I have a Lennox multistage system with a heat pump, and furnace for when it gets too cold. The best way to run those (according to the installer) is at a low level all the time. So it doesn’t benefit much from things like location tracking to turn the system up or down while we’re out. Especially since I work from home.
What it does do is make graphs for tracking how it runs the heat pump and furnace each day.
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that’s not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don’t reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.
In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.
Corporations don’t have to be about making tons of money. They can be about organizing people to accomplish things that they couldn’t individually. You then make money just to give those people a living wage and keeping the lights on.
This doesn’t even need to have a legal framework. Just a couple of people who agree to take up certain tasks is a company.
Cyndrical locks are pretty easy to pick, though. There’s a $20 tool where you stick it in and wiggle it and done (this sentence is dirty and I’m not apologizing). Newer stuff uses different springs on each pin so they don’t all pop at once, but then you just wiggle it for one pin, turn it a bit, then hit the next one. Takes longer, but it’s not hard to learn.
Programming grew up in an environment where failure is cheap (relatively speaking). You might make a mistake that costs five, six, or even seven figures (I’m sure I’ve made at least one seven figure mistake), but nobody will die from it. When people could die, such as flight control software, different development techniques for formal methods are used. Those tend to cost at least ten times more than other methods, so they aren’t used much otherwise.
If anything, we should lean into this as an advantage. Iterate even faster, catch failures faster, and fix it faster.
Major engineering organizations, like the IEEE or the ASME, often require degrees, but do have exceptions built into the rules for on the job experience. So this does happen, and regularly enough that there’s consideration for it.
Christopher Tolkien was blocking a lot of things. Even the Jackson films sneaked by and wouldn’t have been made of he could have stopped it.
He’s dead now, and the new heirs to the rights like money. They also have about 20 years before the copyright expires. Which isn’t that long; that’s about as much time between now and the Jackson films. To keep ahead of the clock, they’re greenlighting a lot of garbage and risk running their franchise into the ground.
There’s an entire corpus of books and documents critiquing the current system and on how a society based on mutual aid would work. None of them “expect everything to be provided for free”.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Item (c) comes the closest to what Sisko did, but he did it in a way that gave them a chance to get out, so it’s not a perfect match. Forcing conditions for removing a group probably wouldn’t qualify under any of these. That said, it can be a factor in Ethnic Cleansing, but the Maquis aren’t really an ethnic group.
I’ve had a fan fic on the back of my head where the Borg start out as a small group exploring networked community like that, but some of the members are more radical than others. One believes that people need to be brought under collective influence in order to solve their social problems and sees individuality as a problem. However, when the more virulent form of the collective gets going, she becomes a hypocrite who refuses to subsume her own individuality to the collective while inflicting the same on everyone else.
That’s why the Borg Queen seems so contradictory. She actually is.
Back in the 90s, I was asked to critique a local business web site. I noticed a picture wasn’t loading correctly on Netscape Navigator when it was working fine on IE. Turned out, the designer had stuck in a 5MB BMP image. This when a whole lot of people were still on 56K modems.
PNG mainly lacked support from Microsoft (Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Photoshop). IE didn’t handle PNG transparency, while Photoshop had a shitty PNG implementation that tended to produce files larger than an equivalent GIF. Held back widespread adoption for almost a decade.