The days are long, but the years are short. My childhood took a huge amount of time to pass. My child’s seems to be flying past at warp speed.

They rapidly become far more of a fully fledged person when they hit school age. Mines a few years ahead, and they are now awesome to interact with.

Depending on how I measure it, either becoming a dad, or founding a community group that has changed quite a few people’s lives for the better.

The horrors persist, but so do I!

I’ve actually got one myself. I would have to get creative to get it recharged from my solar panels. The inverter is grid tied, and would need to be bypassed.

The original comment was talking about having a server up. That, and the networking kit to make it useful, would draw quite a bit. A lot more than you would get with a portable solar panel in the UK. To keep that up would require significant panels and storage capability, which implies fixed solar. Hence my comment warning them.

I know a few people who thought they would be fine in a power cut, due to having solar. I set them straight on that, before it caught them flat footed at least.

Supermarkets rely on just in time deliveries. We learnt during COVID that even a slight delay can cause problems. Enough people then panic buy to snowball it.

It would take remarkably few road closures to leave towns isolated from supply chains. A 72 hour buffer is very useful in those cases. Even if it’s just to relieve short term pressure on those supply chains when they reconnect.

FYI, most home solar setups are grid tied. This lets you sell power to the grid, as well as supplement it with grid power, when required. The downside is that it goes down with the grid, so not to back feed and electrocute linesmen.

To go independent you need a more expensive system with a fail over mode. It drops out with the mains, but then fires a switch that disconnects you from the grid. It can then fire up again in off-grid mode. The reverse process is needed to reconnect to the grid.

You think they don’t already?

The difference is that it doesn’t have a big flashy public name. It will be an informal network of diplomats and knowledgeable command staff.

Parenthood. You reach the point of pure exhaustion somewhere around 6 months. Depending on your child, it can last for years.

They are technically slightly different terms. Someone can be homeless by choice. They could also be homeless, but have somewhere to stay (e.g. a shelter). Rough sleeping refers to people who have to sleep outside, without it being a choice on their part.

The term has had a lot of creep. It’s akin to how the word retarded changed from a medical description to an insult.

Yourself, along with some martial arts training.

You won’t be doing any Bruce Lee moves with basic training, but even basic training can make a big difference.

One of the first things you learnt in most martial arts is how to balance and move. This, combined with some basic blocks, is often enough to disengage and retreat quickly. It also helps train your brain to drop into defence/combat mode when required. This stops you freezing up for a critical few seconds.

Any weapon is mostly useless without the training to use it in the heat of an encounter. If you’re going to train with something, it might as well be a weapon you will always have available.

My preference is Tae Kwon Do, but any general martial art will be hugely beneficial.

Oh, and as a side effect, martial arts often help train a mindset change. You know you can defend yourself, and so subconsciously project confidence. It makes you less of a target to begin with.

It’s a very British style protest. Farage tried to turn an investigation/resignation/bielection into a media circus. The larger parties instead stepped aside to let the clown in to deal with him.

Mexico had a wrestler run (and win!).

I think it was in relation to having private tutors.

The rich had a private education, with a few years at “public school” to make contacts and learn to socialise with their peers.

It predated universal education systems.

Didn’t Mexico have a similar issue a year or so ago?

Someone ran and was elected under his mexican wrestling persona. He attended parliament with his mask on. He insisted, since he was elected under his masked persona, he would attend parliament under it.

He originally did it because cartels had targeted MPs, and he ran on an anti cartel manifesto.

I have an internal mindscape. It’s closer to a layered interactive data stream than anything else.

One of the ‘nodes’ on that is my speech center. Unless I block it, it tries to turn the data stream into a word stream. They then loops into the auditory ‘node’. That then tries to process it the same as someone else talking to me. It lets me use all the filters and processing tools I built up as a child. It is excellent at finding holes in my ideas, the same way I would mentally pull apart what I was being told by someone else. It also lets me crystallise ideas into a form that can be passed to someone else.

I can suppress my inner monologue (unless I actively require it, e.g. for writing this message) but generally I don’t. It’s useful when I need to deep dive a problem. My brain can outrun my word stream, and dropping it can let me attack problems without the limitations of language caging me.

I’m in 2 minds on this. It reads (and looks) like the police were dealing with deliberate civil disobedience, against a legal event. (Yes I feel dirty describing it like that, but it’s true).

Looking at the video, it looks like a twitch response that they reigned in immediately. The police officer had protestors all around him and was likely feeling defensive. It shouldn’t have happened, but it was a quick human/training failure.

As for the police stopping them at all. The best we can hope for now, is for the police being neutral. I would hope that the police would step in, if it was a bunch of right wingers trying to invade a gay pride event. It’s hard to argue the reverse, when the shoe is on the other foot.

And just to clarify, I’m well on the side of the protestors here. It’s just one of the things you need to accept if you’re pushing the law. I’ve played run-around with the police at protests myself before (years back now, unfortunately). I knew the police had to oppose us, and accepted that fact.

Outside is better, but inside is often a lot easier and almost as effective. Most glass blocks IR (heat). If you reflect it back out before it gets converted, it will exit fine. In practice it’s a few % difference, depending on the foil.

Margaret Thatcher was an absolute bitch. However, at least she had a spine.

Apparently, after the Falklands war, she personally wrote a personalised apology letter to the family of every UK soldier killed.

There are arsehole leaders who I can at least respect. Trump is not one of them.

One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.

E.g. we couldn’t do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can’t prove the universe isn’t a computer program, only rendering what a “conscious” entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.