Nah, put a traffic cone on 'em.

Why not?

WireGuard on my VPS, because otherwise I’m stuck behind CGNAT and can’t access anything in my network from elsewhere. Or Tailscale, but that’s not really self-hosted.

Yup. Government owned land with very few restrictions on use. They generally have turnoffs here and there for recreational shooting, usually against a rock wall or something. People will pull off, set up targets and have a blast.

Nice, that first one is right next to a bank too. So if you show up to rob the place, but forgot your ammo, then you’re set!

You can also just vandalize the vending machine and steal the ammo, which would probably be a lot easier than hacking it, or even vandalizing a gun store.

Yup, in my state (Utah), there’s no required legal process to carry a firearm concealed, and you can buy a firearm w/o any required checks from a private seller (not ammo though), but you need to prove your age to access porn. That seems a little… odd.

How about this: scan your state issued ID. My license has a barcode, and bars already scan it, so it’s a solved problem, no AI needed. The process should essentially be:

1. scan license
2. snap picture of face
3. send to police for lookup - needed to verify you’re not a felon or whatever, there’s more to it than just age verification
4. accept or reject transaction

The only AI that needs to exist would be at the local precinct, and used for related ID verification checks.

Or how about this, instead of all this BS, put the vending machine in the store and have a clerk check your ID like they normally would.

Ammo should never be an impulse buy, and I say this as a strong proponent of the 2A.

As a big proponent of the 2A and generally in favor of less restrictions, I also don’t see the point. Here are the times I’d need ammo:

• at the range - just call someone over and they’ll deliver it to you
• before going hunting - I’m heading to the hunting store anyway, I’ll just pick some up there
• a trip to BLM land to go shooting - pull from stash and refresh it w/ an online order
• when picking up a new gun - gun stores tend to have ammo

Vending machines tend to be in more urban environments, and if I’m there, I either already have ammo (if I’m carrying concealed) or I’m not carrying a firearm anyway. In the rare situation where I’m carrying a firearm w/o ammo (why?), I’m not going to stop and load my gun in public, so why go to the vending machine?

I don’t see any good reason for this to exist. Either order online or pick up along w/ other stuff at the gun store. A vending machine is going to be out of whatever caliber I want anyway and they’ll probably get restocked rarely, so even a mild convenience would likely end up being an inconvenience. So even if it was safe, it’s not solving any problems.

As someone w/ young kids, I definitely don’t want to make access to ammo easier for casual gun owners. Gun enthusiasts already know where to get ammo, this is just going to be a target for bored kids.

Not quite, but vending.com has vending machines. I think they run a few thousand each, so they’re not exactly cheap…

it takes upwards of 20 years to build a reactor. Even if that gets expedited through modern technologies, we’re still talking something like 15 years until they come online, and you’re still paying all the upfront costs throughout that time

From some reading, it seems a lot of that is bureaucracy (non-safety related), construction delays, and lawsuits. I wouldn’t be surprised if we could get that down to 10 years average with a concerted effort, assuming we can build multiple in parallel.

Whereas solar can go from concept to grid in 2 years, and batteries aren’t much worse.

Sure, on a small-ish scale. A nuclear plant will put out way more electricity than a typical solar project will. So while the time to getting value from it will be a lot shorter w/ solar, they tend to chip away at existing infrastructure instead of completely replacing plants.

The desert has the benefit that solar can be really well calculated

Oh yeah, solar is incredibly effective here, the main problem is storage. Hydro isn’t really a thing since our dams are intended to keep water for summer use, and they refill when we’d want to be generating power. Warm water also isn’t feasible at scale, and promising technologies still aren’t proven. I’m especially interested in hydrogen storage, since it could be really useful for long-haul trucking (we’re a pretty big hub for that) in addition to storage for winter generation.

I was interested in EVs being used for overnight power storage (basically recharge during the day while at work), but it seems like that hasn’t materialized.

centralized heating that provides for a whole city block

I don’t think we’d need to go that far, putting in buried heat exchangers on new construction isn’t that expensive, and I’d expect coordinating billing and whatnot would be more annoying than it’s worth (need an HOA, and HOAs can really suck).

The better option, IMO, is to create mixed-use zoning near transit hubs, which would encourage use of mass transit and allow for those economies of scale you’re talking about without annoying planned communities w/ HOAs (i.e. business below you could pay your heating/cooling bill). Maybe that’s what you were getting at, my point is that it doesn’t make as much sense for residential areas IMO, but it could make sense for mixed zoning areas.

I do want to point out that I’m not obsessed w/ nuclear or anything, I just think it’s a good option to replace existing base-load plants running on coal and natural gas.

What we need is battery arrays

I absolutely agree. My support for nuclear is not instead of renewables, but in addition to it. Nuclear is a proven technology, and at least in the US, we have a lot of space where we can store waste relatively inexpensively (nobody’s going to care about a massive landfill in Nevada).

