That’s part of the reason a moon base could be viable. The sun outputs a reasonable amount of helium 3, which is great for fusion reactions. Unfortunately it tends to sit at the top of our atmosphere and get blown away again. On the moon, it gets captured by the dust in collectable quantities.

I never said it wasn’t useful, just a very low efficiency reactor. Then again, if it was better, it would burn out faster, which would be bad for life on earth.

We left the union (an action I fought hard against). We are still part of Europe (geographically ) however.

Even the core only has an output of 200-300W/m^3.

The amusing thing is that the sun is actually quite a shit fusion reactor. It’s power per unit volume is tiny. It just makes it up in sheer volume. A solar level fusion reactor would be almost completely useless to us. Instead we need to go far beyond the sun’s output to just be viable.

It’s like describing one of the mega mining dumper trucks as an “artificial mule”.

A couple of things particularly help me, though I’m in a slightly different boat mental health wise.

The first is simple, your mind can’t be trusted, it’s lying to you. The looming monster is far more of a paper tiger than it seems. The feeling nothing good happens? That’s mostly it forgetting all the positives and just focusing on every negative it can find. The lack of support? It’s often there, if you reach out. Your own mind is telling you it’s not.

None of this makes it easier to fight far from it. It’s all in your head is also where you are stuck. It does however give you a target. This leads on to the second point.

Anchoring. If you can’t trust your mind, you need something to hang on to. Something to reference. Anchors are that. They are stakes you drive into your own mind. Some will act as lighthouses. They let me tell how I’m drifting. Others are more concrete. I have a set of actions and habits that exist mostly to keep me stable. They are like pinions in rock climbing, when I fall, they stop me tumbling too far. They give me lines to pull on to climb back up.

Anchors can take many forms. The simplest are logical decisions you have taken that you KNOW to be true. You make them through logic and decision, and know to trust them ahead of time. E.g. When the insidious voice tells me I’m worthless, I KNOW I have value. I can deny the voice and cling to the truth. Its almost weaponised denial. It is true, discussion over, end of.

The other form is habit sets. These are the most powerful, but harder. I’ve set up social expectations I don’t want to drop. I have decided that I will go, even when I don’t want to. The events, in turn, can break me out of funks and put me back on familiar ground. They can be as simple as “I will make the bed each morning” or “I will keep the kitchen clean”. They can be more complex like “I will attend the club every Wednesday” or “I will call my cousin once a week”.

If you were a cloth, anchors are the spikes used to hold you in shape. We can’t hold the cloth down with just 2 hands, not in gale force winds. The more pegs we have, the better we can control the shape, and so ourselves. You will slip, you will lose anchors, but other will catch you. They let you make progress and KEEP it.

It’s daunting, but start simple, put down a few mental pegs things you logically know to be true, but often don’t believe. Build slowly from there.

As I said, my mental health issues are a slightly different path. It does share a lot of commonalities with yours, so hopefully my ramblings can help.

We need a system with “regression to the mean” built in.

Savvy investing, business and hard work should get you ahead. The key is that it should be taxed enough and in a way that, unless your children are also exceptional, the generational wealth will tend back towards the average. The same applies from the bottom. Someone from a poor background should be able to pull themselves back up, if their work ethic etc is appropriate.

Right now we have run away in both directions. Wealth begets more wealth, and poverty begets more poverty.

IoT can be great. The key is, as you pointed out, to actually have personal control over it.

It also has to account for WAF (wife acceptance factor). If it doesn’t fail gracefully to a dumb version of itself, it’s not to be trusted

It’s mostly a non issue in my group. Our ages run from late teens to OAP. I often don’t even notice ages. I just talk to them as a person with a shared interest.

It does help that at least half of us are neurodiverse. Most awkwardness doesn’t even get noticed by either side. Enthusiasm covers a lot of sins!

I mostly judge people by skill level in the subject. If they are knowledgeable, I’m happy to pick their brain for info. It doesn’t matter if they are 20 years older or younger. Conversely, if they are new, I try and share the lessons and tricks I’ve picked up.

I’ve seen this more than a few times, as well as felt it myself. It’s a particular form of situational depression.

In short, the solution is to “find your tribe”.

Your problem is 2 fold.

• Humans are a social animal. We need a group to socialise with, to be stable and happy. The requirements vary, but it’s almost always non-zero. The lack of meaningful contact sends us into a downward spiral.

• 99% of people are boring to you. This is actually completely fine and reasonable. Unfortunately the 1% that aren’t boring to you tend to be hard to find. Even worse, weirder people tend to mask. They pretend to be normal and boring to fit in.

The goal, therefore, is to find what 1% you need and where they congregate, with their masks down. They are out there, you just need to find them. You do this by trying new hobbies and activities. Most won’t hit the mark, but some will resonate with you. It’s OK to try a lot of things before you find it.

For me, it was a makerspace. I actually ended up founding one, since there wasn’t one locally. I’ve seen a number of other people come along and discover there really is a group of weirdos that they fit into that aren’t boring. They, in turn, add their brand of weirdness to the group and make it better for all involved.

Without knowing more about you, I can’t point you in the right direction. I can say they are out there. You just need to find them.

Go find your tribe.

Edit to add:

You preferably want to find somewhere in person, not online. There is a lot of social feedback that our minds need, that gets lost with online communication. Online is better than nothing, but it’s a service station mac Donald’s compared to a Michelin star restaurant.

Nope.

It’s down to you to either read the room correctly or apologise for getting it wrong. You just don’t get judged too harshly for the first offence.

The difference between a joke and bullying is entirely down to the victim. They are allowed to be as sensitive as they want. “Its just a joke” tries to turn it back on them. The only reasonable response is along the lines of "I intended it as a joke, but obviously screwed up. I’m sorry. "

The only grey area are those who are happy to dish it out, but not receive. You should expect people to wind you up to the same level you wind them/others to.

It’s context dependent. Some fields are inherently batch work. E.g. TV. In these cases, unions can allow contractors to set pay baselines etc, without a race to the bottom. Otherwise big companies can try and play us off against each other.

E.g. BECTU (uk tv union) organised a strike against a company last year, after they changed their invoice pay time to 3 months.

That makes me nervous as well. Hopefully, there are enough people involved to know not to kill the golden goose for a quick buck.

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Ultimately it’s a slow and steady strategy. There goal is long term profitability, not short term gains. In the long term, the best strategy is not to piss off your customers.

The advantage of this is that it can snowball to impressive levels. At least until a exec with more education than brains does a pump and run on it. A mistake steam seems to know to avoid.

That’s why I prefaced it with the fuckery comment.

While there is a lot of fuckery with “organic”, on the whole it should be better off. The chickens laying organic eggs generally have a better environment, more space and better food. This helps boost their immune systems, and slow the general spread.

There are very few treatments to stop bird flu. Healthier birds is about the only viable defence, once it’s in.

He’s doing the equivalent of robbing a bank while wearing a suicide bomb vest. The only difference is that he’s threatening the world economy instead.

The fact that he hasn’t thought through the consequence chain afterwards is just him being stupid. Akin to a robber trying to pay the stolen money into his bank account, at the branch he robbed a few days before.

That doesn’t help against hardware thermal runaway. The pi would overheat its own ram chips and hard lock up. A simple power cycle fixed it.