What are you supposed to do with surplus wealth, exactly? No economy at any level can be tuned to have exactly the right amount of resources... there will be surpluses and deficits. Those who don't want to starve come deficit time do well to invest the surplus in ventures that might see pay off later.

Failure to do so just means the surplus rots or otherwise spoils.

But really, we're talking about bitcoin. Which isn't wealth at all. It's a bizarre gambling game where few who play know what the rules are. Crookeder than a Las Vegas casino, and there's no money in the vault if somehow you do win.

Well, see... I honestly don't know enough about window construction. I keep wondering if those could be hidden entirely by the frame elements that hold the pane itself. And my original mockup is just wrong... there's a better geometry that only needs one gpio pin for the entire pane. Didn't occur to me at first.

Will stop back with an update if I figure out anything interesting.

Possibly, but the benefit of the doubt argument is compelling. It's difficult to understand for a certain demographic, the type that has been online constantly since the 1990s, that works in technology, etc... but some people are lurkers. They'll read this stuff for years before they first comment, and then it will be about one thing exclusively.

And what might cause a doctor to begin posting in the last year or so? Are there any truly epic topics out there that would persuade them to drop the silence?

As for the "gets wrong basic details" I'll have to take your word for it. But assuming that is true, I've never known real-life doctors to be like some tv show genius that never misses anything, that never confabulates or gets confused. They work in an environment where that's much less deadly than it sounds because there's a checklist culture and a half dozen other people catching their slipups. So of course once they posted on a forum without that backup, there'd be little mistakes.

It is quite a coincidence that such a dramatic event occured to someone who spends such a large amount of time writing on reddit about the anti-vax.

It's not a coincidence at all. Just means they were near the breaking point for awhile now, and they finally tipped over. March was "bad enough I need to vent" and this week was "so bad I can't go on". These things are related, not "correlated without any plausible mechanism of causation".

People are “mentally wrong” for not wanting nazis around?

Yes. When your choices are "do the hard work that would make them not-nazis" and "polarize the world so I can go on a Nazi-huting crusade and literally kill them"... there's something sick in you that you should figure out and fix.

No. White supremacy is not a logical position

Positions generally aren't logical at all. Of any kind.

and it can’t be argued away

Not with argument alone. Shouting arguments at them from Twitter that you've also gotten them banned from can't ever work.

But they can be "interactioned" away. That means 2-way communication. In close contact. The sort of close contact that was already happening before you "threw him out of the bar".

This isn't speculation on my part. It's well-established science. This shouldn't come as a shock to anyone here. Even if sociology's not your thing, you have to have stumbled across it from time to time.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

You're just wrong. And the only reason to still insist you aren't wrong, is if, deep down inside, you want to go murder people. Of course, you can't murder just anyone... that'd be evil. So you find those who are deserving of death, and then orchestrate circumstances where, hopefully some day, you can kill them and not feel any guilt for it. That's what you are.

Its not their goal to be convinced or even debate really,

Doesn't sound like that's a goal of yours either. Like, how terrified you must be that your arguments will lose that you can't debate them?

"Oh my god, what if I changed my mind and thought like them! How do I avoid that!?!?!"

It's pathetic.

This is not a free speech instance, and we will do no “debating”, of ethnicities right to exist.

Why not? It's a good point to start with. Does anyone have a right to exist? And what does that even mean? And if it somehow turned out that some had a right to exist, and not others, what would the criteria even look like? How could those ever be sane? Oh gee, skin color. It's definitely skin color that makes someone have the right to exist. This weird little pigment protein, if its amino acids are arranged in the wrong sequence!

I could tear the shit out of them in that debate. I would make them feel bad for ever having spoken the words.

You? Too scared of losing. So scared of it, that you accuse them of not wanting debate, when you refuse to do it yourself. So scared that you announce in a public forum that "well people really dont' want to argue"... ON THE INTERNET. That's sort of like announcing there's no sun. At the beach. At noon.

The truth is that you hate people too. Every bit as much as they do. But among your ingroup, there are people who it is righteous to hate (Nazis), and people who aren't (ethnicities). And you want to genocide them too, just like they want to genocide the people they hate. But you need them to strike the first blow so you can pretend they provoked you and not the other way around. It's awfully convenient.

No I am not arguing that. I can't argue that, because I have no idea what is on this particular link. I am unable to view it. If I am unable to view it, I couldn't possibly say whether or not it's on other sites I do have access to.

