A reverse osmosis filter will provide plenty of water with nearly no minerals. They're available to install under the sink/counter for a few hundred bucks and provide clean drinking/cooking water and work fine with ultrasonic humidifiers without the issue of depositing minerals everywhere / clogging up the ultrasonic emitter. So its a lot cheaper than buying it plus you get great water.
Those aren't exactly common here, since municipal water is high quality and everyone drinks it as is. It is not like some parts of the world where the tap water is full of chlorine and barely drinkable (I ran into that when I went to Athens).
And if you have your own well, you generally do a cheaper filter targeted at whatever impurity you have (such as an iron filter), rather than a reverse osmosis filter.
With reverse osmosis the water also gets too pure for drinking and you need to add back minerals to it for safety, it is not healthy to drink ultra pure water for any prolonged period of time.
Man. It seems like every avenue of humidification is paved with difficulty.
Ultrasonic humidifiers (and others) that spritz water droplets out? They need fed expensive water, or they spread particulates everywhere. Health aspects aside, it's nice living in a house that isn't bathed in something that looks like chalk dust.
Evaporative methods? They're similar in their lust for pure water, and the particles tend to concentrate at the humidifier instead of everywhere else. That accumulation needs to be cleaned up periodically (or parts replaced, depending on how rent-seeking the design is).
Distilled water from the store? That's gloriously clean water, but it represents a money pit that can never be filled up.
RO water? Sounds nice (is nice), but they're expensive and inefficient (producing 1 liter of RO water wastes in the realm of 3 or 4 liters down the drain). The systems need installed, and not everyone has the capacity to wrangle their own plumbing projects.
And as an added bonus: Drinking RO water saps our precious bodily fluids of the minerals and electrolytes that people crave to stay alive, so we also seek to deliberately impurify it.
I guess that means that an ideal path to RO-oriented humidification, we end up with 3 taps at the kitchen sink, then? One that provides demineralized for the humidifier, another that provides remineralized water for drinking, and one for everything else?
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It's all ugly in some way.
Isn't there some kind of evaporative humidification method that is easy and inexpensive to clean? Something I can just feed cheap tap water into, and that I only have to deal with cleaning once a month or something? That sounds like the path of least pain for me in my neck of the woods.
When I last looked, the evaporative methods were better than others. You don't need distilled water for it, tap will work. They do need cleaning and frequent disinfecting though due to the pad constantly sitting in the water. The prices of replacement pads are a bit expensive but it was cheaper than constantly buying distilled water.
There are a few brands out there but the Philips ones seemed better than the others and the prices were not as insane. I just disliked their marketing and buzzword filled content but otherwise they seem OK. Oh and you should know a lot of their stuff now are internet connected(disabling it will make you lose some functions but otherwise the device still works) and have touch buttons and screens etc. It's unfortunate but this seems to be where every device is heading.
I do agree with you that this seems overly complex. You can pretty much do it yourself if you'd like to take on a project. A fan and a constantly wet rag has the same function but is not as compact.
Thanks. I'll check out Philips. I wonder if third-party pads exist.
I prefer dumb, but I don't mind if it's smart. Especially if I can integrate the smarts into my Home Assistant rig.
I built a humidifier once. I just used the Instant Pot that was already on the countertop. I filled it with water, set it to "Keep warm", and it slowly evaporated the water and left minerals behind.
This worked fine (it was safe, if inefficient).
But monitoring the consumption of water and the improvement in humidity showed that to actually raise the humidity to a comfortable point would and do so throughout the house would use a lot of water.
And I want to do more with my time than fill humidifiers back up. :)
For truly dumb, Honeywell HCM350W/HCM350B https://amzn.to/4tSEAGy has just a multi-speed fan knob and a hidden UV lamp and nothing else. The 1.1 gallon tank gets through a couple of nights here, current outdoor humidity is 16% on an overcast day in the middle of "rainy" days (high altitude semi-arid). 6 non-brand wicks for $22 will last a long time: https://amzn.to/48EwKbb
Copy that, thanks. The third-party replacement bits look OK-priced to me, I like the idea of a UV light (which is at least simple and safe), and since it's dumb then it's certainly simple to automate with a switched outlet.
