yodelshady

If you ever doubt that the US has a simply fucking insane advantage in primary resource extraction and consumption, consider your comment. You think $40 per MWh is expensive.

Wholesale rates in Europe hit SIX HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE EUROS PER MWh last year because of gas supply issues and unfavorable weather. Spot prices have gone higher still, over one order of magnitude higher actually, those were futures contracts for a useful period of time. Because THAT'S WHAT PEOPLE WILL PAY WHEN THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

Consumer rates of 30 cents per kWh are perfectly normal. 100 not unheard of.

Oh, fun fact; the largest producer of nuclear power in Europe is suing its government because it was forbidden from selling at that market rate. It had to sell at 40 cents per kWh. Not to consumers of course, to the fucking glorious private sector, aka resellers, who did sell it to consumers at market rate. The ones who hadn't gone bankrupt and fucked off earlier when market conditions were against them, that is. Although they did spend a lot arguing, successfully, they didn't need to pay producers then, either. Because the glorious efficient private sector can't have competition.

Yes, I'm bitter. Going to an industry conference and seeing no one able to run plants properly because of unreliable power, whilst neighouring Germany sets a new coal-burning record, in unnatural heat, does that.

Sure but the problem might be internal find-the-lady accounting.

In fact it probably is. Much like internet advertising has to be. You can't have an entire economy based around free services funded by advertising for other free services, you can't have returns generated solely by investing in companies that invest in other investors. Unless massive numbers of private sector backers have been defrauded, the lady is somewhere. Though maybe not somewhere that taxman looks.

I might buy slighter fewer Starbucks, or Fords, or flights if they were no loyalty programs, but I'd be spending zero money on StarBank/FordBank/DeltaBank without the product to go with it.

It's all converted to heat. (nearly) 2/3 is used for computation, which produces waste heat, 1/3 is used to move that heat out of the building. Presumably HVAC designers are smart enough to ensure their waste heat is made outside, and so doesn't add to the total cooling load.

For those that are, for example, in CA, Thames Water probably rivals PG&E or various telecoms for Examples Of Neoliberalism Not Working Very Well.

Billions in dividends paid out to the private equity that bought it, terrible performance, zero investment, zero competitors, and skyrocketing debts, that the taxpayer may well have to fix because the alternative is millions of voters no longer have a resource necessary for life.

On top of that, you of course have a rising population, competing for land (reservoirs and sewage works take up space, almost all the land in South East England is built or farmed, less farming means more sensitivity to the global ~~dumpster fire~~ food market), said population objecting to improvement works (even when improvement works are necessary for the aforementioned life stuff to be delivered), and climate change, which means, er, less water. Or more. Don't actually know. If you did know it was less, you could build desalination. If you know it was more, reservoirs and upgraded sewage systems. But don't know. So build neither, because you're private equity and fuck it, voters aren't your problem.

If there's a slightly amoral upside, datacenters are probably one of the best customers to rinse. Profit margins are high, politically not that popular, and being close to London matters. Maybe it could also be one of those kicks I've seen dreamt of a lot of HN, that forces developers to be a bit more efficient rather than throw racks at the problem.

Hilarious, but utterly pigheaded.

Unsustainable doesn't mean "Great thunberg is sad". It means our way of life stops, with an iron certainty. What tf do you think rising food prices are? They are a crisis of not enough resource. Using less of one resource (gas for fertilizer) necessarily means more of another (land). Same for housing. Same for electricity. There's not enough of anything.

The more "reasonable" people fail to acknowledge that, the more likely your midnight scenario ACTUALLY HAPPENS, because the people who will acknowledge it aren't reasonable, they're looking for targets, and History is just as certain they'll find some. Pretty much every European country has seen a big alt-right swing, and blaming Twitter for that is weak.

Economists need to acknowledge reality, magic beans will not always save us. We escaped once, by burning a hundred million years' of resource in one hundred and eating 70% of the land area of the planet on the way. There is no planet B.

We have burned through approximately 70 million years' worth of carbon and hydrocarbon resource [1] in less than 200 years, certainly enough that any anthropologist will tell you the rebuilding of our civilisation would be impossible. We have additionally created a mass extinction [2], and already drastically changed the climate of, for example, Europe, created unprecedented wildfires [3] - a Europe which is also, coincidentally, rapidly deindustrialising now Vlad's turned off the spigot [4]. Living standards have already declined [5], with the obvious answer: we no longer have the abundance of resource per person. That,not money, as every economist on the planet is supposed to know, is wealth.

No, we are not being supported. You are coping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [3] https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/20/greece-wildfires-2022/ [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2022/09/11/europe-is-... [5] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/there-s-a-generation-...

See: collapsing European industry, finally now even in Germany, due to thinking "demand-side response" was a good solution.

Right, islands (and Israel) normally do because there's not the space for a large enough reservoir.

