And apparently they are now doing a face-heel turn and joining the lockout party. Hopefully mine lasts forever, even though I keep feeding it eBay toner!
Stephen Baxter's Phase Space. If those short stories, especially the ones with Reid Malenfant, grab you, then read the Manifold series. If you find yourself wishing it was more Alastair Reynolds, then the Xeelee Sequence.
Likely they were bought by people who already have houses, as investments.
Your logic, that over-expensive housing won't sell at all, only holds if people are only buying houses that they will live in: to a first approximation, people generally live in just one house.
I think it's about avoiding having them running than turned off at the socket. And I have a countdown timer on heating devices that could be left on and won't automatically turn off after some time like electric grills and heating mats.
> As long as...
Well, exactly.
Also as long as the house wiring is correct, and we all know all domestic electrical jobs are always top-notch¹.
Meanwhile I did a fire course and the firefighter running it said "never leave applicances on over night or unattended" (rule 2 after "always close doors").
Not that I always do not do so (the dishwasher and washing machine in particular), but the coming millions of cars drawing double digit kilowatts at night out of domestic electrical systems is probably going to cause a few fires.
Even in the UK, which has quite stringent electric regulations, you can get two-conductor cables with a plastic earth pin (which is always required even if you don't need grounding as otherwise the shutters covering the live and neutral holes are not withdrawn). On the other end, it could have a "figure-of-8" IEC connector.
And I definitely noticed a tingle on some metal laptops even when they have a 3-pin plug and a "Mickey mouse" IEC connector on the cable to the power brick.
I'm always amazed that these products can be so accurately locked to an exact flavour for years, regardless of the inputs, which, being plant or animal matter, can vary a lot naturally between batches and between years.
Not only whisky, even things like branded fruit juice, McDonald's burger meat and salad, Nutella and branded chocolate, coffee, to name just a few, seem almost preternaturally consistent.
Good to know the venerable "credulously repeat what the charismatic technology man said" school of journalism is now well into its second century of utility.
In the vein of fan theories about imaginary events, a favourite of mine was that James Bond died in Blofeld's brain drill chair and the second half of Spectre was hallucinations as his brain shut down.
The release of a subsequent film with the same actor sadly disproved it.
He didn't have more knowledge than we do now, 100 years, trillions of research dollars and millions of engineers later. He had a very amazing and intuitive sense of electricity, mechanics and physics in general, as well as an eidetic memory but it's not like he was conjuring mystical secrets out of the aether, any more than, say, OpenAI is today. And that's about how his inventions were received: with surprise that such things were possible, followed by credulity and wild predictions over where it might go, mostly relayed by people who didn't understand the technology.
Electricity simply doesn't provide a practical mass destructive capacity in the way that, say, the strong nuclear force does. However, from the breakneck rate of electrical technology from the 1890s onwards, you could see why an extrapolation of those capabilities could make it plausible that it could eventually get there.
Much "journalism" isn't journalism at all, it's just content aggregation and maybe a paraphrasing. In the case of anything remotely technical, this will probably also include dumbing down to the point of uselessness, if not outright incorrectness.
I assume it's only a matter of time before someone plugs something similar into Wikidata and rather than using AI to generate facts statistically, look the specifics up where known.
Especially when servicing interest on debt (the I) isn't nearly as cheap as it used to be, unless the debt is locked in at a lower interest rate. Even if it is, but the term ends, a rosy-sounding EBITDA can turn ugly.
> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single species in possession of a good technological base and a will to survive, must be in want of a interplanetary kinetic asteroid redirection system.
- real whiteboards are just better
- real whiteboards aren't as good as screen sharing
But yes indeed, nothing new has been said on this subject for years.