Welcome!

Locally, yes. Solar (and wind) energy isn’t uniform in timing or location, so when there’s too much of it relative to consumption, there needs to be a profitable way to use it rather than just dumping it into resistive heating or letting the panels wear out faster at open circuit. Desalination is a pretty good idea since places with high solar resources also tend to be poorer in water resources. The challenge is the capital costs of desalination plants and competition with existing water sources - water rights are a giant ratfuck by themselves. I think it’ll make sense to build desalination plants that can absorb excess energy generation, but if there’s even political will for it, they’ll take a lot of time to build up

That describes my family. We’ve done Airbnb and VRBO, but now pretty much stick to hotels. You know what you’re getting, price is competitive, to bdint have to wash your own bedding, and a lot of hotel workers are unionized. That’s all in addition to the awareness that every Airbnb house could be a home for someone who needs it. I won’t be sad if the Airbnb model folds and helps the housing market regain a bit of sanity

Good thing we didn’t “defund the police” so taxpayers can keep paying police to violate their rights. This will continue and worsen until there is some incentive in place for police to follow the law

Could be Mossad, too! Or wind, I guess; Helicopters are death traps

I generally try not to bring it up, but I know folks that’ve resumed eating meat and we’re welcomed back with high-fives. This argues against the “preachy” argument in this thread. And people don’t get criticized the same way over eating unnutritious fast food all the time. My view is that some people feel criticized by other folks’ different life choices. When Alice to be in an out group, Betty is confronted with their own life choices.

I’m no help here, but I have been thinking strongly of converting an old windows box to Linux gaming with steam, so I’m hoping someone can help OP and I can pretroubleshoot my own transition. Steam has their own debian-based OS, right? I was planning on falling back to that if proton didn’t work

I’m a bit torn on this one. I love Colville’e running the game series and a lot of his perspectives on what makes a game fun and was going to back the project but in the Q&A sessions, they were really focused on spending the stretch money on their own VTT. I don’t really trust them to spend that money efficiently as it’s way outside of their exhibited skill set. Maybe they’ll be able to quarantine the VTT development/resources so that it doesn’t affect quality of the core product, but since they’re fully backed, I decided to hold off for now. I backed strongholds and followers as well as kingdoms and warfare and both suffered from "cool idea that was a little too convoluted to be worth it_

On the other hand, the Arcadia content that they contracted others to produce was fantastic. I’m excited to see what they come up with but won’t be backing at this point since it’ll just be throwing cash at their VTT

Home Depot rents out gas-less mig welders surprisingly cheap. You could spend a fun 3-4 hours noodling around trying simple welding of angle iron pieces!

Fireflies. I could sit on a porch watching fireflies every night of my life