The problem with going for 100% renewables is that I don’t think we can really keep up with battery production, and if we push for dramatically increasing our energy storage capacity (whether that’s chemical batteries, pumped hydro, etc), it’s going to cost a ton to transition. Solar is cheaper than nuclear, but solar + battery backup currently is not, especially if it needs to run over the winter when solar generation is much lower.

I’m not saying we should stop installing battery-backed solar projects, but that we should add nuclear to the list. Our electricity demand will only continue to increase, so we need multiple solutions to replace coal and eventually natural gas. One of the major cost and time limitations for nuclear is construction, and that’s because we don’t build many of them. If we line up multiple plant projects at the same time, we can make better use of our engineering resources (it’s a lot easier to build 10 of something back to back than 10 of something months or years apart), which will make nuclear more attractive compared to other options.

gas can not stay the main way to heat homes

Agreed, and I’ve actually been looking into heat pumps for my own home. I already have an external AC unit, so theoretically the transition shouldn’t be that hard (air ducts already exist).

The problem is that, in my area, winters get pretty cold, and heat pumps are a lot less efficient at heating when it’s cold. The solution is to dig a deep hole to bury the heat exchangers so they get a more consistent temperature to maintain efficiency, and that’s a really expensive project for existing structures (not bad for new construction). The transition to heat pumps is going to be very slow because of that large upfront cost/poor efficiency in winter.

Even if this wasn’t an issue, there’s still the massive problem of existing electricity production (in my area) being fueled by coal and natural gas. If I switch to a heat pump, I may be polluting more than if I stuck with gas (it’s pretty close last I checked). My state (ignoring transportation) gets something like 1/3 of its energy from coal, about half from natural gas, and most of the rest comes from solar (and a little from wind). We need something to handle that base load supply, and installing batteries is going to be expensive (esp. since hydro isn’t really an option in our desert) and probably take many years regardless. Nuclear can be built today, and in my area, it can be built on the other side of a mountain range from the bulk of the population.

Warm water is an amazing energy storage medium

I doubt we have enough water here in the desert to handle that. We already have problems with our existing inconsistent water supply for regular users, locking up even more water is going to be a really tough sell.

How did you manage that??

Yup, but population density should be what matters, because that implies how much usable space there is for waste disposal.

Idk, Finland has a much lower population density vs Germany. France is something like 1/2 the population density, but they also have >50 reactors, so surely Germany can find room for a few…

Was it? Huh, I guess I avoided it thoroughly enough to not remember when it launched.

What isn’t sensible about nuclear? For context, I’m coming from the US in an area with lots of empty space (i.e. tons of place to store radioactive waste) and without much in the way of hydro (I’m in Utah, a mountainous, desert climate). We get plenty of sun as well as plenty of snow. Nuclear should provide power at night and throughout the winter, and since ~89% of homes are heated with natural gas, we only need higher electricity production in the summer when it’s hot, which is precisely what solar is great for.

So here’s my thought process:

• nuclear for base load demand to cover nighttime power needs, as well as the small percentage of homes using electricity for heat
• solar for summer spikes in energy usage for cooling
• batteries for any excess solar/nuclear generation

If we had a nuclear plant in my area, we could replace our coal plants, as well as some of our natural gas plants. If we go with solar, I don’t think we have great options for electricity storage throughout the winter.

This is obviously different in the EU, but surely the nordic countries have similar problems as we do here, so why isn’t nuclear more prevalent there?

If France can find space, surely Germany can.

Not taking a picture, but here’s what I have:

• Ryzen 1700 in a giant case sitting on my desk (desktop PC is on top of that in a mini-ITX case); 2x 8TB HDDs, connected to network over Wi-Fi; hope to cut the size significantly once one of our ITX boxes need an upgrade (both Ryzen 5600s)
• Mikrotik router (5 port) and Ubiquiti AP sitting next to my bed; Mikrotik handles my local static DNS for my public services

Running:

• Jellyfin, as well as Samba and some other NAS stuff
• HomeAssistant (nothing monitored though, but I plan to add my Sensi thermostat soon)
• Actual Budget
• Nextcloud
• Vaultwarden (currently unused, plan to switch soon)

I also have a VPS to get around CGNAT, and I have a Wireguard VPN configured so communication is encrypted.

Plans:

• upgrade NAS to either a mini-ITX motherboard or a mini-PC w/ external USB-C enclosure
• actually run Ethernet - have been putting off for years
• configure my Sensi thermostat in HA and maybe get some other smart home crap
• use Nextcloud more - want to get SO using the notes app so I can finally kill Google Notes for shared shopping lists
• port my PF spreadsheet to LibreOffice and actually learn to use LO Calc (currently using Google Sheets); I use GoogleFinance func for stock quotes, so I need to replace that with some other workflow (mostly rebalancing investments)
• replace our TV or at least have an alternative for Jellyfin - the config disappears whenever our TV WiFi screws up, which is like 2-3x/month; screw you LG…

So yeah, somewhat simple. My family likes Jellyfin, but I haven’t really gotten them on board with anything else.