TL/DR - they're using mini solar tower collectors to concentrate and collect sunlight to charge PV panels. This produces a lot of excess heat (enough to melt steel) - the heat is pumped away via water into an underground vault where the heat is stored until the evening where the heat is converted back into electricity using conventional off-the-shelf materials and hardware.

I avoided chrome for a long time. Finally I made the switch because FF was getting too slow on old computers back in the day. Lasted for maybe five or six years before I started getting some bad vibes. Why am I letting google run the web browsing software I'm using? This can't/won't be good in the future.

At least five years ago I made the switch back to Firefox, and haven't looked back. I love having adblocking that works (I use a router level ad block and ublock origin just in case to ensure I block almost every ad on the internet lol).

I'm honestly surprised it took people this long to decide to move away from Chrome.

What most people outside China don't understand is that real-estate has been one big scam. See, developers have been building skycrapers filled with condos. They tell the chinese people "Westerners are investing in second homes - it's a great nest egg investment for retirement! The property values will increase over time!"

The problem is that in the Chinese culture, people do not want to move into homes furnished by someone else. They want to customize and build the home to their own needs. As such all these condos are essentially empty - just bare walls with no trim, no paint, no furnishings, no kitchen cabinets, appliances, etc. It's not a "home" it's an empty canvas to build whatever you want......

Except it turns out nobody wants to live in an empty ghost town filled with shoddy constructed skyscrapers.

So that's how you end up with households that own 4-5 'homes' which are really just empty condos in empty skyscrapers that nobody wants. And now many people are waking up to the ruse and simply refusing to pay their mortgages on these second/third/fourth homes. Which is resulting in many major developers going bankrupt. (There have been multiple, but here's the latest developer in china flashing warning signs - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-property-developer-guangzhou-rf-faces-bankruptcy-restructure-demand-2023-07-13/ )

You can read more here - https://www.wired.com/2016/02/kai-caemmerer-unborn-cities/

Oh and fun side note - many venture capitalists inside America saw these developers building all these skyscrapers in China and decided to invest in these huge corporations. A fair amount of large financial institutions have bet big on these developers in China, and are going to lose their asses as these developers go bankrupt. It is already having a ripple effect on the US Stock Market as well.

510 is such a weird number. Did they just take “420” and shuffle a one from the 2 over to the 4?

Nope - just like how an 18650 battery is 18mm in diameter, and 65.0mm long, a 510 battery threading is 5mm diameter, and 10 threads (per millimeter I think?)

Pretty sure it was intentional. I can't find it now but there was a decision by Elno to not add the water systems to the launch pad which would have prevented the pad from being destroyed. They knew it would get damaged so decided not to mitigate the problem.

It's a classic infographic which has been floating around the internet for a long time. Hopefully you're not trolling and did learn something - because more people need to understand the concept.

Because otherwise you end up with districts like this one in Texas which purposely segments the community to alter the votes in one's favor:

Texas 2nd district

Fun fact about Gerrymandering, it was named after former Massachusetts governor and founding father Elbridge Gerry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering

I have a Tile Tag and it's not bad. I keep them on my keychain, in the car, and when traveling. They aren't as predominant as Air Tags yet, but they work.

I seriously suspect that Google will eventually acquire the Tile brand so they can absorb the patents without having to start from scratch.

Yup! That was another thing - since I had Wednesdays off, I scheduled my appointments and errands for that day so I didn't have to run out of the office to get stuff done during the week. It really did make me a more efficient employee.

Alas, that's too progressive for boomers to even think about. They'd rather us work 7 days a week without any breaks!

After fifteen years, I cancelled my Netflix last year. Don't miss it at all.

I think all these streaming platforms forget that not all of us need to watch their content 24/7. I spend less than an hour watching television a day while eating food and that's it.

Did you know that you can still enjoy Youtube ad-free (or the occasional 10-second skippable ad). How do you do it? By not watching youtube at all aside from the random how-to video. Since I watch less than an hour of youtube a month on average, I see essentially zero ads.

Getting old sucks, but everyone's doing it.

The thing people don't realize about nukes is that you don't just build them once and bob's your uncle, you have a nuclear bomb forever. The material starts to decay and the potency of the bomb is then greatly diminished. Nukes must be maintained to keep them operational. In fact, I know westinghouse would buy old unspent weapon's grade material, and then refine/dilute the material to convert into fuel rods for nuclear power plants. Given the war, I don't know if that's still the case.

But yeah, nukes take a lot of effort and resources to maintain as far as I understand it.