This is simple logic. It's rather infallible.

This is more theoretical at the moment. Though, the stuff is cheap enough that I can experiment. Panes of glass are cheap enough, the material's cheap enough. Actually thinking about tinkering.

Might even figure out a way to retrofit, in which case it could be within the realm of the possible. Or hell, maybe I start selling it as a product somehow, dunno.

I am ignorant of what the link says, because NYT paywalled it beyond my ability to sneak past.

What am I supposed to be ashamed of? Not ponying up for a newspaper subscription that still wouldn't even let me read the actual newspaper articles, but just their crappy website articles?

How do you think people who grew up in far flung villages of USSR rose up to become leaders of the country.

We're not talking about the same thing.

You seem to think that because some poor people from villages succeeded to leadership that this is impressive, or the only criteria that matters. It's bizarre.

I'm pointing out that there were entire classes of people who were excluded from even getting a university education because of whose parents they were born to. That this problem wasn't somehow limited either to the early decades or to some far flung oblast, but was actual policy.

It's pretty fucked up. That poor, disadvantaged people sometimes eventually succeeded doesn't mitigate this. I can't tell if you're in denial of what I'm talking about (most likely) or ignorant (you'd probably protest that I was making stuff up, and I could swat away those objections with clear evidence).

Why would any sane person want what you offer, when I've already seen the experiment run before? When I know what the results will be? No thanks, glad, the USSR is dead and gone.

I have a few radios in my Rpi, but no Zigbee or Zwave. I do want some sort of trigger for broken window panes... a motion sensor detects something far different than that.

This isn't about "less work" so much as it is about doing things the right way.

Most of the HA stuff is wifi, but I am thinking about trying to use 1-wire for some sensors (temp and humidity mostly, maybe reed switches). And a few will be directly hooked up to gpio.

If you run a bar, and have a white supremacist, or misogynist sit down at your bar, and let him stay there, you now run a white supremacist bar.

This is a strange philosophy that doesn't really hold up in the real world. Though it is taking root there the last few years, I wince when I think what it might lead to eventually.

It's also a counter-productive philosophy. If a white supremacist sits down at your bar and you kick him out... he's not going to cry about it and then change his ways. He will go find some place to drink where he is welcome. That place will, with absolute certainty, reinforce his beliefs. However weak or strong they were before, they will become stronger for it.

If he had stayed, what would happen? He might talk to some people who have milder views? This is guaranteed to soften his white supremacy, if not eliminate it eventually. People adopt the attitudes and beliefs of those they socialize with. They do so without even realizing it. The longer it occurs, the stronger the effect.

The only reason to kick him from the bar is if there's something mentally wrong with yourself. If you yearn for some sort of final showdown, where you can fight the Nazis like ole great-grandpa did back in the 1940s, so you too can be a hero. You're doing what that Kyle Rittenhouse did, creating circumstances that will inevitably lead to violence, because subconsciously you want to murder other people that you did not need to murder. It's sort of sick.

check out the paradox of tolerance for why bigotry should never be tolerated.

Mindless drivel, that. The "paradox of tolerance" is that you never really wanted tolerance. You wanted the world to look a particular way, where everyone thinks, believes, and speaks as you do. And when they don't do that, you want to revoke their freedom of speech and selectively punish them for it. Afraid that, given the freedom that is everyone's birthright, that their "wrong" ideas are somehow more powerful than your "right" ideas, and that only violence can see you achieve victory.

No one can have correct thoughts, without first working through the incorrect ones. Some do it faster, most slower... but you either allow them to reach the correct conclusions on their own, or they're not reaching them at all. They're just being punished and brainwashed into parroting what you want them to say. If you need that to happen quicker, you do it by speaking with them. Even if it is frustrating or uncomfortable.

I pooped something?

People like Musk or Bezos simply didn’t exist.

They did. The numbers just weren't counted, and the climb to the top was slightly different. There were people in control of comparable industries, who were in control of comparable economic force. They just didn't have "billions in stock valuations" because the economic system didn't actually count such things.

These people experienced a far more luxurious life experience than the common Soviet citizen, in the same way Bezos experiences a far more luxurious life experience than myself.

Everyone had access to the same kind of education

No, they didn't. Ever heard of "coffin problems"? They were a sort of entrance exam that kept "certain people" out of the most prestigious universities while allowing others in without even bothering with the tests. Sort of like the literacy voting tests they had in the Jim Crow south. Impossible to pass if you were the wrong sort of human.

