Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.

They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.

It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.

Lower expectations is a great tip.

I find that the more a group does things, the more everyone chills out. It's like the expectations come from a fear of being judged and from uncertainty. When everyone has information from the last ten events then you don't need to stress anymore, because everyone knows how this one will go and they've all judged one another already.

It helps to remember that you are competing with: no event.

If there are other parties happening and you're trying to make a better one, by all means, go all out. But mostly people in their 40s aren't going to many house events, so they're just happy to be somewhere with people. They don't care that you didn't decorate or sweep the floor or prepare an elaborate meal. You made soup and they're thrilled.

I'd also add that first-event nerves (on host and attendee sides) can be an uncertainty problem. No one wants to misunderstand the dress code, social code, etc. Once people have been together, there are now group norms that assuage that (aka "I know what's acceptable to wear and talk about").

I think the argument is that commercial recipes in the US are written in proportional notation, e.g. 1:2:3 sourdough, but recipes in countries which use metric give units, e.g. 1kg:2L:3kg. I also note that if you add small proportions of an ingredient, e.g. salt, it might be easier to change units in metric (5g salt) while it would be easier to write proportionally in imperial (0.005 parts salt) if you were then going to scale to to a tonne/ton of dough.

I have no idea if this is true but it sounds like a coherent argument that isn't just volumetric vs mass units.

I misread the article too, but it states that with 3 or 4 on the jury the probability has increased to 0.9, instead of 0.8 with 1 or 2. It's just that an incremental extra jury member from odd to even never increases the information, even when it's 9999 to 10000.

In this specific discussion, the traits labelled as toxic masculinity were as follows:

> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.

The person who most embodies these traits for me, in my life, is...my mum. I don't view them as exclusively toxic any more than I view them as exclusively masculine, either. Sometimes you really do just choose to hug your kids even when they were aggravating little twits five minutes ago and you're still mad at them, and that's a good thing.

Gender studies as a field is absolutely riddled with gender bias. I view it with scepticism because I don't think it will treat my gender or my sex fairly, not because I think there's no need for it.

The "X for MEN" trend, for example, exists in the context of decades of "X for WOMEN" products. The Man Shake (TM) is a product that only exists because Slimfast (TM) has already convinced the world that meal replacement shakes are for women.

I can see why The Man Shake is stupid, but I don't understand how Slimfast was any better. Nor do I understand why The Man Shake is masculinisation but Slimfast isn't feminisation. Nor why one should be seen as exploitative advertising targeting insecurities, while the other is an intentional political effort.

If I remember correctly, there was a story about a robot that got stuck midway between two objectives because it was expensive and so its creators decided to strengthen the law about protecting itself from harm.

I'm not sure what the cautionary tale was intended to be, but I always read it as "don't give unclear priorities".

I have an issue with the "code is a liability" framing. Complexity and lack of maintainability are the ultimate liabilities behind it. Code is often the least worst alternative for solving a given problem compare to unstructured data in spreadsheets, no-code tools without a version history, webs of Zapier hooks, opaque business processes that are different for every office, or whatever other alternatives exist.

It's a good message for software engineers, who have the context to understand when to take on that liability anyway, but it can lead other job functions into being too trigger-happy on solutions that cause all the same problems with none of the mitigating factors of code.

I live in Australia and about half our beef production is apparently grass-finished. I believe what we get in the supermarket is more likely to be grain-finished, but I've definitely bought steaks with the telltale grass-finished yellow fat from Woolworths before. My understanding is that it's more about rainfall and seasonal feed than the particular flavour of one or the other.

For the record, I also think calling grass-fed beef gamey, metallic, and saying it's unlikely to be popular (like the top-level reply did) is an overstatement. The most prominent thing is the different coloured fat. The taste isn't hugely different, probably because our grass-finished beef still gets enough feed.

It's just beef. I go to the supermarket and buy steaks and then I cook them. Sometimes they're finished on grain if the farmer didn't have enough feed, and otherwise they're finished on grass or silage or hay.

I don't understand why you would write something like that in response to a pretty normal discussion. The whole point was that I don't care what feed the beef was finished on.

I think the whole point was that mega-yachts are money (or, from the perspective of the employee, effort) pits. Those employed shipbuilders and wait staff aren't building cruise ships and they aren't serving meals on them. The time and effort that went into those tasks will never reappear.

The median person is better off if the rich either invest that money, lose it to tax, or give it to charity. The money/effort gets redirected away from mega-yachts and other consumption and it has to go somewhere.

That money often doesn't go to someplace the common person would fine more useful. A yacht made and stored outside the US is easy to hide from US taxes if you want one, if it is a status symbol you can find plenty of others, some of which are easy to make elsewhere thus moving money out of the US.