I love the part where the scumbag CEO call people terrorists for pointing where his cameras are.

sloped lot. I put them there before the walls.

Here the sewer is 80% (so for every $10 you consume of water they charge another $8 for sewer). In those months I don’t use their water I still pay for the sewer minimal fee (up to 10m³ water consumption, my average in the months I use their water is 18m³)

Is not-liking-being-monitored-by-some-asshole-billionaire-ceo-who-is-selling-all-my-movements-and-habits-to-people-i-know-nothing-about-and-i-have-no-reason-to-trust-their-intentions a hobby?

There were a couple of years with extended drought season and the city’s water reserves got dangerously low and there was rationing. Since then, I got another five 260L barrels and tons of 5L bottles filled with rainwater under my stairs just for use on my lawn, garden, and houseplants. I don’t believe the climate is going to get any better in the future, nor that the population will get smaller or industry will use less water. Every year is hotter than the previous one. What I expect are longer and longer drought seasons, and I don’t think I’m prepared enough :P

Another thing users are “agreeing” by default and have to opt-out?

I’m not a native speaker. I just mean I use the city water supply when it’s not raining season, and when it starts raining (about half of the year here) I stop using (and paying for) it and use only rainwater. As I wrote in another comment here, my city has a lot of natural springs and I get water for drinking there.

If your written language isn’t messy you actually read syllables.
There is this guy called Paulo Freire that developed a literacy method for adults that is really impressive and it was tested in several parts of the world. It has a whole part about making it relatable to the person learning and using its environment and social reality, but the reading/writing part is based on phonetics, so in two months his method can get adults from poor regions that have never went to school reading and writing - but as it’s based on phonetics, and language is messy, at start they mix syllables that have same sound, like stuff with c and k, or ch and sh, or ks and x, but if they know how it sounds they can read it, and regardless of grammatical mistakes when writing, what they write is understandable and “right” when it comes to phonetics, so even though it’s “wrong” you can still read and understand it, and that’s possible because the written language is based on syllables… now imagine having to teach 3000 to 4000 different symbols and if you make one stroke to the wrong side or miss one stroke it’s a completely different word?

The continued existence of written Chinese means as much as the continued existence of Christianity and how it spread through other continents, it has nothing to do with how good it is, but with historical power relations - and if Chinese becomes the next Lingua Franca, as it will probably be, it will because China won at capitalism and conquered the world’s markets, and not because its language is good - I actually can’t say if the language is good or not, but the writing system, it’s beyond bad.

ps: this has nothing to do with some Eurocentric view of language, because I actually find the Korean writing system pretty awesome.

My system goes like this:
Summer arrives and it’s hot, time to clean shave my head and beard and look like a nazi skinhead.
By the time winter comes I’m looking like a hobo but my hair is nicely covering my ears and my face and neck are protected by my beard so I don’t feel so cold.
Summer arrives again, time to clean shave again.

It’s been more than a decade since I installed mine, so there are probably more options today, but when I did, you were either on-grid or off-grid. On-grid means you “sell” your energy production to the energy company, but if the city power goes out, so does yours. Off-grid means you don’t use city energy at all, but it was much more expensive because it required batteries for storing energy… however, I remember recently reading about people using their electric car batteries to power their houses when the electricity was out, and I’m sure batteries are much more affordable nowadays because of how much electric car technology has developed.

Not directly, but I probably could. I have nets in my gutters so insects and leaves don’t fall on it and I have another filter before the tanks in my basement. I regularly do tests to check levels of pH, chlorine and other stuff. The chlorine tablets I use says it’s used to make water drinkable, and I use the rainwater to cook and make coffee (so I only consume rainwater that was treated and boiled).
My city is in the middle of mountains and it rains a lot and it also has tons of public water fountains, so every weekend I just go to a natural water spring at the bottom of a mountain and fill some bottles to drink through the week - the city’s water company do weekly tests on the fountains and every fountain has a QR code for you to check that fountain status.

hmm, I see, thank you for explaining :)

I have two 10,000 liter water tanks in my basement that I use to harvest rainwater, and another 2,000 liter tank on my roof. From October to around May I close the city water and use only rainwater. I’ve been doing that for a bit more than 10 years now, and it paid for the installation cost in about 4 or 5 years. I also have solar water heaters, but it’s hard to tell how long they took to pay for themselves because I also have on-grid photovoltaic panels for energy generation. My energy bill is about 1/6 of my neighbors’, and the photovoltaic panels paid for themselves in about 5 years as well.

Oh yeah, if you start learning it when you are like 4yo and have high mental plasticity and see it everywhere around you everyday sure it isn’t a problem, but it doesn’t make the ideogram/logogram system any less convoluted, unpractical and arbitrary… one has to learn from 3000 to 4000 symbols just to be able to read most publications. You are right, it’s hardly equivalent, imperial units aren’t that bad
Just like using Arabic numerals were a huge improvement from Roman’s, the alphabet was a huge improvement from pictograms, ideograms and logograms

I think what you are looking for are custom holographic label stickers. Without having its original design it’s quite troublesome to make an exact copy, especially if you use non-symmetrical overlapping geometrical shapes and hex color bases that are just a bit off the common ones… however, I don’t know a tool to automatically verify them, and as hand-signed copies, they can be copied close to perfection with enough resources.

Yes, learning a few letters that form syllables and through that you can read words even though you don’t know what they mean is not practical, it’s better to learn a some thousand symbols and, if you don’t know a symbol at all, you can’t even say it out loud because you can’t read it.
Ideograms are the imperial units of language.

It was (the first world wide language used for diplomacy). If you want to quote Wikipedia, then:

“French is sometimes regarded as the first global lingua franca, having supplanted Latin as the prestige language of politics, trade, education, diplomacy, and military in early modern Europe and later spreading around the world with the establishment of the French colonial empire. With France emerging as the leading political, economic, and cultural power of Europe in the 16th century, the language was adopted by royal courts throughout the continent, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Russia, and as the language of communication between European academics, merchants, and diplomats.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca#French

Maybe sailors communicated with locals through a broken pidgin, but diplomats and aristocrats used French.

I first heard of the expression in a fancy dinner a relative brought a diplomat she was dating, and for diplomats all around the world for the last four or five centuries French was the Lingua Franca, as well for meetings between courts, aristocrats, academics, and the first language a book would be translated to because up until a few generations ago if one wanted to learn an “international language” it would learn French, which makes the etymological assumption understandable. However I just went to check some info about it since I was just told Franca doesn’t come from French… turns out, it has nothing to do with Germanic languages as well, but a mix of mostly Romance languages used through the Mediterranean for trade and that maybe got its name because Arabs, Turks, Persians, etc called all Europeans “Franks” and it was synonym of Westerner.

Then it’s just a happy coincidence that it was the first world wide language used for diplomacy.

You mean the VPN? Changing server doesn’t fix it?