I'll try to pick one up before the cold weather comes back again. (Right now, we have the opposite problem for humidity here, in that we have too much of it.)
We have fairly hard water so they get chalky white and crispy in like 2 months or so, but replacing is still a little optional, the wick just starts slowly working less well. Minerals stuck on the wick aren't a health risk or anything like that. The base where the water sits is easy to wash and bleach when you feel like it.
A tip here, if your wick is symmetric you can turn it upside down and get some more life out of it. My humidifier has rectangular wicks mounted at an angle, and only the top back tends to get a lot of minerals. I can thus turn them around and over in 4 different orientation.
Plus I have very soft water, so all combined I can get through an entire winter with just one set of wicks.
Still, I wish they made washable wicks out of fabric instead, so you could just put it in a bath of vinegar or citric acid for a few hours and then put them in the washing machine. In theory I see no reason they couldn't last for years.
These wicks are like tough paper. Yes, flipping the wick doubles the lifespan here. Also before it gets too bad, rinsing the wick dislodges the mineral deposits and slows down the buildup.
Why do people with no understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation, have the ability to initiate a vote changing everything for everyone? This is just about the dumbest thing I've read this week which says way too much these days.
The people pulling the strings behind all this do indeed have a clear understanding or ability to clearly think through the implementation and consequences of said implementation. They know exactly what they're doing and why.
Couldn't agree more. I've been voicing this for the past decade. Its crazy how the system is setup for eventual failure. Its a race to the top, or bottom, depending on who's looking, but for most, the bottom. Companies have to either consolidate by buying all their competitors, and customers, or find a way to deliver the same goods/services for less. Its always less. At some point, not everything can be made with love and good intentions... You can't cut all corners without destroying the integrity of the original product. You can't outsource all the manufacturing without affecting job markets. Manufacturing is already mostly outsourced, now they're going to outsource a lot of the cognitive labor to AI. The never ending chase for consistent quarterly growth numbers has really messed us up and they're not really planning for whats to come. Not that they could plan for AI progressing as quick as it is and replacing jobs as quick as they are, but they're not ready.
We're already seeing governments shaming and gaslighting their citizens as they try to find ways to pay for programs to support as many as possible, saying they don't want to work anymore, they're lazy and have to be given everything, pre-chewed.... When you make it nearly impossible for humans to find worth and purpose by exchanging labor for pay, you devalue any contributions they could have and are racing to a future where most of what humans have to give, outside of original creative thought, and art, which AI can do too so it depend on others willing to find value in it, then you're not left with a whole lot. Most of the population aren't self starting entrepreneurs with an infinite drive for wealth and who want to sacrifice everything for a job. Many just seek stability and want to find something they can be at least ok at and can repeat and provide for themselves and their family. By making jobs that much harder to get, you're adding barriers for most to find work. Many countries have been spoiled by stability for so long, their populations don't view survival as a "fight", maybe a struggle, but not a fight for life. Soon it'll be a fight, if not all out war, and almost no one will be ready for that. IF the economy and government (under whatever system and name you want to call it) was setup to provide for all, knowing all the wealth was centralized and they had a mandate to redistribute resources so all could be comfortable, it would be a different story, and even then, but its not the case. A time is coming soon where companies will start losing customers because customer's spending power will disappear. Companies will have optimized themselves out of a path for future growth by destroying their customer base.
