou might consider floating the algae offshore, along the Pacific and Atlantic costs. It's roughly 1,300 miles from San Diego, CA to Port Angeles, WA, and 1,800 miles from Homestead, FL to Lubec, ME. Dividing our 443,000 square miles by those two added together, we find we'd have to extend our grow region some distance off-shore. That is, 143 miles off-shore. The full length of both coasts.
Or perhaps you'd prefer to re-purpose the Gulf of Mexico. Its total area is about 600,000 mi2, we'd need about 3/4 of it dedicated to algae growth.
The late David MacCay's Alternative Energy Without the Hot Air gives a comprehensive breakdown for the UK of alternative energy options. Again, the picture is bleak.
This much ethanol would only provide 48% of the energy currently consumed by oil based transportation.
It's actually much worse than that because most crop land is already used to grow crops eaten by animals and people. If we feed all the crops to transportation machinery, others will go hungry.
What's wrong with that site? I've been listening to the podcast hosted there, Econtalk, for the last year+.
Do they have some bias in the grander scheme of economics? The guests and topics always seem extremely varied, and the host actually asks challenging and interactive questions to the guests.
No idea about the podcast, I'll give a listen though based on your comments.
My comment was on reviewing a few of the articles, the sloppiness exhibited in this one was common. I guess it's more a preaching-to-the-converted sort of area than trying to do a good job of presenting arguments.
Perhaps I didn't give it a fair shake - I'm definitely not one to enjoy watching people grinding their favorite axes, particularly if they are uncharitable to other viewpoints while simultaneously presenting their own assumptions as canon.
If you like someone's toots there, you can follow and message any user on SDF's instance from your account on any other instance.
As mentioned elsewhere, the only thing you would gain by creating an account on sdf.org is to have your toots appear by default in the local timeline of other sdf.org users.
On the android app I use, switching between accounts is as simple UI wise as switching to different instances (or spaces or whatever the top level division is called) in Slack. In two taps I can switch between tech themed and social themed for example.
I agree some platforms make multiple accounts hard to the point where you're registering multiple free email accounts, installing multiple browsers and using incognito mode, etc.
That is not inherently the case, and can be quite the opposite when allowing users to control multiple accounts is part of the software's design.
But tying accounts to instances, and then instances to topics, is bad design. The purpose of multiple accounts from a user perspective should be for having separate identities, not separate topics of conversation.
If you're forced to create one account per instance, there's no way to do something as simple as "merge comments from two instances into a single stream", which supposedly was the selling point of federated systems like Mastodon.
I'm of the opinion that tying instances to topics is the mistake here. Since the software is mostly following the email provider model, I think it makes more sense to base instances along other lines of trust model/ownership model/hosting provider than "topics".
Obviously "topic" is the easiest way to differentiate instances today, but when was the last time you choose an email provider based on "topic" (or even domain name, for that matter)?
I've seen electric companies bill like that to reflect the realities of power generation and usage, but it's applied equally to all consumers of electricity at the time of day.
Using 1000w of electricity with a 1950's toaster cost the same as using 1000w of electricity with a 2018 microwave.
And hopefully it would cost the same to use 1000w of electricity to power your home server hosting a website that criticizes the local electricity company.
> And hopefully it would cost the same to use 1000w of electricity to power your home server hosting a website that criticizes the local electricity company.
This is absurdly myopic. The only way it's 100% along party lines is if you ignore EVERYTHING else that happens in politics except the issue of Russian influence in the 2016.
I could go on and on citing examples of both parties doing absurd things, but you've already indicated you're done with this thread so I won't cut into your Rush Limbaugh listening time and won't mention anything about birth certificates.
I give a lot of page views to those ad-heavy online unit conversion calculators that are quite simple. While the page itself really just implements basic arithmetic, I have no idea how hard it is to get the 1st result from the search engine when you google "Convert 130 inch ounce to newton meters"
True for me. Using spacemacs which uses vi style keybindings, so most shortcuts are key sequences instead of chords.
I think its faster for me to press two or three characters on the keyboard my fingers are already on before I move them into place on another keyboard.
Adding a second keyboard and using the Russian layout is a cool method to use a 2nd keyboard that doesn't just duplicate the keys of the first, and likely has more fun applications than just adding more shortcuts to your text editor.
There's also "key-chord-mode" which lets you bind any function to any two keys pressed in unison (or right after each-other) [1]. IIRC it's built-in to all modern versions.
I'm trying to build out more ergonomic bindings since emacs-pinky is starting to haunt me at times. I have key-chords setup for very common things like jump to beginning/end of line ('jk' and 'kl').
