I mean, it’s not like it’s any different in a lot of Canada, the polarization has gotten pretty unreal everywhere. Alaska has a lot more in common with the Yukon and Northwest Territories too than they do with southern red states.

Presumably superconductors are a given at that level of technology. But also at megastructure scale, we could easily talk about very exotic energy transfer methods. Mirrors, microwave transmission antennas, kilometer wide conduits of highly conductive “ground” material, large scale production of fusion fuel, maybe usable power from heat difference is such an efficient process at any scale that the sphere just has a hot side on the inside (towards the sun) and a cold side on the outside (towards cosmic background) and anyone who needs power just patches in a heat pipe to the inside surface.

Actually there’s a lot there on that last one. Large efficient power plants could be built anywhere where people needed them hooked with big heat pumps into the inner surface and outer radiator surface, smaller applications could just hook into the inner surface and radiate heat passively and let the climate control deal with it. Rogue energy thieves could be tracked down by scanning for unregistered cold spots on the inner surface.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8486698/ Apparently it looks like it should actually be treatable with cochlear implant. But every person is different, might be lots of reasons I/we aren’t aware of he’s not a good candidate.

I don’t know how you read what I wrote and took from it “I don’t think American culture has a problem involving guns”

Internal gun violence is such an unbelievably miniscule part of the death toll of American society.

I am very glad for them? I hope their police stay that way

I am neither anarchist nor communist but the day I’m okay with police being better armed than the populace is allowed to be is the day I can’t imagine police not standing with labor unions or treating minorities significantly differently than those in the dominant socio-economic class and not a second sooner.

There are too many responses here to reply to all of them individually so I’m just going to post some quotes here, more in response to other comments than the OP, but perhaps also a perspective to consider for OP as well.

“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

• George Orwell

And the shockingly only increasingly relevant full quote from one of the founders of the Black Panthers party:

“Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it’s off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves.”

• Huey Newton

I’d really ask more people to consider their position of privilege, to be less afraid of state sanctioned or enabled violence of all forms than some crazy neighbor with guns who was likely failed many times by that very state to have come to this point. Please just consider the counterpoint, that armed minorities are harder to oppress, and that far, far more people have been killed by state sanctioned and enabled violence, than by access to firearms by “the common people”.

I’m not telling anyone that they’re wrong, I’m just asking that you really internalize and consider this perspective. Thank you for reading and thinking.

“very leftist” “wants police to have lots of versatile guns and the populace to not” I’m confused.

Finland has very similar access to guns, yes it has much fewer total guns but that is much fewer people having many guns, they have a very similar percentage of homes with at least 1 firearm in them as the US currently does. It is actually a myth that they control the ammo, they control their military ammo, not their hunting/personal ammo. Switzerland is not THAT far behind though they I believe do have tighter restrictions on ownership. Also the percentage of households with at least 1 gun in it has remained mostly unchanged in the US for the last 60+ years, and the types of guns available have also remained largely unchanged, intermediate caliber semi automatic mag fed rifles have been shockingly cheaply available in the US since the M1 Carbine became available as military surplus after WW2. Something other than “availability of firearms” is very different now to explain the gun violence (it’s mostly culture and systemic poverty).

That seems like a very I have nothing to fear from other people viewpoint. Lots of places in urban areas where a firearm is a tool for safety that has everything to do with other humans.

Is this old? Is this what old feels like?

People somehow still surprised by Switzerland being neutral on Naziism

I think it’s just really rich people, but tech CEOs are in this terminally online culture so not only does it all end up out there but they seem to feed off each other and try to bizarrely one up each other.

He might, but he also might mean that he has a power meter that is displaying Kwh since last reset and he plugged it in and then checked it again later when it was all set up after an arbitrary time period and it was either showing the lowest non-zero value it was capable of displaying or was showing a number from several hours.

Lol thank you, I knew that I don’t know why I wrote it that way, in my defense it was like 4 in the morning.

You are misunderstanding the confusion, Kwh is an absolute measurement of an amount of power, not a rate of power usage. It’s like being asked how fast your car can go and answering it can go 500 miles. 500 miles per hour? Per day? Per tank? It doesn’t make sense as an answer.

Does your computer use 100 watt hours per hour? Translating to an average of 100 watts power usage? Or 100 watt hours per day maybe meaning an average power use of about 4 watts? One of those is certainly more likely but both are possible depending on your application and load.

Sure? But kind of a weird interjection to make at someone saying that they don’t.

I thought I stated my opinion pretty clearly. I can do it again for you. It is disingenuous to say that everyone has a price, that’s just something people say to make themselves feel better about benefiting from compromising their morals. Everyone needs to look at themselves and their principles and make a decision based on their beliefs and their situation. But saying “if I didn’t someone else would, anyone would do the same, everyone has a price etc…” is a cop-out.

Okay? Good for you, you are a somewhat less principled person than some others. Not sure what you’re arguing about.