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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • From a (US) financial perspective, a phone charger takes about 5 watts of electricity. At $0.010/kWh that’s $0.0005/hr (or ¢0.05/hr) of charging. This is utterly negligible.

    For reference, a worker at the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr would be paid that much after 0.25 seconds of working. It’s not even worth paying an employee to tell you to not plug in, which would probably take at least 15 seconds.

    Naturally, some businesses may want to discourage people from loitering, but more often than not, they probably want your business (library, grocery store, coffee shop &c) or understand that reality happens.


  • You can be ousted with a lot of popular support if you really piss off a small number of people. A leader has more wiggle room with high popular support and a strong military and police force, but if those institutions weaken, then the possibility of a violent overthrow increases.

    Russia’s population is ~143 million. If even 1 in 1000 people take up arms, that’s a 143,000 strong army. If 1% participate in a general revolt, that’s 1.4 million people, which could easily overwhelm institutions and bring an already weakened economy down.