I ended up getting a ham radio license and now I get to use technology that actually works (even if it's a little more janky than meshtastic/reticulum).
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
For hobby usage, ham is fantastic. For decentralized communication for the general public, which seems to be Meshcore/Meshtastic’s goal, it’s a nonstarter. There’s just too big a barrier to entry.
I vaguely remember reading an article where someone had somehow transmitted digital signals over HAM, could feasibly be a transport for a reticulum network, right?
A lot of startups are cults. Tesla maybe the final form of a culted startup where the stock owners don't care about anything anymore.
That said, the people who change companies aren't the ones that believe that management ever had the best ideas, or are able to push back on the cult thinking with clarity. Unfortunately, though, it's not necessarily evidence that wins arguments, it's charisma, which is how the cult is started in the first place.
em-dashes help flow ideas better than other means. For whatever reason, it's easier to process in my brain a comment with an em-dash rather than trying to split the idea into separate succinct sentences.
You can do small succinct sentences, but style-wise it sucks for longer passages.
It's not just data, right? Power can be abused as well. That person has power to control the narrative and can make a large bet on the number of times he can say the word.
So now it's public servants military power, congressional power, and they look to enrich themselves with making (or lobbying for) decisions which affect the outcome of a bet.
You could imagine an army general that lobbies for the bombing of Iran knowing the president has his ear, and then bets on the bombing of Iran by March 2026.
Go for it, don't spend a lot of money though on the first one. If you enjoy it then figure out the next one to spend the money on.
The big issue for me right now is that a lot of the smaller bed printers can't really do some of the larger projects I want to do like wall hanging systems or drawer organization systems.
Also Bambu the company mostly is fine, but there's some worry that they'll eventually lock people into using only their filament, but doesn't seem to have happened yet. So buyer beware.
> Also Bambu the company mostly is fine, but there's some worry that they'll eventually lock people into using only their filament, but doesn't seem to have happened yet. So buyer beware.
I'm not sure how Bambu could actually do that. They use RFID tags to identify their filament type/color. I taped a tag from a used roll to some prusa filament and the printer couldn't tell the difference.
Just in case, my Bambus are LAN only and don't get updated. I use Orca Slicer instead of the Bambu slicer.
Bambu can't even keep their filament in stock, plus they ship the printers with multiple preloaded profiles for other filament vendors. I don't foresee them making that change any time soon.
That's certainly the implied threat when people show up with AR-15's in the Idaho statehouse. Yes it's legal. But what is the point? This is ruby red Idaho.
I've always said when peaceniks start to carry weapons, it's time to worry. Alex Pretti didn't pull his gun, but still got shot. At what point will some escalation tactic end up in a gun fight between the local police and ICE?
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush.
Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms.
E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
> As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food.
It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
My friend is across town and I should be able to hit him with the line of sight meshtastic repeater from my house, but I've never been able to.
OTOH, we can hear each other clear on any of the ham bands.
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