Ah yes, finding the rotting corpse of a long-dead rat, maggoty and moldy, bones and fur and decay… much less disturbing.

Ah yes, finding a bloody rat screaming and twitching, trapped under the wire, its spine broken… much less disturbing.

Deflation increases the value of money vs. goods and services. As a consequence, deflation concentrates economic power in the hands of people who already have money.

If you have debt, deflation increases the value of your debt making it harder to pay off.

I’ve had success printing TPU onto the uncoated steel side of a print bed. Flip it over and clean it, gently sand it if it’s too smooth for the first layer to grip.

Deflation is worse.

It’s not just the convenience of running water, it’s all of the infrastructure around making sure that water is clean and safe, which involves government regulation and audits, massive engineering projects, a lot of maintenance effort and a considerable amount of tax dollars.

Just as an example, leptospirosis is a common bacterial contaminant in untreated water:

Signs and symptoms can range from none to mild (headaches, muscle pains, and fevers) to severe (bleeding in the lungs or meningitis). Weil’s disease (/ˈvaɪlz/ VILES), the acute, severe form of leptospirosis, causes the infected individual to become jaundiced (skin and eyes become yellow), develop kidney failure, and bleed. Bleeding from the lungs associated with leptospirosis is known as severe pulmonary haemorrhage syndrome.

If you go hiking in places like Hawaii (where the government gives a shit about public health) you’ll see warning signs about lepto around pools and streams because people have this delusional fantasy about tropical paradises with clean flowing streams. If you go hiking in other places the lepto will still be there but the warning sign won’t. Untreated, uncontrolled water is a hazard.

Everyone can’t be an expert on water sanitation. Employing some experts to provide that service for thousands or millions of people is a fantastic solution. It’s probably impossible to overstate how much benefit water infrastructure provides for society.

So I disagree with you. “Running water” (centrally managed water sanitation and delivery) is one of the best things human society has ever done. The benefit to public health is incalculable.

The only reason you might discount how much benefit you gain from this system is that you’ve grown up with it as normal. You’ve never had to worry about groundwater contamination, about boiling every cup of water before you drink it, about filtration or desalinization or testing for lead. Which is why I describe having access to this as a privilege - because we take it for granted.

it’s hard for people so used to the comforts of capitalism to realise this is actually luxury

being inside, seated comfortably, doing non-manual work, educated, can read, listening to music, this is a job better than 99% of people who have ever lived have had

Hell, if you’re in this situation you have immediate and convenient access to potable water in your living space. This is a level of privilege beyond almost every other human that has lived in all of history.

Also, friends to plays with.

More information about this dangerous chemical: https://dhmo.org/facts.html

I mean… this thing just ate energy. The prototype car was pulling 6.5kV off the conducting rails to keep the air jets running hard enough for the hovering, and it wasn’t even carrying a passenger load. If you add more weight you have to add more air thrust to keep hovering, which means bigger engines and more power, and the production model will need extras for redundancy because if the air cushion weakens while you’re doing 200+kph and the car just grazes the track you’re in big trouble. I seriously doubt this concept can scale up to a working transit system and be at all safe. The electricity input alone would be a hazard.

I’ll bet it sounded like a Harrier from the outside too.

Also what do you think the vortex is like above the air intakes? I’m imagining this thing cruising along sucking in birds and just flushing them straight down onto the track as it travels the countryside.

Selective Service, actually.

I’ve been using JShelter which provides a few different options for handling page load failures. It also works on Firefox mobile.

A couple notes:

• You can be fingerprinted by the extensions you have installed in your browser. This is really difficult to circumvent, because if certain pieces of a website’s code never load on your system and never send expected responses to the server then the server definitely knows that. The more uncommon extensions you have installed, the more identifiable you are - and you’re already in a minority as a Firefox user.
• More and more websites are behind Cloudflare (mostly because of DDoS attacks) and JShelter will typically break Cloudflare’s filter which attempts to block bots. I’ve found that disabling just the fingerprint detector usually allows access to sites that have this protection.

Slashdot?

Welcome back to the Dark Ages.

This inorganic composite glass is made of inorganic materials

barely

Time to lay some pipe.

Hmm…

Hummingbirds live 3-10 years depending on the species, cockatiels ~15 but possibly as long as 25 with good care, white storks 35+ in captivity and even longer in the wild…

So what happens when one of you/part of you dies? If you’re sharing the mental state, do all of you experience death collectively? and then the surviving parts have to continue living with that?

Captain Planet to the rescue!

Um, the core feature is privacy invasion. It does what it says on the tin.

It’s fine if some people want that functionality, as long as it’s not enabled by default.