Let’s say you’re a person of questionable immigration status who has lived in the US for a couple of decades, achieved some modest success - your own home, mostly paid for, a car or two, maybe even a small business.

Sure, just walk away for not even a month’s pay, back to a country you’ve not lived in for decades.

Oh, and there’s a good chance some roided-up high school dropout is going to snatch you and stuff you in a van when you go to the immigration office to begin this nice, civilized process so that he can make quota.

Yeah, I’d be uninterested in drawing the attention of the immigration enforcement machinery right now, too.

If the government wanted people to take the carrot, they shouldn’t be so quick with the stick, even at immigration courts where people were doing their best to follow the laws.

In the winter in northern Europe or the colder parts of North America, as part of a radiator system? Kind of works!

Any other time and place? The power to run it, plus the power to cool it.

Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.

Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...

My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.

Grid level renewables are more economical than rooftop solar by a significant stretch, and Texas has a lot of that, especially wind. The lifetime cost of rooftop solar just doesn't work out very well when you also have cheap electricity.

Something is deeply wrong with the home solar market in the US. It comes out about 3x more expensive than Australia despite similar labour costs.

The one that I'm at a complete loss for is Uruguay - it is one of the wealthiest countries per capita in South America as well as the least corrupt and most egalitarian... not exactly a huge source of desperate immigrants. Did their government scold ours too harshly for the recent Venezuela shenanigans or something?

Yeah, Uruguay is also surprising.

Yes, life in Bavaria, working in manufacturing, is nothing but miserable oppression. Horrible 35 hour work week. Wretched 6 weeks of vacation. Ruinously expensive 500 EUR/month daycare. The prospect of having to pay a couple hundred Euros per semester when my child reaches university.

The good wine is now 8 EUR/bottle.

Suffering and deprivation.

Do not come here, I beg of you. Save yourself.

I had to use extraordinary means to get this message out.

That’s exactly what an oppressive government would have their citizens say, fellow Bavarian!

/s

Wow, that would take care of our usual home office base load (Germany, not using electricity for heating)

It's a siren call for us techies, but reality is less pretty than our fantasies of "cheap base load".

I got an offer for a "essentially free" residential turbine including the pylon (8 to 10 meters, the legal limit for a "Kleinwindanlage") in SW Germany - just had to dismantle it and put it on my lawn. And of course pour a huge foundation [2x2m?] and have an accredited electrician do the necessary alterations. Nope. It didn't even produce enough electricity to offset the maintenance costs - no idea how I should offset the costs for moving it, even with the free capex.

And I did the math about 3 years ago: Prices for both PV and batteries dropped a lot since then. For late fall/early spring I would be better off by adding a PV carport (2 cars). I could also finally automate charging my batteries while electricity is cheap during Dec/Jan, might even be worth bumping my existing battery from 28 kWh to 42 kWh.

To be fair: The math might work out in the Northern Germany; but I would not bet on it.

I'd never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, particularly in Germany, by a factor of at least 3-4. 50-55" mid-range TV: plenty under 400 EUR. Double-glazed window about that size, custom-made (because just about all windows in Germany are custom-made): 1200 EUR, and that was about six years ago - I shudder to think what it would be now.

Similar to when solar panels became cheaper than fencing.

Yep, loving my gesetzliche Krankenkasse (public health insurance, which is more like "highly regulated insurance"), even more than I liked the Privatkrankenversicherung (less highly regulated, but still with better guardrails than a lot of things I've seen in the States) I was on my first decade in the system here. Sure, there are some specialists who won't accept it, or who will give you a sooner appointment if you're private pay, but in that situation, you have the option of declaring that you're a self-payer that quarter, and your public insurance will reimburse in the amount they normally would have for that procedure or exam. For things like an MRI, the full retail cost in Germany is still much lower than in the US (it was about 600 EUR for my back a few years ago, while I was still privately insured, and I still had to wait for reimbursment).

Even once I do hit the income threshold to switch back to private (switching back to fulltime work), I'm pretty sure I won't.

As far as doctor choice goes, I feel like I have more on the public insurance here (like 90% of the population) than I did with UHC in the early 2000's back in the US. I certainly have fewer financial surprises.

What if Anthropic offered a platform for such sharing while you were still around, with a percentage of the collected API fees going to you?

“License your chat history” - most of us wouldn’t have any takers, but someone like you might.

(And I say this as someone who is really not a fan of how LLMs are being presented to the world at large)

It'd probably be such a small amount of money that it'd cost me more to cash the cheque. Lawyers are the only people who get rich over that kind of thing. Don't share any information with the robot that you don't feel comfortable with them using to make their service better. If you want to be fully in control of your interactions with AI then use llamafile which is 100% local. That's the healthy thing to do. Everything else is just rent-seeking and the fact that so many people are doing it is threatening much more important goals than money like transcendence.

If I never hear the theme to "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" again, it will be too soon.

We don't let our kid watch TV at home, barely watching it ourselves, and have no streaming subscriptions. My American niece, on the other hand, a mere two years my son's senior, has had a TV in her room since at least age 5 with access to Disney+, and my brother and sister-in-law let her fall asleep to it. She was a good little hostess, putting on something she thought her younger cousin would like, and she was, sadly, correct. However, while she had spent her life with constant AV stimulation, my kid couldn't sleep.

I eventually had to tell her that if she wanted her cousin to sleep in her room, she had to turn off the TV at bedtime. This was very, very hard for her, and she couldn't understand why he couldn't sleep.