We're playing silly buggers with economics again here; when it's rainy, "DeSaL iS uNcOmPeTiTiVe", because the "market rate" for water is pennies per meter cubed. Except, oh wait; suddenly it's dry, the "market rate" skyrockets" and large parts of your economy collapse. The "market rate" was always giving a massive* surplus to consumers, and now it's gone.

This is A Bad Thing.

Turns out it would have been better to have a slightly more expensive water source that was reliable. This fact is somehow obvious to everyone except economists, who should (at least in Europe) be called out as frauds for universally advocating along such idiotic lines.

Good practice should really follow the joke about airliners: the ideal flight deck crew consists of pilot and dog. The pilot is there to look after the dog, the dog is there to make sure the pilot doesn't touch anything.

Even the RBMK reactors, which had lecturers in the 1960s pointing out safety flaws, needed human intervention (and quite a lot of materials fraud) to actually go boom. TMI similarly needed some humans to fix it until it was broken (also why there is a genuine good-faith lobbying argument to mandate less maintenance sometimes, especially as higher-quality equipment wears slower).

You'd still need security, and frankly security for the security, though.

Multiple times I've seen companies be the originator. Quite simply, it's insurance fraud. They demand an air gap, you say you have one.

You can certainly argue that, at a general level, air gaps don't work for the same reason teen abstinence doesn't work. They don't happen. But in specifics, particularly for infosec professionals, it should be your job to call out dishonesty. Not to not along sagely and say "air gaps don't always work". If your airgapped machine is breached, there better be a USB lying around, or a physical configuration change.

JFC, my Xbox is not airgapped.

(actually it currently is. But you get the point.)

> Running out of money is how you lose this battle.

True, but I honestly find it hard to conceptualise how that relates to military spending.

You think the Soviet population would be better fed if MIC scientists had paid more attention to food production? Unlikely, it seems if anything in the Soviet Union that has a negative correlation. And the factories are, famously, dual use in capitalist or communist systems, so without the military demand, it seems more likely their population wouldn't have engineered products at all.

By design, they lacked a middle class. I think it's worth stating: any system that can produce a > Mach 2 fighter is incredibly advanced, that that society was serfs < 100 years prior also incredible. But the products - military or civil - were consistently less rounded, more slapdash, than US fare. We could therefore infer - again, since the factories and talent are dual-use - the middle class drove product quality in both the civil market, and ultimately the military one.

They also, of course, didn't trade much with the richest economy in the world - unlike, say, recent China. It certainly seems to be a famous nail in the Soviet coffin that people did know regular civilian life in the West was better, and they couldn't get a slice of that pie.

Unfortunately, the internet hasn't rewarded nuanced argument very well.

Partially related, low speed parking lot and shop window accidents are much less common in manual-dominant countries (although those are less frequent yearly).

The usual cause is hitting gas instead of brake, followed by disorientation (expected = braking, result = acceleration, usually strong acceleration). Humans, especially elderly, can't reorient quickly enough. With a manual, you're depressing the clutch as well, so the mismatch is much lesser.

Yes, it can and does.

Go to a chemicals conference these days and half the research is on managing blackouts. In the best case your plant, which is the same CAPEX in Europe as it is the US, is producing 25% less.

There's only so much sugar-coating you can do. The atmosphere's like a funeral.

But the title and tweet do NOT label it Eurozone. They label it EU.

That rather makes it poor communication, no?

It either does not or mislabels the chart. The chart refers to Eurozone.

The title and tweet both say "EU".

Who do you think cover any and all negative externalities when wind and PV combined "fluctuate" to pretty much zero for a solid 96 hours, as happened in the UK in winter 2021? Batteries for that scale are a simple fucking lie.

The non-intermittents get to name their price. Except for nuclear, of course. EDF were forced to sell at 45 Euros / MWh when the market rate was over 600 last summer, because the private sector is more efficient, so can't be allowed to compete with reactors whose capital cost was paid 40 years ago by a government.

The whole European energy system is a fucking mess, trying to ignore this obvious fact that grids cannot be allowed to fail. Now, go to an manufacturing conference in Europe and the atmosphere is a fucking funeral. Try selling to customers when your plant produces half of what a US or China plant does, at irregular intervals, because it's at the mercy of metereologists. Go on. Try it.

Where I live currently, the first fossil-burning power source for the grid is the fourth largest. That's not that unusual for Europe any more.

Overall I think you can quite easily make an argument for 200 g / kWh as a conservative grid estimate these days, which means 40 - 50 g / km driving typical EVs. That's half what the smallest fossil cars were managing.

Price is a fair complaint.

There should absolutely be a human where the buck stops. But... "fixing an organisation" involves calling people racist. Then screwing their careers. That should carry a heavy emotional burden. It should involve anger and pushback.

"Some weights in an algorithm are wrong" seems a much less fraught problem.

