Where did the Carter White House's solar panels go? (2010)

Perhaps Elon can be the bridge there, since he's seen as a bit of a free speech messiah by the right.

If nothing else, I'd think the "red-blooded" crowd would love the speed that EVs give you.

I work with a lot of relatively conservative folks. The F-150 Lightning is making huge waves in that crowd, in a positive way. One of them owns a landscaping company, and just swapped out their order of a half dozen regular trucks over to the electric ones. FWIW.

There's a subset of the anti-EV crowd that's against EVs not because they're brodozer drivers, but because they realize individual vehicle ownership is the other half of the problem. EVs still cost resources that are harmful to harvest outsized relative to their use thanks to strip mining and the chemical process used to separate cobalt from manganese at a mass scale. Those people, myself included, believe that mass transit needs to make a resurgence instead of everyone switching to EVs. I even get annoyed seeing EV "bicycles" that weigh as much as the riders and cost as much as a scooter because I think they're wastes of resources used to dodge taxes and pedestrian right of way laws regarding motorcycles.

I’m really torn on EVs now because of all the freaking data collection (every new car, not just EVs). I want to do what I can to reduce how much I’m contributing to climate change, but I still might get another old car when this one goes because I don’t want to be spied on.

In addition to other objections, there's the people who think that EVs don't hit every use case yet, and they use a lot of rare earth metals, etc... and that you can get 90% of the benefit with a PHEV (and build/sell a lot more PHEVs with current resources).

IMO, we're going to need a lot of different approaches to solve climate. EVs, PHEVs, reduction of use of single-occupant vehicles, more transit, more biking, more e-bikes, blah blah blah.

Hippies were much more about social inclusion than environmental issues though at the time. So I think yes the woke movement is definitely a descent of the hippy movement. Wokism has a stronger focus on racial elements, bit that was definitely present in the 60s too, just less militant in the hippy movement than it was in the black power movement. Possibly you could argue that wokism fuses black power and hippyism.

That’s largely because woke culture is not a real thing. It is vastly inflated by the same folks that said similar things about hippies. The extreme views that are given the most attention are fringe and not popular.

Is "green" really the modern version of hippie? I can support free expression and tolerance, but forcing me to stop using my gas car is nonsense.

The biggest blow was the British privateers... yes, the British are why the US isn't on Metric.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232...

https://www.military.com/history/why-pirates-might-be-reason...

> Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state in 1794, was eagerly awaiting a meeting with French physician and botanist Joseph Dombey. The Frenchman was supposed to meet Jefferson in Philadelphia to discuss a couple of critical international trade issues between their governments.

> He was also going to revolutionize the way Americans did business.

> But instead of meeting Jefferson in Philadelphia, Dombey found himself in the Caribbean, where his ship was being boarded by British privateers. Upon learning he was a Frenchman, and a famous scientist at that, he was captured and taken prisoner.

https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...

> The marauders now swarming Dombey’s ship were a particular breed of pirate: British privateers—the state-sponsored terrorists of the 18th century. These waterborne gangs had the tacit approval of the government in London to harass and plunder other countries’ maritime commerce and keep part of the spoils as their profit.

> After seizing control of the ship, the pirates came across a sailor speaking Spanish with a curiously French accent—Joseph Dombey. A French physician and botanist acting under orders from the French government, Dombey had left the port city of Le Havre, France, weeks earlier for Philadelphia and the meeting with Jefferson, the United States’ first secretary of state and future president. But storms had pushed Dombey’s ship off course and deep into pirate territory.

> ...

> Some historians view this event as a tragic missed opportunity whose consequences we are still living with today. When the U.S. became an independent nation, it inherited an inconsistent collection of traditional British weights and measures. Congress was aware of the flaws with its British measures, and a congressional committee was formed to recommend solutions. Thomas Jefferson, an admirer of French scientific ideas, lobbied for a measurement system similar to that of France. But Congress didn’t adopt it, and the British-influenced system took hold in the U.S. instead. However, If pirates hadn’t intercepted Dombey on his way to Philadelphia, the situation might be very different today. As historian Andro Linklater writes in his book Measuring America,

> “The sight [in Congress] of those two copper objects [Dombey’s meter and grave], so easily copied and sent out to every state in the Union, together with the weighty scientific arguments supporting them, might well have clarified the minds of senators and representatives alike. And today the U.S. might not be the last country in the world to resist the metric system.”

Easier interactions around measurements when communicating with nearly the entire rest of the world for starters. Also, pretty much all of science is metric measurement these days, so there's that. We could also do away with the confusion of using two entirely different measurement systems here as we currently do. Milk often comes in gallon jugs but soda in 1 and 2 liter bottles for one example.

It is literally in the constitution.

>To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

I really like that the US hasn’t adopted the metric system. I like the idea that humanity has some redundancy even in something like a system of weights and measures. It seems like the world would lose something intangible if we all went with the same one. Like if we all spoke the same language or had the same government.

The Mars Climate Observer would have been observing the climate on Mars instead of becoming a crater [1] to be observed by future Mars satellites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

Japan seems to be doing fine with decades of stagflation. Everyone is pretty much taken care of there. Meanwhile, the USA has people dying of diabetes because they cannot afford medicine. I also think if we used trains and other mass transit more, we would be in a better position, like Japan.

I would prefer the stagflation and trains, personally.

That’s an impressively reductive way to describe the 1979 oil crisis.

Everybody and their dog had a solar heater on their house in Cyprus, from 30 years ago. It was cheap deployable tech accessible to literally peasant farmers.

I visited Sardinia recently for the first time, and saw the exact same type of houses built there, with the same climate, but not a single solar heater on their roofs. I wondered aloud why, but got no answer.

My guess is that an energy company took an interest early on in Sardinia, and Cyprus was thankfully missed for a few decades.

I'm well below Canada's latitude, and it costs me $250/mo to heat a relatively small swimming pool (about 10,000 gal) ... in the summer. If I keep it warm enough to swim in October, it'll be at least twice that. The capital cost of the heater is practically zero compared to the fuel. I can totally understand janky DIY setups to try and defray that cost.

There’s a bunch of YouTube videos showing how to make them. It’s really easy, actually, and you can get like 250-500W of heating from what seems to be a reasonably small device.

But what does he talk about though? There have always been super political things, certainly, but the scope of what was political vs common sense has had a huge shift.

Things have always been politicized heavily... But that doesn't mean that things aren't significantly worse than the recent past.

We actually had a political landscape from the 30's to the early 90's that was much less polarized than the rest of our history. We're returning back to where we were in the 1800's.

There are polls, in the US at least, asking the same exact questions gong back I believe half a century or more. It is very clear from these polls that this is the most poltically polarized time in politics in decades.

It's not just recency bias - things are really screwed up.

Why (my opinion) one side started caring more about winning than any of their own positions. That then devolved into only caring if the other side loses regardless of what the policy is.

If a party's main focus is the other side loses rather than to successfully govern - you end up here. And the fact they more or less admit it, and people jump to justify it shows how far things have fallen.

> Solar thermal is an aimed aluminum trough and a stainless steel pipe painted black on its focal point.

No, it's actually these fairly sophisticated phase-change evacuated tubes that have a heatsink at one end immersed in the water, from what I remember reading.

I've had this notion too. The kicker is, as always, cost.

The people I know who had them complained about maintenance problems, and dealing with freezing weather.

I've considered it several times, and it came down to it being too much work.

Even for PV, most payback periods are under 10 years at this point. In sunnier areas payback periods can be just a few years.