NaibofTabr

I mean, OK… Until every bank, government service, health care provider, etc implements this.

True, but this doesn’t really work for densely populated areas. There isn’t enough roof space on top of a 20-story apartment or office building to place enough solar panels to serve the building’s needs.

For places like Barcelona:

New York:

Seoul:

etc. there’s a lot of energy demand, but all of the nearby ground space is already occupied. Even if you put solar panels on top of all the buildings, each rooftop wouldn’t be enough to power its own building, so collectively you would only get a fraction of the city’s energy needs. The cost of doing each install and the wiring infrastructure would outweigh the benefit, it would never be practical.

*Edit: just to ballpark this, New York City used 15-16 billion kWh in Jan 2026, so ~15 million MWh/month, 180 million MWh/year. The Mojave Solar Project is one of the largest solar installations in the world. It generates ~580 GWh/year (580,000 MWh/year). So, to serve New York City we need only 310 equivalent MSP installations. The MSP installation takes up ~1765 acres, so we only need about 540,000 acres (2100 sq km), or a little over 1/10 of the state of New Jersey.

Just for New York City. Not the whole state.

And that’s assuming reliable output, with no transmission losses.

And that estimate is probably too low, because any solar installation in that area wouldn’t get the same amount of regular sunlight as the Mojave Desert.

Nothing demonstrates a victorious nation quite like shutting down international travel and communications.

Would it be a huge shock to find out some conglomerate like Koch Industries or ExxonMobil were involved in an astroturf campaign

Maybe not, but there’s no evidence of that here, it’s pure speculation.

The influence campaign being perpetrated here looks very similar to Russian operations against former Soviet states, where they encourage or create a “separatist” movement within the target nation and then antagonize both sides until the separatists eventually break off a chunk of territory from the target nation, and then wouldn’t you know it Russian troops show up and “help” establish a new orderly, Russia-aligned government. For example:

• Georgia

“… the South Ossetia war and the Abkhazia war resulted in Georgia’s loss of territory in what had been the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast and the Abkhaz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, respectively, to two internationally unrecognized separatist movements that were supported by the newly independent Russian Federation.”

• Moldova/Transnistria

“… the Transnistria War, in which Russian-backed Transnistria managed to stay separate from Moldova.”

• Crimea

“The referendum was held under Russian occupation and, according to the Russian-installed authorities, the result was overwhelmingly in favor of joining Russia.”

• Ukraine

“Intercepted phone conversations of Sergey Glazyev, a top advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin, disclosed the specifics of the project Novorossiya to take over not just Crimea, but also the Donbas, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, which Russia apparently aimed to annex following Crimea. The plan involved fomenting widespread unrest using pro-Russian agents on the ground, and then orchestrating uprisings that would announce rigged referendums about joining Russia, similar to the one that took place in Crimea on 16 March 2014.”

This fits the pattern, with the obvious major difference being that Canada is not a former Soviet nation.

Also speculation, of course. But to me it looks like Russia has this strategy which they play over and over, and with which they’ve been getting more ambitious and seeking larger targets.

Um, isn’t the money in this case coming from a Dutch company? Youtube is being used to propagate this misinformation campaign, but they’re not driving it.

It doesn’t matter that Youtube is an American company, what matters is that there is a large audience on Youtube to influence with this campaign. Similar campaigns are done on every major platform, regardless of what country they’re based in.

Every time you pick up a new tool, you learn things about working with it that teach what you want from your next tool. Gotta start somewhere.

When you reach that point, and you know what you want, what’s important to how you work, you should replace the tool. Just do it, because it’s wasting your time and effort, and possibly also material if it’s failing in ways that a better tool would not. It’s preventing you from doing better work.

Pass it on via Goodwill if you can’t find a better candidate.

Alberta separatist group Russian influence campaign

So I want to try making my own patches

If you mean small pieces of already patterned fabric to sew onto larger textile products (clothing, bags, etc), that you can just cut and sew by hand.

If you mean stitching complex patterns or symbols with multiple colors of thread, that’s something you do with an embroidery machine. These are mechanically complex - they are more work to set up, more fragile, and more expensive than a standard sewing machine. They are also not very good for basic productivity stitches (e.g. seams) as they are intended to make very fine stitches on relatively lightweight fabric. They are not good starter machines.

For general sewing work, and especially for learning, I recommend any machine that does not have a screen like this one:

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/ps700

These types of machines are common at entry-level prices, and they offer a wider variety of stitch options, but realistically you won’t get much use out of those, and in my experience the embedded computer parts make the machine less reliable.

