It’s been a bit over a year for me, otherwise this would be the answer.

Oh my god, that’s amazing. I’m getting on something that can be rooted posthaste, but in the meanwhile…

Well, not by that name. There’s other sorts of legal agreements for shared buildings, though. People complain about condo boards up here too, but it sounds like the American HOA is particularly nasty. I don’t know why.

Yes, this is the unappreciated other end of shitty small-scale power tripping. Normal people don’t want to do jobs like internet moderator or HOA president, because nobody appreciates them and it’s boring. So, people who get a different kind of value out of it take their place, and around we go.

I’ve heard it’s actually more comfortable in really hot conditions. If its metal, the whole thing can be a cold spot I guess.

Anyway, I’d like to flex about all the rough sleeping I’ve done. It’s not usually braggable.

Yes, when bootstrapping, tuck in your bootstraps.

To add a bit of detail, it comes down to circles being nice, simple geometric objects, and an assembly of metal with contact points being capable of way more accuracy than you’d first expect.

Bootstrapping the first lathe is harder; most likely some historical elite master craftsman was able to make one freehand, and future ones derived from it. We still have the one Vaucanson made that way, although it sounds like it was a one-off. David Gingery wrote a book on the topic, but he still assumes you have a power drill and a ready-made threaded rod.

Smelting metal (as opposed to just heating already refined metal) is a non-average skillset, though, and knapping is quite hard to master.

Fun fact, some cultures don’t use pillows, and instead have carefully shaped head stands.

See, in the past we solved that by just not having cities the same way, and no buildings taller than maybe 6 floors. And the smallish cities there were were so disease ridden the population self-limited.

On this same note, insulation in general. We can only make something so strong, conductive, heat-resistant, light or hard, so we’ve internalised the expectation that there’s always practical limits. But insulative? There just isn’t one. That means that with an arbitrarily small source of energy - body heat is not only possible but typical - you can overcome unlimited external coldness. We’ve being doing this since before we were human, by many definitions.

Lathes. You spin a thing and cut it, which sounds unimpressive, but from there you can bootstrap to pretty much all modern technology.

Pretty much anything with an interplay of water and air pressure fascinates me. Someone else mentioned siphons. I’ll mention diving bells and bongs.

That’s not universal, though - this is how I switch keyboards to Cyrillic.

In my climate, mmm, crabapples. I guess do find a raspberry plant I think I can pick from, occasionally.

that you need to get conspiracy theorists to sit down and do the treatment. With their general level of paranoia around a) tech, b) science, and c) manipulation, that not likely to happen.

You overestimate how hard it is to get a conspiracy theorist to click on something. I don’t know, it seems promising to me. I more worry that it can be used to sell things more nefarious than “climate change is real”.

you need a level of “AI” that isn’t going to start hallucinating and instead enforce the subjects’ conspiracy beliefs. Despite techbros’ hype of the technology, I’m not convinced we’re anywhere close.

They used a purpose-finetuned GPT-4 model for this study, and it didn’t go off script in that way once. I bet you could make it if you really tried, but if you’re doing adversarial prompting then you’re not the target for this thing anyway.

The interaction between society and technology continues to be borderline impossible to predict. I hope less true factually beliefs are still harder to defend, at least.

It’s a technical detail people might not have been aware of, and I’ve pointed it out. I’m going to disengage rather than defend a viewpoint I don’t even necessarily hold.

TBF taxes on billionaires would go under individual taxes. And corporate taxes are relatively easy to fudge because corporations aren’t real except on paper.

I would be shocked if they were earning a significant amount compared to federal funding. This is monthly, if you missed that like OP.

It isn’t cheap being “leader of the free world”.