ZeroGravitas

We should improve society somewhat

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Spot the odd one out:

> Some of its key issues include lowered wages for politicians, ending the tax payer funding of various sculptures, monuments and art, large scale remigration, a stricter immigration policy, and free dental care.

Tech to combine radiator based heat pump heating with cooling is relatively new to the market.

I would have assumed air-con was standard in new built homes in southern Europe and less so once you get to more northern places where the load is mostly heating.

Then there are refits, which add another dimension of cost and difficulty.

That's mostly outdated info, modern heat pumps can heat to high temps. They are more efficient if run at lower temps but so are condensing gas boilers, which are the most directly competing technology.

A powerplant that does not exist but the project has put in an application to be connected is not limited by transmission. It's limited primarily by not existing.

Other grids have fixed the problem by kicking out the ghost applications that were never going to get built but were hanging onto their position in the line because that was the closest thing they had to a valuable asset.

But the alleged size of projects in the line regularly gets misrepresented to argue for X or Y change in regulation or just to predict doom.

This author knows this and still argues it:

> We have roughly two grids’ worth of power waiting in line! This doesn’t mean we have that much power built generating electrons today. This capacity in queues is often times projects. Projects that need to prove they have someone to sell to (more often than not the grid) so they can get financed and then built.

Stats on additional generation for the last few years:

https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

Texas's CO2 per KWh of electricity (which is roughly equal to the US as a whole) at about 330 is equidistant between China's (470) and EU's (190) it is not close to the greenest in the West.

If it just costs more, similar to how it's possible to have a low water use datacenter, then in a perfect spherical cow economic universe then the lower cost option is better.

In the real world you'd need to add some cost to account for the externalities on water and GHG.

Do the numbers still work out for the gas powered plant? If not then you're just exploiting unaccounted for externalities.

When the first wave of these datacenter stories came out, the utilities complained that they couldn't finance the work because the data centers refused to commit to paying for them over the longer term, leaving other ratepayers on the hook for the investment.

This seems to further confirm that, though now the data centers are being portrayed as the victims in this.

The sentence immediately following your quote:

> securing grid-connected power now often requires developers to post substantial letters of credit, security deposits, or sign take-or-pay commitments to fund the generation built to serve their load.

The question is, if they couldn't commit to paying the utility, how can they finance building their own independant grid equivalent? Did they find some other sucker to take on the risk?

Probably due to the US government doing a constant stream of insane things that hurt Americans and their allies and China not doing that.

This specific car feels a bit like a gimmick but I feel we're on a trend to putting solar and batteries everywhere and at some point soon along that progress putting lightweight panels on the top of delivery vans and goods trucks will be normal in sunny climates.

Refrigerated loads are a particular sweet spot.

> Enlightenment thought emphasized the importance of rational thinking and began challenging legal and moral foundations of society, providing the leaders of the Reign of Terror with new ideas about the role and structure of government.[7] Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract argues that each person was born with rights, and they would come together in forming a government that would then protect those rights. Under the social contract, the government was required to act for the general will, which represented the interests of everyone rather than a few factions.

...

> Louis XVI was later able to find support in Leopold II of Austria (brother of Marie Antoinette) and Frederick William II of Prussia. On 27 August 1791, these foreign leaders made the Pillnitz Declaration, saying they would restore the French monarch if other European rulers joined. In response to what they viewed to be the meddling of foreign powers, France declared war on 20 April 1792.

So rich people forming cross national alliances to crush democracy? Have things really changed?

Right wing originally meant the people defending the divine right of Louis XVI and defending the ultra-rich has been a throughline ever since.

Did he explain why he returned to save/undermine Wikipedia after all this time?

Paid by evil billionaires? Or just a continuing descent into MAGA-tinged madness?

An interesting comparison would be a standard cargo ship that goes as slow as possible.

"Slow steaming" is already in use and has some dramatic impacts on fuel use.

The limit seems to be "hotel loads" i.e. constant loads needed for crew, but the sailboat will have those as well and not spread over as much cargo.

It's entirely possible that a sail boat that follows the wind might be higher carbon per cargo kg than a giant standard ship going very slowly directly to the port.

I sometimes think of this from the other direction.

Don't put people in situations of great temptation, like access to company cash with no oversight. They'll often fall for the temptation and ruin their lives in the process.

It's a slightly different framing from the "evil people will take advantage and get away with it" but they both lead to putting some kind of process in place to prevent abuse.

Island hopping is a niche where electric flight might get started.

Hawaii is looking at running some next year.

https://www.sfgate.com/hawaii/article/hawaii-electric-airpla...

It seems the best self-hosted and the worst models served by big providers has some considerable overlap in quality.

Whatever reason people have to run those (cheaper? backwards compatibility once you get something running) surely applies to the open models too, maybe even more so.

Doesn't even mention that ACs are heat pumps and running them in reverse for heat on other days would save money and the planet compared with gas or electric resistance heating.

Europe has either been expanding to include, if you look at EU, or it has always included, if you take the geographical boundary, a lot of very poor southern and eastern European countries.

I think EU expansion is a good thing but it makes even well intentioned comparisons difficult if e.g. Germany re-absorbs East Germany, or other nations join the EU

Poland was about 20% of the USA by PPP in the 90s, 40% when it joined the EU and 60% now.

Is that a success or a failure? It can definitely make some stats look worse.

Hybrid solar-battery setups that feed batteries directly when the price drops could be part of the answer.

I'd guess if the numbers for grid energy fed to batteries and the output from were compared it might be possible to discern if there was a source of energy that didn't go via the grid and so didn't show up on the stats.

Is he bailing out an investor he's connected to?

> China has, so far this year, exported more solar panels to the Philippines than to any other country except the Netherlands, a key import hub for much of northwest Europe.

Europe generally does well on solar, now and historically. And wind too. Though you may well consider that "climate change doomerism".

There are segments of their politicians, industry and populations who seem unaware that the EU imports basically all its oil and gas and so sabotage this progress at every step.

Even before Apple existed Steve Jobs was stealing wages from Steve Wozniak who did the actual work.

We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.

I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.

He seems to be regressing, he said this in January:

> The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they’ll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

> I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this — that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.

Now he's claiming he's trained all these billionaires and they are a blessing to the world, not avaricious sociopaths.

Car crashes kill roughly as many Americans each year as guns.

If you add pollution impacts, cars double the yearly deaths of guns.

Link to one ebook version of their translations:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/franz-kafka/the-castle/wil...

> despite Tailwind being incredibly customisable I can instantly tell when a site is using Tailwind.

People used to say this a lot about Bootstrap.

Someone set up a bootstrap or not? guessing game and the real surprise was that you not only failed to spot some bootstrap sites you also guessed a lot of non-bootstrap sites were bootstrap because they all used the same modern UX paradigms.

"lures"?

(2021) and so somewhat outdated by the fast pace of change.

Battery section makes no mention of sodium ion, for example.

The same org has published more recently on the same topic.

Their "Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025" suggested that demand has risen but supply has risen faster leading to lower prices "especially for battery minerals".

They've moved onto other worries. We will have enough minerals but "we" here means China 95% of the time.

Presumably China saw reports like this and said "we should locate and secure more minerals" rather than "this is all hopeless let's just burn oil which will never run out".