A son of a metalworker would have roughly the same opportunity as the son of the chairman of the Politburo.

Because Soviet Scientist eliminated nepotism with advanced knowledge of applied phrenology! Wtf.

that interface is still favored by most users,

And The Big Bang Theory was an award-winning comedy show that lasted for 12 seasons.

I mean, when you say "favored", you mean it's the only one easily available, and the only one acknowledged to exist in a way that most users would even be aware of it. Which is a strange definition for that word, since it implies readily available options that people are aware of.

if they hadn’t accidentally captured the usecase of groups, facebook would be dead.

Debatable. Not sure what "dead" means in this context, but if I can assume you mean "Myspace dead" or "Digg dead", then I have serious doubts. If instead you mean "tweeners are upset grandpa uses Facebook so it's not cool anymore" then it's been dead for years and simply doesn't care.

I am interested in the topic. By that I mean if I could somehow help it become dead, I'd gladly do so. But I don't see a Myspace-like event in its future, near or distant, and I can't imagine the circumstances that could even lead to that.

When means of production are owned publicly then they’re used to create things that are socially necessary and benefit most people.

That's the theory. The practice is that they're used poorly, and sometimes not at all. 3000 tons of left shoes. Phantom inventories floating around, trying to stave off purges.

At some point they tend to concentrate on "socially necessary" because there's so little spare capacity left that that no luxuries can even be contemplated. So you got that part right.

And by luxuries, we aren't talking $300 million yachts... we're talking oil paints. Then we get the "state-sanctioned art" stuff. "When oil paints are scarce, they can't be wasted on capitalist propaganda comrade!" and "There are secret fifth columnists who will use this Cerulean Blue and Mummy Brown to destroy our socialist utopia!".

Gotta love "public ownership". But when you believe in fairy tales, it's so often difficult to see reality.

However, the key point to acknowledge here is that capitalist states are inherently violent.

Humans are monkeys. Monkeys are violent. This happens regardless of political ideology or economic systems.

Socialism is inherently violent. There will always be people who do not wish to live in socialism. And if you let them defect, soon there won't be anyone participating. Thus, they cannot be allowed to defect. The only way to prohibit them from defecting is violence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, any of you are free to set up your own little commune, and do socialism for as long as you like. But it never works, only freeloaders show up. And then you blame capitalism for that.

Capitalism has its share of violence. But it tamps it down... there are easier and safer ways to get what you want than to bash someone over the head and take it.

Do you seriously think there were more desktop users in 2006 than there are now ?

If you'll let me do plus-or-minus on the year 2006 and the "now", then that's almost certainly (going to be) true.

You seem to think I’m pining for some kind of linux-desktop utopia, which isn’t the case at all.

I think rather, that you think this is a winnable race when the Earth just opened up and swallowed all of the race cars and yours is about to fall into the abyss.

It's just over. I've seen too much from random yahoos about how their primary computing experience is a phone. And it's not as if those people are going to work and sitting down at an office computer, they work at Arby's or whatever. The other explanation is that there's an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead me into believing the desktop is dead by a team of millions of propagandists writing subtly about how to do common computing actions on Android, or that the desktop has just came and gone, like dumb terminals before them. Like teletypes.

Personally I think the last 20 years in computing has demonstrated that opensource is the best model for server software

Probably, but that didn't stop Microsoft and dotnet from conquering some large fraction of that market. God knows why.

Can't read the article or infographic or whatever it is. Can't see the names associated with it... for all I know, the NYT cites Bozo the Clown and Ming the Merciless. Your assumption that "it's the people studying this" is just that.

Anything that he mistakenly identifies as socialist/communist is automatically righteous and must be defended at all costs. He's the stereotype that anti-communists harp about.

Reddit used to be a front page of 50/100 simple links, each of which highlighted a link to a comment section. Now it's an iPhone app highlighting captioned pictures. Something that (as far as I understand it) Facebook was from the beginning. But I guess someone who actually never knew reddit until after that happened might think it the other way around.

One does wonder if even he is confused about the response he got.

Which would be hilarious... he actually had access to some of the most effective intelligence organizations in the world just recently, you'd think they might have clued him in.

I'm guessing that white children get to attend the minimum security school, while the rest get the supermax?

Seriously, if your ideal is that all children get the "equal" schools I don't even know that we can have a conversation. Get rid of both buildings. That's the only "equal" worth striving for.