Thanks. I’ll see what I can find

Hey, while we’re sucking off Linux Mint, can anymore explain why my box basically bricked itself with

/usr/lib/polkit-1/polkit-agent-helper-1 isn’t setuid root

Off a routine update? I’ve found conflicting guidance online, the AI prompts are (predictably) not very helpful, and since I’ve lost Internet everything has to be done by juggling a Windows laptop with a dozen help guides open on one hand and Linux on the other.

I swear to God, this is what makes me regret using a Linux system. One bad update and it’s a weekend running down obscure errors.

AT&T was effectively a government-supported monopoly

It was certainly a monopoly. But hardly government supported. The government has issued major sanction against the company no less than three times.

• The Kingsbury Commitment, which forced AT&T to divest its stake in Western Union, stop acquiring competing independent local phone companies, and allow other companies to connect to its long-distance network
• The 1956 Consent Decree, requiring AT&T to stay out of the emerging computer/data processing market and license its transistor patents royalty-free
• The 1984 Bell System Breakup, which formally split the comment company eight ways.

Solar R&D was hardly private. You’re completely excluding things like the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Advanced Solar Energy Research and Development Division.

The NSF has always languished in funding and has historically failed to deliver major breakthroughs, much less any kind of physical rollout, of a public solar/wind energy grid.

If anything, it has operated as an echo chamber of the fossil fuel industry, downplaying the efficiency and ultimate profitability of a renewable grid.

Hardly a subsidy.

And yet, my point is, even they’re still subsidizing solar orders of magnitude more than nuclear!

Show me the solar powered submarine.

Show me the solar powered aircraft carrier.

Show me any meaningful federally contracted project to implement solar power for domestic or international consumption.

At the very least, I can point you towards Georgia’s Vogtle 3 and 4. Nothing like that exists in the renewable space.

In Soviet America, Anthropic Boycott You!

YouTube algorithms are flush with AI boosters in gaming subs

You’re never going to own an industrial scale datacenter

I suspect we’ll see these features opened up for US-allied actors against their foreign competitors.

You can guarantee US auto companies are going to be free to reverse engineer software and manufacturing techniques of Chinese companies, for instance.

But you’re not going to be allowed to use Grok or Meta to hack your Tesla or BMW, pull out the OS, clone it as freeware, and offer a substitute unconstrained by subscription fees and gated upgrades.

Intel is down, AMD is down, SpaceX is going down slowly.

Off of stratospheric highs. They’re now merely overvalued, rather than extremely overvalued

Buy The Dip

Viruses are client side

Not the entire time. The original computer architecture was big central processors that took commands from remote consoles.

Personal Computing wasn’t a thing until the late 1980s. Even then, it only lasted 20 years before the Internet enticed people back into Cloud Computing and SaaS.

Ffs, the whole appeal of the Internet browser window is that you just make requests from foreign systems and they do all the work, returning you the finished result. Client side code has been bad system design for decades.

Pipes are inefficient. If you want water, you should buy it from my big lake. Also, I should be able to set the price of water. Also, fuck these three people in particular, for using water in a way I don’t like.

Digital Maoism Intensifies

It’s “giant splash screen over content, telling you to sign in” experience.

It’s annoying, because so much of the Internet is linked through Reddit. If I’m not constantly seeing these links, I can just pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead, I’m peppered with links to the Walled Garden, fully knowing I’m not allowed inside

Wind turbines are close to 15MW each now. 10 years ago it was more like 5-10MW. 30 years ago it was 3MW for an offshore turbine.

That’s almost entirely been due to size increases.

The average new build rotor in the US is 133 meters, 5x the size of 90s era standard blades

You don’t think that’s significant progress? 5x the power.

Biggest Blades = More Energy

You seem to be implying that solar cells weren’t. I don’t believe that is true

Tell it to Bell Labs. Tell it to the the Solar Energy Industries Association. Idk why Americans couldn’t get on the ball publicly. But solar was squarely in the private domain for generations.

Photovoltaics were brought about by US the government for satellites.

They were brought about by the industrialization of satellites, certainly. But the R&D was all heavily privatized by and for the private telecommunications sector.

When the US began rolling out large scale solar power plants in earnest, Walmart became the nation’s largest installer and purchaser. No state or federal department came close to it.

The largest investors in new build construction are NRG Energy and Google. Even the state regulated utilities lag behind.

Solar only became the knockout winner it is today after 70 years of intense research.

Largely overseas and financed by foreign governments or private firms. The US efforts at subsidizing solar are regularly stymied and gutted by conservative governments.

if there is damage to a wind turbine blade in the winter, they may not be able to get a replacement until spring.

And if there’s damage to a nuclear facility?

Only because solar/wind’s been subsidized

Nothing has been more subsidized than nuclear energy. It’s entire existence is predicated on public R&D. Virtually all of its generators are public projects. It’s a notorious money loser to operate. We still don’t have a good solution for nuclear waste, so that gets stashed on public lands and in Superfund sites, too.

That’s not the reason it lags the alternatives, though. If public spending got us cheap energy with zero trade offs, everyone would be France by now.

Solar/Wind, by contrast, get dogshit subsidies both relative to nuclear and fossil fuels. It outperforms in defiance of subsidies, often growing market share in states that are actively hostile to its expansion.

Even in the face of enormous cuts to public spending and bailouts to coal, under Trump 1 & 2, renewables increased their market share.

That’s because renewables aren’t just efficient, they’re profitable. Enormously profitable. The private sector loves high margins on their capex spend, and renewables consistently deliver.

For the places that have enough land and environmental conditions suitable for wind/solar, that is true.

Again, who doesn’t have this access?

In remote communities, just getting the materials for a wind farm there is incredibly difficult

Remote communities don’t have the kind of energy demand that nuclear power fulfills. Nevermind how it’s always going to be more expensive to build a nuclear generator than a big fan connected to a dynamo.

It’s not a universal solution

It doesn’t need to be, when the bulk of what we’re trying to replace is coal and natural gas.