A) If customers can't manage select a properly secure cloud camera system, what makes you think they're going to do a good job picking a VPN vendor and setting up their product? But perhaps more importantly..
B) What about the apparently huge majority of us that prefer these devices precisely because the video is not stored on-site?
Additionally, if this urban farm plot exists to the exclusion of several stories of apartments, and those apartments must instead be located further away from where people want to be, the net carbon emissions (not to mention the effect on housing prices) are definitely higher than that of a regular rural industrial farm.
I do not definitely think that urban farms AND urbs at a whole can be sustainable, IMVHO the sole sustainable model in the present time is the Riviera ones, where people work and live in low density areas with a small distributed economy that can evolve instead of creating mega-structures and mega-infrastructures that serve a purpose for a certain period of time, perhaps well, but can't evolve and so cyclically became equally giant issues but my point is totally different and it's that actual farming is effective in economical terms at today social organization notnature. In the actual mass distribution of foods model a classic tiny "elderly" farm is unsustainable economically, but that's not by nature.
Actual way we live is evidently untenable, but actual way of living does not means the sole possible, the sole civilized etc. In practical terms my own personal classic veg-garden is far to satisfy my needs, but having it is nice, do not impede me from being a connected sysadmin, do not even demand much time: irrigation is automated, I only need a bit of manual hours at start and end of the season, little time for harvesting even less to surveil. Of course, I do not achieve self-sufficiency, I just made few month worth of fresh tomatoes and salad to make salads at home, a bit of potatoes and beans+peas again just to be used few months, the former fresh (boiled, fried, oven-ed) and the rest normally frozen, some aromatic plants (sage, rosemary, thyme etc) and sparse red fruits. To harvest enough to be self-sufficient I need more land than a small slice of terrain in the back of my home, I need animals for manure (so far I get it for free from some neighbors who have horses, so that's anyway self-sufficient) etc. Not an easy business and not my own business, but in my region there are still few small farms that sell their product in not so small quantity, not enough for self-sufficiency of the territory but still a significant surplus. For poultry it's not much different, it's untested for me but I think producing some crops+insects to nourish them can be done at a very small scale in space, energy and labor terms, the keeping them do not demand much work: a weekly clean up of the henhouse with a pressure washer in 10', a bit of regular fresh water supply, regular harvesting of eggs, perhaps once an year a bit of work to incubate some eggs and when it's about time to slaughter some chickens, a thing that does not demand much again 1/2h for some, a knife, a simple kind-of-open-washing-machine with hot water and few rubber teethes to quickly remove plumage (a very simple and cheap stuff, energy produced by p.v. also), a bit of butcher works to empty them, a bit of time to make the blood drain, some final touch and they can go to the freezer. When needed a simple scale, plunging them in water + right dose of salt (14/15g per kg) for a night, an oven or a smoker and they are ready to eat. Again not self-sufficiency but still enough to not needing buy eggs and a bit of extra meat per year. Just that at a certain scale lower significantly the need of third party food.
Since the target should be local/regional self-sufficiency, talking about my latitudes, trout farms can be planted in so many places here, enough cereals and fruits are already produced in the plains in the center of the country (France), seas offer a bit of foods etc. Not really a distributed self-sufficiency at the actual overall population but almost there, if well done on scale. In the end in the entire world that was what our ancestors have done for millennia and since we are here is have evidently worked well enough...
Surely modern tech help, especially in a climate change scenario to ensure ability of amassing foods for long time, surpassing locale climate events etc I do not think about classic hoe and pitchfork by bare hands, of course, but that's is. The issue is far more the actual economical model than nature or technical.
Just a BIG load of things we need today is needed only because people mostly have forget how to preserve foods at home. Just knowing how to salt the meat (produce sausages and dried meat products at home) and making preserves in jars + using freezers ENORMOUSLY lower a big set of actual food needs. That's is personally tested, when I was living in a big city I usually buy food constantly and that means crapload of packaging AND relevant processing/supply chain behind, now I buy food once a month in quantity having space to stock, I have better quality food and far less industrial/supply chain work needs behind. Just frozen bread and some kind of cheese who can be frozen issueless was game changing with essentially no effort. On scale that means pushing riviera model, with individual homes and enough space, WFH for eligible jobs etc cut perhaps 1/5 of our actual food supply chain needs, not enormous but very significant to start a new economy.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that saving people from financial ruin was only part of the intent of the PPP legislation. The main point of a “stimulus” is to stimulate the economy. If your friend received money and then spent it on something, the legislation essentially worked as intended.