Younger generations are already looking at a future vastly different from the one we saw or thought we'd see. Most things older generations took for granted are literally out of reach. Some older people literally expect younger people to just toughen up and just work hard and make it happen, since they did. Easy to say when their education cost them a couple summers worth of income + maybe a side job. The next generation paid their student loans over years, then decades, some pretty much for life. Now its not just education, owning a home is now out of reach of a lot of people. So now if you have the guts to take on an education, you're dealing with potentially decades of student loans, average homes in the US have gone from around $140,000 to $500,000 over the past 20 years, while incomes adjusted for inflation has grown roughly 12.7% between 2003 and 2023, or roughly 0.6% a year. Add on to that the extra cost of other new necessities the picture is looking very different. Life is more and more equating to financial slavery. Used to be any job enabled you to provide necessities for a family, now unless you live in the middle of nowhere, its harder and harder to even get started. AI is already causing cuts to entry level lobs, thinning out the pipeline for future senior employees..
Its going to be fun they said... Its going to be glorious they said...
One thing for sure, its the people who will pay the price during the adjustment period.
I have the same fight in my life... As an atheist I push back pretty hard against any intrusion of religion in my life and depend on myself for pretty much everything, and am also the provider for others. If I'd sit on my behind and pray for good things instead of taking actions, nothing would get done, so I skip the time consuming part of dedicating a part of my life, time, brain power to all these things and instead focus on tangible things anchored in reality.
With how my brain works, I find it insulting to be told to pray the weakness away figure of speech..
That all being said, our brains, as wonderfully capable and complex as they are, are also pretty stupid and simple in other ways. Willpower and inner strength are a trained skills and mental states combined with chemical states. If the goal is to free yourself from addiction, the means of getting there don't really matter as long as they work and don't cause direct harm to yourself or others. The placebo effect is real, so if one gets strength from believing that there's a "god" or "higher power" giving them a high 5 and believes in them, then go for it. Whether I believe thats a delusion or not is much less important than the person breaking their addiction. Its a whole other fight of its own. I do think there should be as much available support for people that isn't based on feeding you religion if thats not your thing, regardless of the fact that one can attend AA+12step and not be religious and get value out of it too.
I feel like having faith in a higher power is almost like a part of your brain never grew up, in the sense that you're allowing yourself to believe in magic, like a kid. When you were a kid, that made you excited, dreamy, which puts you in a certain state. If you believe and that allows you to put yourself in a mental state where you think the end result will work out positively, whether thats because you felt empowered, you found strength to persevere, or whether you think god's got his quantum digits up your ** and is going to partially puppet you, thus relieving you of some of the pressure, strain, and allows you to get to the same end point, then good for you...
If this was a discussion about whether religions and faith in higher powers should be the guiding philosophies for humans going forward, my answer would be capital F no.. But if we're talking about current crisis response/management and addiction support, you can't rewire everyone's brains before you can start helping them out..
Go forth and arrest 3000 people a day, says Trump.. I assume performance is tied to that 40k bonus they're supposed to be getting under the big beautiful bullshit bill? Are they being paid a performance bonus? An incentive to put anyone in cuffs if they don't care about how its done. History will not be kind to those amoebas.
Sure but to me this sounds paranoid and as pointless as the movie industry trying to create non piratable technology... As in, worried about things out of their control. You cannot go about your life without using your voice unless you're a mute by choice or physically, and all a company needs is a few seconds of your voice to recreate it. If a company is hell bent on getting a voice, they can get it. If you're not widely known, or hold some kind of power, no one likely cares about your voice, and if you are, its likely there's already lots of audio sources of you out there... Even if you're not widely known, if you've ever made an instagram post, a reel, a tiktok, vine, youtube vid, etc, you're out there. Probably makes more sense to go on about your life and resort to legal means if your voice is used without your consent.
Same with your face... You leave your home, other humans see your face, cameras see your face. You do not get to control who sees your face or even who captures your face when you're in public, but you can decide whether or not you consent to your face being used by an entity for profit.
