You are correct, but I hope we can all agree there is a special place in hell reserved for people who interfere with health workers and cause death in the process.

That’s right on par with raping a nun, or a priest diddling a kid in my book.

That’s a pretty standard issue with grid tied solar systems. You save a lot of money by not having batteries, but when the neighborhood goes down you go down with it.

Plus you don’t want to be pumping electricity into a downed power system, you could actually end up hurting a line man who is working on the system.

However, and both of these issues can be resolved by adding in a generator and a whole house cut off system.

In a power outage scenario, all you would have to do is throw the crossover switch and crank the generator. The generator would produce enough energy to reactivate the solar system.

The first problem is solved by line sensing technology. If there is not power coming in and off of the switch then the inverter will not pump energy back into the system, at least on the ones that are not $12 cheap Chinese junk off of taobao.

And rather than suicide cords they generally have an IEC connector (standard rhombusy shaped computer power connector) on one end and a normal prong on the other.

But you are right that it is dangerous and not recommended to anyone, especially the people that are not smart enough to take the appropriate concerns and considerations into mind before using it.

That happens quite a bit in a lot of areas. It sounds stupid but your toaster does not care where the electricity it is using comes from.

As long as the sine waves are in sync with each other then you have nothing to worry about.

It’s probably not standard in America because the technology is newer and the regulations haven’t caught up.

Every once in awhile it crosses my mind that if I just gave up my morals I could make so much fucking money.

The difference between me being a middle-class American and me being filthy fucking rich is every day I wake up and I choose not to defraud every single person I possibly can of their money.

I feel like I should get a little thank you now and again, because I could be the greatest monster you’ve ever seen but instead I’m just a nobody and I don’t think I get nearly enough appreciation for my service.

And you could also look at the real world. We have boost air.

I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.

You’re thinking like you are the customer and the customer is always right, so if you pay for a service it should provide you what you want, right?

This is not that scenario.

You are not the customer. You are a product that is being sold to advertisers. It does not matter if you also pay them money, you are still the product. If you pay them money on top of being sold then you are just an especially profitable product.

Paying them money will not cause you to cease being a product, no matter how much money you are willing to pay.

If you use a different company’s product that starts off with you being the customer, eventually, they will learn that they can make more money by selling you to other people, and they will.

You are right, but it is very simple for phones to convert spoken word to text and sending text information back and forth is very lightweight on data usage. So it’s not happening, but it could happen.

What friend, you’re afraid to learn a little Russian?

The sad thing is it’ll probably start with infinite anime. There are so many currently existing manga that could be quickly and easily adapted to a full anime given the proper AI backing that it could take you years just to catch up.

Our great grandkids will probably be watching Spotify remixes of aitv shows recommended to them by influencers paid for by micro10gapplesoft

Counterpoint:

Thanks to streaming we don’t spend quite as much time thinking about the media we consume and the deeper meanings and subtext and generating internal fanfictions about what could possibly be coming up in the next episode a week from now.

Streaming makes media easier to consume but fills it with culturally empty calories.

The grand majority of conversation I see about a show is, “Have you seen _? No? You should totally watch _, it’s really good!” Or alternatively, “Yeah, it’s great isn’t it?”

Since Netflix came out we’ve definitely taken one step down the ladder rung closer to Idiocracy ass movies.

It’s kind of like in the 1800s they believed that human beings could never generate enough pollutants to actually affect the Earth. There are intelligent opinions statements saying that the Earth was simply too large for anything a mere handful of 100 million humans could do to leave any lasting impact on.

Of course, they had no idea that we would swell to 8 billion humans or that the industrial revolution would take off quite so well as it did, but even today there are many people who believe that nothing that they individually do can leave any type of lasting ecological impact, positive or negative.

And because of that you have bum fuck HVAC technicians venting refrigerants into the atmosphere willy-nilly and assholes driving down the street throwing lit cigarette butts out in the middle of a drought and people just dumping their trash wherever they find an opportunity to dump it.

I said all of that to say that it’s probably likely that even minor usage of drugs cause effects that are at best difficult to quantify. I don’t think getting high one time is going to be the differentiation between a homeless bum and a Nobel Peace prize winner, but it might be the difference between someone who works a career and earns at their best $250,000 a year and someone who works a career and earns at their best $80,000 a year.

I could have sworn nicotine was technically a stimulant because it has vasoconstrictive properties.

And I don’t know anyone who has ever put off going to sleep in order to take more depressants.

Reminder that the people most affected by this would be the kind of people who can afford a $100,000 vehicle.

And the stingiest people on the planet are the rich.

I don’t think it would be too crazy to rely on that to help draft pro consumer legislation.

Maybe we should write an open letter to our senators and congressman and request that they draft legislation to make it illegal for hardware vendors to software lock hardware capabilities behind a paywall.

If I buy a $100,000 vehicle I shouldn’t have to pay 50 60 80 100 $200 a month to utilize the features that are built into the physical hardware of the vehicle I have purchased.

I can understand a fee for internet access or for premium radio subscriptions or something but not to use the heated seats and battery life that is physically built into the vehicle I purchased.

How are you going to make any money then?

Answer: paywall their fucking site.

I’m paying for Internet access. If they don’t block their site it’s free game.

Yeah they’re following the IBM playbook of being the operating system that businesses run.

I just wish they would take a hint and release a paid version that has none of the ads, none of the bloatware, and none of the bullshit.

I feel confident that I could pay them just as much money as they would ever earn from mining my data and annoying the ever-loving fuck out of me and I would be happier about that.

But since they won’t do that fortunately there’s things like Atlas OS.

“Come take care of big pappa penguin, baby bird”

Yep. It’s my goal to be as unprofitable a citizen for our corporate overlords as possible.

I want them to lose money by doing business with me.

I want them to go bankrupt so that their future replacements can learn from their mistakes and not repeat them.

If they choose to be user hostile, I’ll match their energy and multiply it. Fuck em.

Yeah realistically you’re talking about a team of 10 to 30 people whose entire job is to give the final thumbs up or thumbs down to an ad.

You’re talking one to three million dollars a year, maybe throw an extra million on for the VP.

Chump change, they just don’t want to pay it cuz nobody’s forcing them to