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An important reminder
  • Counterpoint: "40 percent of the officers stated that in the last six months prior to the survey they had gotten out of control and behaved violently against their spouse and children."

    And that's just the ones who freely admit to being abusers. It doesn't take a huge mental leap to realize that a position of authority with a low barrier of entry is a magnet to people who want to abuse that power.

    You can find the source for that survey, as well as the context here: https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-families-experience-domestic-violence/

  • EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator
  • Most European residential electric systems operate at 240v, versus 120v in the US, which means you can only backfeed a US outlet with half the power you could in a European outlet. That alone makes this system half as useful for US applications.

  • T-Mobile imposes $5 monthly price hike on customers using older plans
  • Remember the tmobile un-contract? This is literally from their press release in 2017: "T-Mobile ONE customers keep their price until THEY decide to change it. T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile ONE plan. When you sign up for T-Mobile ONE, only YOU have the power to change the price you pay." https://www.t-mobile.com/news/press/un-carrier-next

    Remember how they promised the FTC they wouldn't raise prices if they could pretty please merge with sprint to become the biggest telecom network in the country? https://www.yahoo.com/news/t-mobile-promises-sprint-merger-195428217.html

  • Is it worth the solar panels I'm getting?
  • Sorry for the industry jargon, but measuring things in kW won't give you the full picture, you want to compare things in "kWh". Your utility bill should show your price in $/kWh and the solar company should have given you a production estimate from Helioscope or some kind of similar energy estimating software that shows expected annual kWh output

  • Is it worth the solar panels I'm getting?
  • Their pricing looks good, you're getting black on black modules and optimizers for a bit over $2 per watt after incentives. As someone who works in the industry I'd say that's a pretty decent price.

  • New York Passed an Ambitious Climate Bill for Publicly Owned Power. The Perfect Partner? McKinsey
  • I work for a private solar developer in NYS, and I can see that the state regulators are either asleep at the wheel or intentionally complacent with allowing private utilities to let our electric infrastructure rot so they can keep collecting profits off of ratepayers. We have some of the worst utilities in the country and state is currently suppressing a grassroots effort to oust RG&E, who is the worst of the worst. In general though their refusal to modernize their grid is grinding the goal of 70% renewable by 2030 to a quick halt.

    I had really hoped that getting NYPA behind the building of renewables would make them a heavyweight that could take the utilities to task for their failures, it's infuriating that they've fallen to more regulatory capture.

  • consider the implications for a post scarcity future
  • I'm an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here's how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.

    The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.

  • consider the implications for a post scarcity future
  • Most places where this can be done, it is already being done. The low hanging fruit for pumped hydro was all picked decades ago, and at great cost to the ecosystems it destroyed in the process - turns out that drowning thousands of acres in massive man-made lakes had a bit of an impact on the plants and animals that lived there.

    Not saying that the benefits weren't worth the cost, that's a whole different debate. But there's little to no opportunity to scale this energy storage tech beyond it's current footprint.

  • consider the implications for a post scarcity future
  • As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can't just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.

  • Anon notices what they've taken from us
  • Don't forget the RGB notification led!

    I switched to Chinese brand phones, they still have all this and they're dirt cheap, currently rocking an Ulephone power armor 18t, which also has a flir infrared camera and a microscope for some reason. No I'm not joking, they work surprisingly well and have come in handy more than I thought they would!

  • 12% 401(k) Contribution - What to do? [USA]
  • As others have mentioned, you can invest in the stock market within your 401k, though your options can sometimes be limited or saddled with high fees depending on what broker the 401k is through.

    If yours is through a shitty broker then you might be better served by opening an individual retirement account (IRA), likely a Roth IRA given the limited info you've shared. You can open one with a broker of your choice, so go with one of the better ones like vanguard or fidelity. Using tax advantaged retirement accounts will always beat saving your retirement money in a non-tax advantaged one, all else being equal.

    Edit to echo the flowchart from one of the other comments: https://imgur.com/u0ocDRI

    This is the core of sound personal finance strategy in purified form. Great resource!

  • Why the United Auto Workers union is poised to strike major US car makers this week
  • Really buying into the corporate propoganda here aren't you? These used to be great paying jobs, but the average auto workers salary has eroded just like every other industry and is less than $40k these days, even if you arbitrarily exclude non-union auto workers it's still barely $50k. Even those non-union workers will benefit from industry wages increasing with this new contract.

    Also, this contract will be a 4 year agreement through 2027, and auto workers haven't seen a raise since 2019. If you considered the 46% they're asking for as an annual raise over that time period 2019-2027 it would only be a 5.75% annual raise.

    And we haven't even talked about the inflation since 2019 which has already eroded their pay by 20%, plus whatever additional inflation through the next 4 years will do. If inflation doesn't cool down through that period this 46% may barely maintain their current wages.

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    *Permanently Deleted*
  • I burst out laughing while reading this article, it's laughably bad, written by someone who doesn't have the slightest understanding of the content matter.

    Virtually all existing communication mediums are light based, since "Light" is a term that covers electromagnetic waves spanning a range from radio waves, all the way up to xrays, with visible light getting a small part of that range in the middle.

    With all light there is a tradeoff where higher frequency light can carry more information at the cost of lower penetration. It's why your 5Ghz wifi is faster than your 2.4Ghz wifi but the 5Ghz doesn't reach as far in your house

    Visible light is in the 400-800Thz (Terahertz), so it's orders of magnitude better for transmitting a lot of data but since it's blocked by most materials it works better if you use something to channel it, like a glass tube. Which is why visible light is already used extensively as the backbone of the internet, aka fiber optic cable. (to be completely accurate, most fiber optics use near visible infrared light, just below the visible spectrum, since it doesn't scatter in glass as easily)

    The new communication standard referenced is nothing ground breaking, it's just a standard for any niche application which can make use of it. It's not a new technology, and if it was better than existing methods we would already be using it.

  • Money Won't Save Them Now
  • Don't carry water for people who would let you die to increase their mountain of gold a little. What you've described might be true of millionaires, even multi millionaires; but no one gets to a billion dollars without stepping on those below them in the pursuit of more money than one person could ever spend in their lifetime.

    Being a billionaire is pathological, if the human race was a biological organism and one part of it started hoarding that many resources, we would call it cancer and cut it out.

  • Reddit Antiwork Mods censor calls for action

    I've suspected that the antiwork community on reddit is a honeypot, this just adds another bit of confirmation. Any actual direct action could be dangerous to the corporate masters, better to nip these things in the bud.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)EN
    Endlessvoid @lemmy.world
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