Various courts have already invalidated clauses of click-through agreements that no reasonable person would expect to find in such an agreement.

Terms of service are not an absolute "I'm rubber you're glue" type shield against all possible accusations of wrongdoing, however much companies would love us to believe they are.

> The main problem of renewables is that it is intermittent and that fact remains to be solved.

It is solved.

Grid-scale batteries are being mass-produced today.

It will continue to get even better, but it is reasonably well solved even now.

Intermittent production is currently being solved by natural gas and coal production. With very rare exceptions these are not being shut down. Therefore, the immense amounts of wind, solar and batteries that are being added to the grid are purely additive. They are making the grid cleaner & cheaper, they're not impeding in any way the ability of other generation sources to cover the gaps.

Once wind/solar/batteries reaches about 90-95% of production, it'll become harder economically and technically to increase that number. I'd love to have that problem, we're far from 90% today.

Sorry I’m not quite following what point you’re trying to make.

Throughout my life the cost of renewable energy generation and storage has been dropping exponentially whilst growing in capability.

That’s been happening for decades now.

The cost of fossil fuels just keeps rising with spikes every time someone starts a war.

Fossil fuels are already far more expensive. In 10 years no one will consider them seriously and in 20 years they’ll be a specialist novelty used by museums to run classic cars.

Mick thought he could give up his job and live off winnings. No steady state earnings. Just wins and losses. On the bad days he lose, and hope his winnings on other days would see him right.

Lose on Monday. Easy: double your bets on Tuesday. Lose on Tuesday too? No problem, double up again on Wednesday. You can't possibly have a 4 day losing streak.

If you're talking about renewable tech like a volcanic geothermal system in your back yard then you got me. But that's just like a regular job with a predictable income. It's not what 99% of people mean when they say "renewables"

Exactly how big do you think batteries need to be to store a summer's worth of extra sunshine until the bleak winter?

Btw Mick is a real person who really did lose all his money because he didn't count on a 10 day losing streak, and almost lost his family in the process. Lucky for him he had a forgiving wife and a steady state income.

You don't seem to understand how renewables actually work.

The idea that you need so many batteries to store enough energy to last the entire winter indicates that you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026. (...Or 2006.)

The idea that renewables are unpredictable in anything remotely resembling the same way as a casino indicates you don't comprehend how renewables have ever worked.

It's true, we don't have 100% control over the output of renewables the way we do with fossil fuels*. But that doesn't mean they're unpredictable enough to cause meaningful problems for grid-scale renewable energy. And if you think that solar panels don't produce power during the winter, well, for one thing, you're going to have to explain to my parents just what was offsetting huge chunks of their energy bill the last several Upstate NY winters.

And...batteries are getting better and better. Give them a few years, and it won't be at all unreasonable to store a season's worth of energy, at least for a house, and probably for a town. (I have no idea if the way they scale makes it significantly harder to do that for larger areas and larger storage volumes.)

* If we have the fuel. And that's a large and growing "if".

I have 25 panels highly efficient panels on a small house. "Total overkill", even according to the installer who was happily taking my money. For two months in the summer I was generating 4x to 5x what I needed. To store that surplus I would fill five 9kwh batteries PER DAY. These aren't shitty lead-acid or NiCad, they're brand new LiFePo4, and are surprisingly compact. But using them to store two months of surplus would cost me half a million euros and take up most of my yard with 300 batteries.

The other question (a more important one) is how much stored power I would actually need for the winter. Which points to your comment "you don't comprehend how good solar panels are in 2026". Yes I absolutely do. My worst performing solar day recently was 5.85kwh on the 27th of August (a bad day, but not a short winter day). Two days in a row like that, and I'd be relying on some external "steady state" power source, like my old nuclear power plant at the end of the garden. (The very next day I generated 30kwh, but the whole point is that it's not economical for me store enough surplus for two consecutive shit days in August, never mind the whole winter).

I don't know what my November through to February average will be, or for much of the spring/autumn I'll be "averaging" a surplus. But I guess that maybe €300,000 of batteries in my up yard would hold enough surplus to get me through the winter months? The solar could certainly fill them. Solar isn't the problem.

I just can't imagine how this is supposed to scale.

We've replaced fuel sources and all related technology many times. You can't reasonably argue we are now at the end of that process.

Exactly. And the dangerous mindset tends to be worse than just "more money quickly": it's far too commonly "if this can't become the next Facebook/iPhone/ChatGPT, it's not worth doing." The only options are "take over the world" or "fail"; there's no room (in many people's heads) for a product that makes a decent, steady profit and continues to do so over the course of many years.

There is, is just different capital for those companies (debt, growth equity, angels, grants) and less attention. There’s far more of these types of companies too.

I think we're running into (or at least pretty close to) a Two Guys Fallacy here:

There's still a strong libertarian streak in HN posters, in a variety of ways.

However, there are also (mostly) different posters who have more vocally shifted the site's Overton window to the left.

These days, I find it fairly common to, for instance, make a comment that points out the very obvious problems the Republican Party has created in recent years, get downvoted to -3, and then upvoted to +5 (or vice versa), all within a few hours. This would suggest that there are contingents of posters (or at least voters!) in both camps.

I generally operate with the understanding that HN today has lots of groups, with an overall "left" lean (as much as anyone can flatten politics into a single axis.) Libertarians, leftists, liberals, nationalists, everyone is here. Appealing to one "enemy" group strikes me as a cheap blow; it's sure to increase engagement for your post with little added discourse value. IMHO at least.

And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.

It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.

Absolutely True.

I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.

My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.

The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.

The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.

But "employment" is tracked as a binary, not as a "number of jobs someone is working".

So if person A takes 3 jobs just to get by, there are fewer jobs left for person B. (Not quite 2 jobs less, because it's not perfectly zero-sum, but generally at least 1 job less.)

So while I certainly wouldn't make the claim strongly, as I don't have any data, it would at least make sense for the lack of living-wage jobs to increase unemployment rates.

...What? Opposite ends?

The Shift key is right next to the / key.

The Command key is one key away.

Even on laptop keyboards.

I can trivially chord Cmd-Shift-/ with my right hand.

> Keyboard shortcuts for those menu items are what most people will learn -- save, print, cut, copy, and paste will be the common ones that a lot of people will know.

I would say that it's true that the keyboard shortcuts for those items are the ones most likely for people to learn, but not true that most people will learn them.

I've spent 15 years in (tech support/programming for) academia, working with genuinely very smart people who use computers every day of their life, many of whom are actively looking for better ways to use those computers in their teaching and research, and 9/10 of them go to the Edit menu for Copy and Paste every. single. time.

To a large extent, I believe it's a holdover from the earliest days of the Mac, when the mouse was brand-new, and many developers had to essentially be forced to even support it, let alone treat it as a first-class interface device.

I agree that it would be nice if Apple would have more keyboard navigation available by default now than they did then, but given that it is readily available for those who want it, I don't really see it as a huge issue.