There’s several ISM bands, though, pretty evenly spaced. The 13.5MHz one is used for passive RF chips like on credit cards, for example. They’re skinny, but for purposes where bandwidth doesn’t matter they can be. For other purposes bandwidth is scarce enough there has to be tight regulation.

Actually high water absorption happens in mm wave bands up in the hundreds of GHz (and THz too, if we could make a decent transmitter). Those fucked up riot control devices that make your skin feel on fire work based on that principle, because the heat will only go deep enough to hit pain receptors. Presumably, they stop working if you get a water mixture of any kind on the window, too.

Mine doesn’t connect to anything AFAIK. Actually, maybe it has Bluetooth? I’ve never bothered with it, though.

I would hope it’s a special, heavy-duty kind at least.

They’re on everything because it legitimately just is a good way to get lots and lots of controls and displays on a limited space.

The water resonance thing is a myth, AFAIK. Strong absorption is actually a bad thing for a microwave oven, because then it would only heat the surface. The way they work is effectively bouncing the radiation through a barely-absorbing dielectric thousands of times, to get the effect really even.

The frequency is probably just an easy one to build magnetrons for.

Really!? That’s a bit of a life hack. Good to know.

Usually mass-produced is a fraction of the price of anything bespoke.

Maybe just one without proper breakers?

Yeah, I’d much prefer micropayments in crypto (I swear that’s not just a string of buzzwords). HTTP even has codes built in for it, it just never took off because crypto and even paypal didn’t exist yet back then.

If you have nothing you, you get a dead internet space. There’s simply no reason for the mentioned people to not make endless sockpuppet accounts. That’s why the meatspace -> phone -> email chain arose in the first place, without anyone ever designing it as far as I’m aware.

On here? I haven’t noticed, but with the lax admission procedures on some instances spammers, scammers and bots are kind of inevitable.

In the really long term you’ll probably need an email address that needs a phone number that needs a physical address like everything else.

Few people at 45 feel like they’re ancient and just need to hurry up and die, OP. Hell, actual seniors think of that as young and virile.

That aside, I’ve given up on having a proper career at this point. I’m not sure how much I want to go into what happened on my main, but I was pretty much obsessed with making a modest legacy in high school, and I fully expect to just hustle to survive now.

Yeah, it’s like OP is imagining cigarette deaths happen suddenly. They don’t; unless you end it fast yourself you’ll be like the pictures they put on the packages where I live.

Everybody nowadays knows you leave the phone at home to be off grid, right… right?

The tragedy of the commons is definitely part of it, but until recently there was a sort of global consensus anyway. Domestically climate change action - real action - is unpopular.

No, it’s not that people are unaware, or even don’t believe it, it’s that they can’t reason about it strategically

It’s spending now to save later. If that’s about military spending or emergency services everyone gets paying taxes for it, but words are as far as most will go to stop nonspecific far future weather. Even when people talk about the situation with climate change, you hear them frame it in moral terms instead of practical terms.

Case in point: Canada has a carbon tax, and a majority want to get rid of it. Denialism is not a prominent part of the campaign, just the fact that it costs something. And not even much, and it’s all given back in refunds - doesn’t matter, the extra gas cost people will bear is zero.

The obvious answer is fossil fuels, right? Few people want to cook the climate, they just can’t quite fathom something that abstract and slow-moving, so they do it anyway.

Less obviously, feeding all our most sensitive data to random websites and apps. Again, the threat just doesn’t look enough like a sabre-tooth tiger.

Glad I could share something interesting!

Yeah. A blockchain is a chain - new stuff is built on top of old, and it grows forever. Ripple’s ledger is all relatively up to date information IIRC. It doesn’t actually need the chain, because as long as a critical number of nodes agree on a single order of transactions, they can agree that only the first spend of a set is valid if it would otherwise lead to double-spending (which is the main challenge of a distributed currency).

How that agreement is reached in an asynchronous network with possible malicious nodes is the real trick, and at that point I do start getting fuzzy on the details. Byzantine fault tolerance is hard. I think I’m actually going to read the whitepaper (again?), now that I’m thinking about it.

Edit: It’s still not. I guess “blockchain” has just become just a marketing term at this point. The current crypto market is dumb even if crypto isn’t.

Sure, I’ll PM you.

For anyone else, it’s easy to find by search, but it feels like one of those things that could be ruined if it got too well-known.

Yeah, I know how Ripple works. The ledger is not blockchain-based.

Probably for the same reason people put other sensitive stuff in mystery software: if it’s not physically visible the threat doesn’t seem real to them. Obviously, that’s dumb, but you did directly ask.

There’s a lot of overhead involved in making it untraceable like that, and it’s not clear how much of it can be achieved using postquantum algorithms. Ripple is also nice in that it doesn’t bother with a blockchain at all.

Yeah, it’s a slight exaggeration. OP also works totally remote, though, so it would be a very strong guess.