It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
What didn't make sense, of course, is what those people were supposed to be buying, since the reason they were furloughed was because.... people weren't buying things, because of lockdowns and such. Hence, inflation when aggregate $ exceeded stuff worth buying.
> It was not sold as a stimulus, it was to allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (in a bizarre ill-thought-out privately-run unemployment insurance scheme) to continue to pay ongoing expenses.
Can you clarify what's your rationale for believing that a program designed to "allow businesss to pay furloughed employees (...) to continue to pay ongoing expenses" does not correspond to an economic stimulus program?
It was not to pay furloughed employees, it was to avoid having to furlough or lay off more employees than they did anyway. Furloughed employees did not get paid, but retaining a certain percentage of pre-pandemic headcount was a requirement for the loan to eventually be forgiven.
Source: I was furloughed April 2020 while my employer at the time received over $2m in PPP. Furloughed employees were explicitly told to collect UI.
If they spent the extra money on secondary-market financial investment (like stocks or crypto), propping up asset prices, then that seems like it goes against the stimulus that the program wanted, which was to keep steady sales for otherwise reliable businesses.
Inflation is hitting most countries aggressively now. The US may actually be on the conservative end of inflation which may have been buffered using government subsidies/influence, but the net takeaway is the rapid expansion in the world can't be explained by simply looking at the US's free-money-keep-buying scheme.
The graph shows until this Feb. JPY has been plunged about 13% recently, and even without it import energy/food/everything price is increasing for obvious reason. Let's see whether salary catch up (I doubt).
You are correct that the access security of a booklet is almost certainly better than that of a password manager. The issue with the booklet is that humans do not like transcribing long strings between computer and paper so (at least in my experience) people who use the booklet method tend to eschew longer passwords, they tend to avoid creating new passwords when they can re-use an old one, and they don’t change the passwords very often (if at all). Also in the event that the booklet is ever lost or stolen (which is made significantly more likely by the fact that you must carry it around with you everywhere in this age of the pocket computer), you are suddenly in a very bad place.
Suburbs ARE evil, but our land use policies keep us from building enough housing in cities, which makes them too expensive to be considered a good option for most people.
I didn't downvote it, but it's likely due to the unsubstantiated claim that suburbs are evil or the sweeping generalization that all cities have poor zoning and land use planning. Or perhaps the biased implication that large cities are good for everyone.
It seems like this is an unsubstantiated claim. At the time that this change was introduced, Chicago was at the tail end of one of the longest economic declines that it has ever experienced. Several huge retailers that were located in the area closed around the same time. The hope was that changing this street into a pedestrian mall would save it from economic collapse. Unsurprisingly, it did not as the forces at work were much larger than anything that could be fixed by changing the traffic pattern on a single street.
I'm not sure this is right. One of the very clever things Uber did was take advantage of a loophole in the hackney laws that allowed drivers to operate for hire without taxi medallions as long as they did not perform street hails. From the point of view of taxi operators who had long relied on this system to protect them from meaningful competition, this was a flouting of the intent of the law, if not the actual language of the law itself. They did not however, as far as I know, actually break the law.
Uber broke limousine chauffeur laws, not taxi laws. It varies from state to state, but generally you need a chauffeur license to pick someone up for hire. From what I understand there is generally no limit to how many might drive around but they are not allowed look for customers, the customer must find them.
The taxi industry was hurt the most, but it wasn't taxi laws that were broken it was chauffeur laws.
What? In the UK, private hire licensing is & always was a normal thing and the way Uber uses it is entirely normal too. It's not a loophole. They weren't even the first to allow booking without phoning.
Your comment seems to lack much in the way of fact.
They weren't banned in the UK. Or London. Their application for a license renewal was temporarily denied in London. They appealed, once.
They worked with TfL to resolve their concerns and were granted a new license - though slightly shorter term than normal. They're not entirely off the hook and will need to continue to show that they're behaving appropriately, but they're absolutely fine to operate now and that is not likely to change any time soon.
B) What about the apparently huge majority of us that prefer these devices precisely because the video is not stored on-site?