I’d lean towards writing an economics masters thesis that demonstrate that climate change will shrink GDP -A% per +/-B degrees/humidity variation from temperate, demonstrate this effect in past versus present data for Greece, modify the basic productivity formula underlying all of economics to include “divergence from temperate conditions”, and then finally show that when run against different world regions parallels, each region with positive (hot/humid) variances from temperate is commonly associated with the “lazy” stereotypes imposed on workers in high-divergence regions by residents of low-divergence regions. But sadly I have to get a job first, so maybe in a couple years.
Ugh, it’s so disappointing to see incompetence. Flock could understand that they’re vulnerable to “just cut the pole down” and thus made the cameras easy to remove because that’s cheaper and because it doesn’t result in people cutting down municipal infrastructure, but the reporting fails to consider that possibility. And the people that did this getting their faces caught on the literal cameras they’re taking down is just chef’s kiss stupidity on a platter. I do enjoy the irony of Flock cameras being relegated to the same ‘nuisance litter’ category as those scooters, though :)
This is partly why I’m investing so much time and effort learning to reverse engineer ECUs: it may, someday, become a matter of necessity rather than hobby, if John Deere collapses or gets private equity’d or whatever. At worst my hobby is just a fun hobby, at best I save a farm.
For the same reason that the Vegas attraction “dig a bunch of holes with industrial diggers” was so popular: people want to do jobs they think are cool without years of training cost up front, and this is a way for them to do so.
Farming simulator and Car mechanic simulator are both in my todo list, because those are hobbies I’m truly interested in pursuing and I’d like to know what it’s like to do them as a sim first. Most other live sims like this are deeply uninteresting to me, even if they have lovely visuals. Meanwhile I’ve seriously considered buying a Renesas SH-2A simulator for nearly $3k so that I can develop better car software!
Is there some job you’ve always wanted to do that requires extensive training that you can’t / won’t complete at this time? That would be a use case for sims that’s less game and more hobby for you (but that’s always a blurry line for all of us so don’t take that as criticism).
The timer seems essential to the gameplay. If I can’t get the word in thirty seconds, I lose. That’s how word games with hourglasses worked in board boxes for years. The scoring system is fine. This is a tightly designed game and it would be less enjoyable if it catered to any other needs than went into its design.
Well, it’s maybe 120 credit-hours for an Economics bachelor’s degree if you don’t have any prior college credits or degrees, less if you’ve got prior art to build on (or a second major usually only requires the ECON classes).
Fun fact, if you see in the course catalog that’s listed as Remote/Online, check the scheduled times; if there are some, they’re either mandatory meeting times or in-person testing days; if there’s none, then it’s a fully asynchronous class you can THEORETICALLY complete in parallel to your job, whenever you like.
You could dip your toe in the water very slowly the first term and set calendar reminders for the drop & withdraw deadlines. At worst you don’t like it, at middling you realize you can’t multitask school and work, at best you pass the course. One step closer: wax on, wax off.
Start with the HB 3546 testimonies presented to their state legislature; one of the slide decks at the above example of such (I assume there are others) suggests that $200m+ of transmission upgrades on behalf of datacenters were charged evenly to all customers (I assume as a kWh rate component), rather than to those few incurring the excess demand; this is likely as a result of how their regulatory structure was set up in the past. Presumably that’s a core reason why the increase is so dramatic: +30% per kWh to pay for not only the immediate kilowatt hour transmission costs, but also the capital improvements necessary to deliver (as that slide deck puts it) the power demand of an entire city to a single customer. Perhaps long-term I would prefer they outright charge datacenters directly for the capex up front (just as Comcast or AT&T already charge residential customers to build out a new circuit in rural areas today!), but this is certainly a good first step towards de-externalizing costs that don’t benefit the statewide ratepayer base back onto the specific business segment incurring them.
I imagine OPB has reporting on the HB that you might be able to dig up from their archives as well; if you do, please post it!
Hah! This is exactly how I’m serving the vestigial remnant of my blogging in the early 2000s from a ZIP-backed Cloudflare Worker today. Should I rebuild my site with Drop+Claim or is it fine as-is? I kind of feel like ‘if what I have works, don’t change it’ is the best path.
OP, your site makes for nice reading, but that quantity-sorted list of states to filter by is kind of maddening to work with. Alphabetical recommended :)
I have something even more useless! After fifteen years of trying to catch things when I drop them, I started catching things when I drop them. I’m not less clumsy now, but there’s no better feeling than dropping something, casually grabbing it out of midair with a conserved-motion movement, and then going back to whatever without an annoying interruption. I’m a bad fit for that particular military but, like, they do understand the effects of drilling in habits until they’re reflexive.
Some hobbies are really excellent for generalists, because you can apply the one learning-training method to any number of bizarre or intentional circumstances that life hands you. I’m currently working on ‘select heavier than average apples with a single toss and catch each at the grocery store’ and, no joke, some guy at the store complimented this. I’m sure they were hitting on me but they noticed. Made my day. It’s the hobby that keeps on giving. (I have so far only dropped one apple and, yes, I bought the poor bruised thing.)
Other fun hobbies in the category: Diagnostic guessing, Balancing stuff, Vehicle operation, Packing efficiently (rather than most compactly), Knots (which are critical to textile and bodily repair both), Folding (or as Calvin might call it, dimensional transmogrification), Echolocation mapping (you can practice while sitting in a cafe).
At the core of this is learning how to learn, and then dedicating yourself to doing that somehow, no matter how pointless whatever hooks your attention might seem to others. I figured out at one point how to alter my visual perception frame rate to slow down and stall, just for a moment, a spinning (on high) ceiling fan’s blades. I can never get them to stand perfectly still but insomnia is cruel and the nights are long, and it’s fun to imagine what my brain is doing to brainwave sync rates across my visual cortex to make this work. (If seizure-prone, maybe don’t try this alone.) Unexpectedly, even this has had a practical value: when a passenger in trains or cars, I can consciously relax my eye muscles now and let the landscape motion blur by rather than saccade-focusing constantly. Hooray!
Every useless hobby skill has an unforeseen opportunity to be valuable :)
If not due to their articles, then what cause do you attribute that widespread outcome among traded, subsidiary, et al. corporations to? (I’m happy to be wrong but it’ll take some time to research this and I want to be sure to hear your opinion in the meantime.)
Yeah, if you have a long lurker history, that makes it difficult to assess whether your intentions are genuine or not. I lack visibility into ‘voting’ participation levels as a normal user. That’s why I ask the mods to review things (and beg people to email them rather than post mod questions as post comments!) rather than, in nearly all circumstances anyways, asking for a specific mod outcome. They know far better than we do what the full circumstances are.