redirect it to https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Edit: someone already snatched it but no redirect yet

disengage

Of course, but that has nothing to do with your prediction that I took issue with. I'm not saying this shit isn't dystopian and going to get worse or that age verification isn't going to be a part of that, but the specific childish predictions of "operating systems add age verification that literally is just asking the user what their age is and just send it willy nilly to cloud services -> government outlaws lying about your age -> services log ages and IPs -> the government gets that info and uses that to track down and prosecute people with the exact maximum age".

The reason there's generalized harassment of oppressed groups and not of digital pirates (or age liars) is 1) because pigs don't actually care about digital piracy that much, its not baked-in to settler society in the way that white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. are, and 2) because pigs can't really see it. 2 could change, we could get the watch dogs future world where everyone is facial recognition-ed at all times and that's linked back to their digital footprint to such a granular level of detail that random beat cops can see that you pirated a movie last night or that you signed up to facebook with a false name/age. But even if that changes, point #1 will not change on its own, changing the law doesn't suddenly make cops or the legal system at large give a shit to enforce it, it'll just get used as another way of harassing the marginalized people they already wanted to harass.

A can't see on your face that you lied about your age when you installed ubuntu 9 months ago, but they can identify members of those groups and single them out for harassment, culminating in disproportionate prosecution for minor offenses. These things are not comparable. A better comparison would be digital piracy.

This is a ridiculous hill to die on, idk why I'm even replying

Yeah this is really cool tbh. It seems (napkin math) in this case the power generation is only at most like half the capacity needed to desalinate the amount of water that plant processes (100kW output capacity vs 55 m^3 of water at ~5 kWh/m3 = 278 kW) but even that is a pretty major game changer and if it can scale like you're saying....

honestly my only familiarity is from excerpts in Liberalism: A counter-history by losurdo and it didn't seem too appealing but it may kind of be an interesting historical perspective on the USA far before its hegemony

In terms of power generation its not a ton. 100kw capacity?

But I think the idea is that it's performing 2 functions that already needed to happen, and getting power as a byproduct. The two functions being: diluting desalination brine back down to normal levels for discharge, and discharging treated wastewater (this is the key that the article doesn't make very clear, but this one lays it out better: "In Fukuoka’s system, a generator is attached to a local desalination plant located near a sewage treatment facility. It draws in highly saline wastewater from the desalination plant and receives treated sewage.".

Plus it's a proof of concept/research facility for larger scale implementations elsewhere (gulf states maybe?)

I didn't realize there were parts of japan so dry that they needed desalination to have reliable water supply so I was also initially confused tbh.

Its hard to know what the shape of things to come will be.

If the shocks are just higher food prices due to higher diesel prices... That's a tough situation honestly because I don't see it opening up a lot of cracks in the existing food system. Stockpiling now is a good idea but will only carry you so far and you don't necessarily have a lot of resources to do so, by the sound of it?

If the shocks are more severe, with genuine shortages or breakdowns in parts of the distribution system, there may be opportunities that open up to provide your own transport or labor in collecting food from farms or other points in the supply chain yourself that commercial operators can't or won't bother with due to the cost or low availability of diesel. That would still require some of the hard work of building connections, but a crisis situation would make that easier in some ways. Volunteers with electric vehicles could be a real asset here in providing transport that isn't disabled or rationed?

I'm not assuming good faith lol, those mechanisms just wouldn't be effective, and assuming the government thinks about linux users enough to chase down IP logs of users with a particular fake age is childish, and that's all assuming that the PRs being discussed even do anything of the sort (sending the age stored in the user db to external services willy nilly).

If age verification crap catches on it won't be totally unenforceable mandates like "its illegal to lie about your age" it'll be technological solutions ala DRM and they'll be more effective (but still circumventable with a little expertise probably). And for now, I do expect that the legal mandates will remain on service providers, not individual users. We're simply too much effort to prosecute for meaningless bullshit

It's reasonable to assume the next legal step is to outlaw lying about your age. IP logs associated with an age of 126 would be easy targets.

Its really not reasonable to assume either of those things. If shit like this really takes off it'll be less like the linked discussions and more like DRM, with proprietary software (and hardware, if they want it to stick), linked to an online service that "verifies" your age externally.

My interpretation is that Drop Site is trying to offer journalism by tweet. As in they aren't just puttimg out excerpts or headlines from articles, theyre actually interacting with other accts independently of that, but they also arent just retweeting faceless accounts like most unserious "situation monitorer" types. Theyre actually explaining who the quoted person is and why/if what they are saying is credible.