> a good RO system can filter out most microplastics from the tap water, but it also releases some (of its own) into the filtered water

Home distillation is cheaper than RO (esp. if you have solar) and doesn't release microplastics. Just remineralize with a high-quality salt

"It’s the T-bills wot dun it."

That’s my read on why the U.S. just paused the global tariff hike to 10%.

From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why? Because Uncle Sam has to refinance a mountain of debt this year, and the cost of that depends heavily on Treasury yields — especially the 10-year. That’s the rate that sets the tone for everything from mortgages to corporate borrowing.

So they tried to spook markets. Introduce global tariffs. Stir up uncertainty. And it worked—at first. Yields dipped. Traders moved to Treasuries as a typical flight-to-safety.

But then something flipped.

Instead of being seen as a safe haven, U.S. debt itself started to look shaky. Maybe it was the deficit outlook, maybe the global response to tariffs — but whatever it was, yields started climbing. Fast.

At that point, the strategy backfired. The executive branch had no choice but to walk it back. So they paused the tariffs.

Because when your national budget depends on cheap debt, you can't afford a crisis of confidence in your bonds.

What I love about this comment is that one person thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and posted it, and then a bunch of other people thought "of course every other country just does the right thing when the US doesn't" and upvoted it, and not a single one of them thought to check what the "right thing" is.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth-1, there's no right thing, and countries all over the world have "by and large solved" the issue by doing completely different things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_by_country

> Water fluoridation is considered very common in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Chile and Australia where over 50% of the population drinks fluoridated water.

> Most European countries including Italy, France, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Switzerland do not fluoridate water.

These were nice early in the TensorFlow evolution, for things like Frigate...

But even CPU inference is both faster and more energy efficient with a modern Arm SBC chip, and things like the Hailo chip are way faster for similar price, if you have an M.2 slot.

I haven't seen a good USB port alternative for edge devices though.

The big problem is Google seems to have let the whole thing stagnate since like 2019. They could have some near little 5/10/20 TOPS NPUs for cheap if they had continued developing this hardware ecosystem :(