What seems to be missing is discussion of the fact that Google's customers are the advertisers. The search engine users are the product. To what extent does Google monopolize the sales of eyeballs to the advertisers?

And, if Google can't pay to be the default any more, and given that users are the product, maybe the solution is for the search engines to somehow pay us to select them as the default.

How about this. For each row, compute an 8 bit hash and write to a file whose name is the hash value. Now you have 256 files that you can dedupe in memory (and if not, use a 10 bit hash or whatever).

I have tried something similar, writing each entry to a trie on the filesystem and store each duplicate row on the filesystem. The problem was this created a heck of a mess and was taking too long, but it seems like it's feasible.

It would seem that an important part of the "market" is missing, namely the ability of consumers to respond to price signals. If every customer could set a maximum price and automatically be cut off when the price goes higher then the load shedding would be automatic, with the available power going to those willing to pay more, presumably because they need it more or can afford it.

That assumes that disconnecting from the grid is a viable option. During this issue, disconnecting from the grid had a substantial chance of causing your pipes to freeze and burst. I wouldn't hold my breath that your insurance will cover that if you turned off your own power.

One of my takeaways is that you really don't want people trying to attempt DIY heating systems. There were ~450 calls for carbon monoxide poisoning, related to people trying to heat their homes with non-electric sources or sources that worked at all. A lot of people tried to run camping stoves indoors. Others ran generators indoors. I believe a girl died because her family tried to stay warm in the car in the garage with the door closed.

> with the available power going to those willing to pay more, presumably because they need it more or can afford it.

I vehemently disagree with this. Wealthy customers should not be able to push the price of electricity high enough that others can't afford to heat their homes. Letting the market figures it out means that those with financial means get to make a choice about what to do, while the poor are universally shoehorned into the worse of the two options.

A significant part of the base load is inelastic demand. People need to heat their homes. People need their refrigerator to work so their food doesn't go bad in a time when you may or may not be able to get groceries. People need to charge their cellphones so they can let their family know that they're okay.

I don't think we really disagree. My point is that the market won't function unless demand can adjust to prices. Right now there is no mechanism to allow it and the market can't possibly work.

If there were, as you say, it still might not work. But there were a lot of pictures of empty buildings with lots of lights on, etc. so there are inefficiencies. And if customers were automatically switching off (or simply reducing their own usage) as prices went up maybe prices would never have gotten so high. Ideally it would sort of be a fine-grained "rolling blackout" where priority is determined by what a customer chooses to purchase given all the variables that only the customer is aware of. That's a functioning market.

I agree that it may be completely impractical to make it work for electricity.

Maximizing vertical space is why I always put the task bar dock or whatever at the right. Plus you have less back and forth with the mouse because scrollbars are also on the right.

When I read that I immediately thought of social media and how it sucks up everyone's time and energy.

This is cool. I had a similar idea, but for spending instead of investing. It seems likely that, post Citizens United, directing your spending towards companies that are supporting politicians that you also support is probably more effective than making small donations or writing letters. When you buy a product, the political activity of the company that sells it are part of what you are paying for. If companies are going to play politics then let's have some transparency and let them compete partly on that basis.

Has anyone ever tried to sue the union for keeping a misbehaving cop on the street? It may be that they have to defend their members, but the union should pay for the consequences, not the citizens at large.

How about ssdnodes (https://www.ssdnodes.com/)? I've only used them for personal sites but so far, so good and it seems to be a good value. I also like webfaction (https://www.webfaction.com/). You get shell access but they manage the OS and provide a GUI for installing and configuring things.

Webfaction is pretty amazing. Setting up and getting started with them is quick and easy. Although GoDaddy has acquired them and webfaction will be shutting down by the end of August. They will be migrating all the customers to GoDaddy.

How would that work for the NZ attack? Apparently only 12 people were streaming the video, and nobody reported it until after the attack was streamed in its completion. Effectively nothing could have stopped this stream save for magically accurate and effective filtering mechanisms, or manual intervention.

This kinda destroys the value prop of “live” though right?

Also the tone of the content could switch at any time.

I was told to assume $350/square foot for new construction here in the East Bay by a design/build firm I contacted recently. So a typical 2000 sq. ft. home is $700K just for design, construction, and permits, plus $300K for land if you can find it. So it seems more like localized inflation to me. Architects and tradespeople need to pay to live here too. Plus requirements due to seismic and fire hazards, insulation requirements, etc. add to costs. Now solar panels will be required as well.

IMO prop 13 worked out really badly but it isn't the main cause of the problem, just one more giant expense for the new homeowner on top of everything else.