We make the distinction between humans consuming information and machines because humans can't typically reproduce the original material. So like, you can go see a movie, but you can't record it with a device which would allow you to reproduce it. But what if human brains could reproduce it? Then what? Then humans could replay it to themselves all they want, and to those near them, but wouldn't be allowed to reproduce it in mass for profit, or they'd get sued. I think the same stuff applies to data ingested by AI models. People care so much about what is fed in when the same information is fed in to humans around the world which increases their knowledge and informs their future decisions, their art, their thoughts. Humans don't have to pay to see a picture of the Mona Lisa, or pictures or any other art out there, even if it'll influence their own art later on. But somehow we want to limit what is fed to models based on it having gotten the permission to be influenced by its existence. I agree, we can't feed protected IP, or secret recipes, formulas for things that are not in the public sphere.. etc.. But other than that, not sure how people expect to limit what is fed into it that it can draw inspiration from.. As long as it doesn't copy verbatim... I get that images have been generated where original material has come out, but if its sections of, or concepts of, then its the same as a human being influenced by it, I honestly don't think that matters.
Then comes the idea that this is owned by a private company who's profiting from it all... Thats true... But there's also open source models that compete with them. Not sure what the best answers to it all is.. But to go back to the original point, if your unique voice, or image isn't copied precisely for profit, then whatever... It'll get used by models, or humans in their thoughts, you can't control what your existence affects in the world, just who gets to profit off of it.
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
Imagine having to teach a whole class, keep track of each kids engagement, where they're at, if they need more help, and on top of that, having eyes on the back walls of the classroom to see if kids have their phones hidden in their pencil case or something, watching youtube or cheating, or msging each other, or are wearing buds under their hair and are just jamming and not listening in class... Imagine each kid has a gaming console in their hand and are already addicted to all their devices and on top of trying to teach them a full curriculum, you also have to be their addiction counselor and police.
At most, if kids phones were registered as "student" phones and registered to a school so that between certain hours, the phones allowed policies from the school to be applied to a phone while the phone is on the premises. Teachers could just disable them during class or allow for exceptions like if such and such kid was waiting for a critical call from a parent or something.. Classrooms could have beacons telling the phones they're in a classroom so if they go in the halls the phones could work... Or not.. Either way, there should be tech solutions to tech problems and teachers have enough to deal with, they shouldn't be further strained by having to police students always trying to find ways to sneak on to their devices.
Soon teachers might be a thing of the past and kids will just interact with an AI teacher anyway... The AI will be responsible for keeping them engaged and make sure they understand the material. At that point the AI can just shock them into submission if they whip out their phones... Muahahhaa... jk jk.
I've found myself doing this in the past 5 years as well. After decades in development, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a house. I've since then slowly been converting the garage into a woodworking shop. Most of the projects I've completed are for the workshop itself. I've spent way more time on what I've built than any sane person should but I'm using my shop furniture as a learning experience and nitpick everything.
There's definitely a different type of satisfaction/reward you get from finishing something you put a lot of time in when you can feel and see the thing. I guess it aligns with why I enjoyed front end dev more so than backend enterprise stuff. Its visual.. With woodworking, its not only visual but a physical object. You see every inch of it, every corner, every joint, everywhere where you fixed something, where you took the time to perfectly sand a surface to ensure it looks just perfect in the end.
I also usually put on an audio book or music in my buds. Its a great way to disconnect and immerse yourself into something that isn't tied to anything else at that moment. No deadlines, no PRDs, no tests, no dependencies, just you and what you're working on... Its relaxing..
Sorry.. I lied... there's tons of dependencies.. Those happen to be all the right tools for the job that you don't yet have and every time you do something, you have to decide whether you'll invest the money to buy said tool, or build said thing to help you get from A to B, or if you'll go the other way around and wing it by hand, taking much longer and hopefully not too much of a worst result..
Yet ME/CFS and POTS has been a an outcome of viral infections for decades. So lets not ignore decades of suffering that has nothing to do with the covid vaccine.
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