I prefer something purely mechanical like this:

https://www.brother-usa.com/products/st531hd

All the controls are physical knobs, dials and switches - no touchscreens or touchpads, no computer components, no vague error messages. It’s mechanically simple to the point where there is very little that can go wrong with it - it just does the job.

This model is also heavy duty, which means it has a stronger metal frame, a stronger motor, and more metal parts in the construction in general (over a standard duty machine). It should last basically forever. Other machines may be able to take heavy duty needles, but that doesn’t mean the machine itself can actually punch through 4 layers of denim without stalling or twisting the frame. Even if you don’t end up working on a lot of heavyweight fabrics, a heavy duty machine will suffer less wear and tear from normal use.

Why would you need to punch through 4 layers of denim? Because when you make a seam in a pair of pants like this:

you overlap the two pieces of fabric and then fold it over and stitch through it like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felled_seam

In the places where multiple seams come together (like where the pocket meets the side seam) there will be even more layers, and an otherwise easy project can suddenly become very difficult to complete when your machine just can’t handle 8 layers in a double-over seam.

Um… one possible downside of a heavy duty machine is that it will sew through your finger if you’re not paying attention, where a lighter duty machine might jab you and then get stuck. It’s also heavier to pick up and move around. It may also have less throat space:

than a similarly priced standard duty machine, because the longer the frame pieces are the more flexible they are. More throat space makes every kind of project easier because there’s more room to feed the fabric through, but it also makes the body of the machine more fragile. If you think you might work on larger projects (like blankets/quilts) you may want to prioritize larger throat space as a feature (dedicated quilting machines have longer arms to accommodate larger pieces of fabric).

Don’t be afraid to buy a used machine, but try to find a copy of the user manual for it before you buy it. Especially starting out, you’ll want the instructions for how to set up your particular machine, and how to do basic maintenance and troubleshooting. All mechanical devices require occasional maintenance. Looking at the manual should also help you figure out if the used machine has all of its parts.

Whatever you buy, keep in mind: simple is good, simple is reliable, simple is difficult to break accidentally and easier to fix if necessary. Extra fancy features do not make a better machine.

Stargate SG-1 characters reference Star Trek several times throughout the series. Star Wars too, but less often. Also there’s this.

It could be really useful for various social or psychological research

The only application I can see for such research would be to extend and refine the distopian use cases. What else would such research be used for? It will only feed back into the cycle of privacy invasion and the surveillance state.

… or monitoring patient status.

Impersonal patient status monitoring (beyond vital statistics like heartbeat monitoring which we can already accomplish much more easily) will not have any practical benefit. The most likely outcome is that it will be used to justify reduced nurse staffing.

I addressed this in another comment, but basically wind and solar both require large amounts of open land to generate significant amounts of electricity. They aren’t a complete solution, they simply can’t fit everywhere.

Most places that can’t fit in fields of solar arrays or wind turbines are reliant on fossil fuels for electricity, and those circumstances aren’t going to change anytime soon. The best solution right now would be to replace the coal and gas plants with nuclear.

I already addressed those.

What alternative do you propose?

If you’re faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority, your answer is clear: Do security.

~Satya Nadella, Microsoft Chairman and CEO, May 3, 2024

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-security-above-all-else/

So much for that I guess.

The comment you’re responding to literally does not mention FF.

Does it need to? That’s the alternative we’re talking about, whether it’s mentioned specifically or not.

Wind and solar are great and have become so good in the past decade that they’re more cost effective than everything else, but they still aren’t applicable everywhere, most often due to real estate requirements. Nuclear reactors are bulky too, but nothing compared to the amount of space you need for solar arrays or wind turbines to generate an equivalent amount of electricity. For the places where wind and solar can’t fit, it’s fossil fuels or nuclear.

…O …K … nothing is going to destabilize global society as badly as the collapse of crop growing cycles due to fossil-fuel-induced climate change.

Anything we can do to reduce burning fossil fuels is going to improve global stability.

I can’t think of any beneficial uses for such a product.

How many cruise ships have you gotten on?

But as soon as money/gifts/favors are introduced, it’s automatically an uneven playing field.

Even if you discount or prevent direct bribes/corruption, there is still an imbalance when a particular group (e.g. the petroleum industry) can afford to employ people as full-time lobbyists, who spend their time and attention on nothing else. It’s much harder to write effective regulation against that, or enforce it.

The only useful response is to organize advocacy groups that can also afford to support full-time lobbyists (the ACLU, EFF, etc).

Yes.

Alternatively, donate to and/or volunteer for groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontiers Foundation (or equivalent groups in your country) which are already organized and employ lobbyists.