Gibbon1

Just making the point that the cost of solar panels to power a car is a fraction of the purchase price of the car.

If the world can afford to manufacture 100 million light vehicles a year it can afford to manufacture the solar panels to power them.

You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.

I think 1600 watts of solar panels produces enough energy to drive an EV 12000 miles a year. Your car though would have to be always plugged in during the day. But probably 3200 watts would be enough for a car used for commuting to be charged mornings, evenings, and weekends.

Undefined behavior according to WG14 but perfectly fine on most architectures. Even on architectures that don't support it (what the fuck ARM cortex) the compilers do support it.

With modern CPU's unaligned accesses only matter when it straddles a cache line address not a register address.

Large family sizes dilute family wealth and leave children at a disadvantage to their better capitalized peers.

I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.

The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.

Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.

The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.

Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.

Problems with unaligned pointers are basically a hardware defect. Signed overflow is an issue because academics are unhappy computers only can do finite math.

Issue with types and C is while the compiler knows about them the standards committees don't want you to be able to. If C had first class types more people would abandon C++ and that can't be allowed to happen.

I think housing isn't an ordinary durable good the way economists think. If there was a shortage of toasters you couldn't make money by churning toasters like you can if there is a shortage of housing. But you could make money importing toasters. With housing when there is a shortage the effective way to make money is by using access to cheap credit to bid prices higher.

So a housing price spiral is a result of a properly functioning market.

There is a tenancy to believe Israel is a vassal state that does the US's bidding. The actual record says not really.

And also Israel is only able to resist being conquered by it's Arab neighbors because of the US. Record says also no.

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple.

The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

I've said over the years a few times, this isn't our fault but it's our problem.

Yet you encourage people to start wars they can't win.

I keep coming back to the first gulf war when Bush encouraged the Shiites to ride up against Hussain and then left them out to dry.

Its what gets done to the Palestinians over and over. And the Jews aren't the enemies you need them to be because if they were the Palestinians would have been long scattered.

Yeah buying an EV instead of a gas car is a hedge that doesn't cost much. There is an asymmetry in the upside and downside risk. The downside risk is all on gas with no upside. No downside for the EV.

If they're the same you can swap them and see if the problem changes. Otherwise swap in known good ones till to works.

Old bus based systems you did that too. I remember once sending a dozen cards to a customer who had an intermittent issue.

In the Loma Prieta earthquake most of my coworkers fled the newly constructed office building. Dodged falling ceramic roofing tiles. And then ran across the parking lot to take safety under the power lines.

I read those before but will read them again. That narrative influenced my thinking about this. There is confusion I think because peoples attitudes tend to be stubborn over time. But they tend to match the milieu they were raised under.

An example of that is the plots in this essay. Attitudes don't change much plotted by age cohort over time.

https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2026/05/28/sexual-morality/

Summarize that we've thrown a bunch of historical peasants into an industrial society and they're reacting astutely to the new incentives. But the big change comes from those that grew up in it.

Example Bangladesh fertility rate went from 7 in 1975 to 4 in one generation and dropped to 2 one generation later.

You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.

Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.

I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.

Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.

I think there are strong links between the immune system, the autonomic system, and the brain. A dysregulation immune system can seriously mess with you.

The classic psychological explanation is the patient only thinks they are sick. But the reality is their body is behaving like they are sick. Worse the classic explanation why you feel sick is 'toxins' from an infection and that is wrong. It's your reaction to feedback from your immune system.

Triggered a memory. As I understand wind tunnel models often has bits of sand paper placed to generate turbulence at the right spots.

Batteries in California have curtailed the need for peaker plants most of the year. Natural gas is starting to become a seasonal supply of electricity. Fall winter spring it's providing a few GW of power. Only in the mid to late summer does it break 10GW. That change happened over just five years.

I keep mentioning this because it's notable. California now needs to increase demand for electricity to move forward on electrification. Things like low cost workplace charging and mass adoption of heat pumps. Unfortunately California is going to elect a governor who thinks it's his job to protect entrenched interests. Fortunately big picture it doesn't matter except to people in California.

Currently renewable manufacturing is doing the the equivalent of adding 10 million barrels/day of oil production per year. Total production is 110 million barrels/day. Demand destruction for oil is coming very soon now.

Probably pushing the idea that doing stuff like that is something criminal trash class families do.

Helps when religious leaders are against it. The Catholic church was against forced marriage which is why that mostly died out in Europe during the middle ages.

You means guys like William "3°C rise in global temperature would reduce global GDP by approximately 2.1%" Nordhaus?

Looked at my collage that I went to 40 years ago. Back then they graded on a curve.

Looking student grades for 2025.

A's 30% B's 45%

2 out of 254 got an A+

I look at grade inflation still being a problem at elite schools and shake my head.

Cracks in pressure vessels can propagate faster then the speed of sound. Which means your pressure vessel goes to flinders before any pressure is relieved.

The secret sauce is bad faith and crime.

You would think using your office to file false charges against someone would be corruption just like using your office to embezzle money.