I've spent the last two days working with (not-Kubernetes) virtualisation software that has serious, workflow-breaking bugs from... uploading and removing regular files, of a format it expects. In some random-aaS frontend I could expect that, but this is systems stuff.

:(.

Because it isn't mildly long. It's either very long or infinite, anywhere where gas is ~ 1/3 the cost of electricity per kWh. COP of 3 at a 3:1 price ratio for electricity to gas = 1.

Which itself makes sense if you use gas as the RELIABLE source of kWh. You need to burn ~ 3kWh of primary energy in gas to deliver 1 kWh to the household, so 3:1 makes sense, and the RELIABLE source of kWh is the price setter because a failure of the grid is literally an existential crisis, something the "agile" private sector companies aren't liable for.

An auxiliary annoyance in the UK is that reversible pumps aren't renewable for government grants. This is ostensibly to discourage aircon, but rather silly, since there are few easier green power problems today than "satisfy a demand that is almost perfectly correlated with high insolation".

FYI as a type the largest suppliers are gas, solar, then nuclear - of which nearly half is being pulled from France, an amount that for some reason isn't always counted by some people.

> for 10wks at a caloric deficit.

A human lifespan is not 10 weeks. Did he do that for the next 50 years? Because that's what's necessary.

IIRC the average American gains weight equivalent to a 50 kCal / day surplus, or 2.5%. By that same logic, going by weight gain and activity, I've started eating 70% more over the last two weeks, and I can't agree that's what happened. I eat out rarely and my groceries bill and cart contents have not changed.

I might believe the claim in isolation but, if all of his health metrics improved - sorry, I'm going to need a replication. Over 40 weeks.

> However, he did admit to eating veggies around his kids.

Oh look.

I explicitly stated a predictive model, which that isn't.

I can come up with any old crap as advice if, afterwards, I can tell the recipient "you need to update the figures until my predictions stop being wrong". That just means the figures I gave were wrong.

I've recently come off a 10 week pause in any significant exercise due to injury (and still can't do many strength exercises, though I was already mostly cardio). I made zero effort to change my eating habits, since I still have a job, and doing it is much easier - debatably only possible - if not distracted by hunger. My weight went down and is skyrocketing now that normal service is resumed.

Maybe I break the laws of physics, maybe my brain is lying to me about how much I ate, or maybe my endocrine system is doing things to maintain a setpoint, like it does with temperature, hydrostatic balance, CO2 levels, Na/K balance, anything else I've missed?

Given the above, how the ** do you suggest that CICO works as a predictive model over long terms? I don't know the first number, really don't know the second, and the second changes in response to the first.

(Saving you a click): GE think they have a Ceramic Matrix Composite blade ready, replacing nickel alloys. This should result in higher turbine entry temperatures, and so higher engine efficiency. And gas turbine efficiency is already pretty astonishing tbh.

Cool stuff, pun not intended. My supervisor, who must be retiring about now, was working on this. As often it's bittersweet seeing a different team achieve the same goals, wish it was ours but I'm glad someone thinks they have it productionised.

> Mines in the US are frequently delayed or prevented from opening entirely due to environmental lobbying pushback.

They are now, yes. I believe the point is, that's a relatively recent development. (And surely, from an environmental perspective, having all the damage in one area is good? Baotau isn't getting any better. By the same token, it's not getting worse.)

Side note but, with politeness, one enormously frustrating part of arguing with Americans is you really don't realise just how many problems are trivial to solve when you have US-level natural resources at your disposal. The social elements are still there, I'm not claiming every US problem is trivial, but the resource access element just isn't. You go to an electronics conference, you're researching some new PV tech, so are your US colleagues, but they've got hundreds of hectares of land that's perfect for the application and worthless to everyone else. And that happens in almost every field. Good for you, but JFC, that's not a universal experience.

> But - outside of performative activism and spleen-venting - do they have any interest in sustained or intelligent actions which might address a few of the problems?

Well, that would like under the purview of your conundrums of political science, not stuff for the hoi polloi. You don't want a tyranny of the majority, but - I believe this is the point being made - just dismissing popular concerns which have at least a grain of truth will bite you in the arse and take down not just your one pet project, but everything else even vaguely connected.

Ultimately here that means solving some thornier problems, because it is an amazing but accurate stereotype these days that the person riding a bike in most cities is more privileged than the person driving. The former could afford a nice place in the city, which is way more than the cost of car ownership - and almost certainly relied on nepotism in some way. To fix that, alternative transit to suburbs NEED to exist, even in the face of negligent or outright malicious government. Accommodation in cities NEEDS to be cheaper, something I'm not sure has ever happened without urban decay and collapse. And lastly, crime, in cities and on transit, NEEDS to be controlled at relatively low levels - yes, even if the perpetrators are minorities. I have to really strongly disagree with the idea that automation makes the law less fair. That's a cheap shot, the progressive's equivalent of "think of the children". High crime areas are not romantic anti-racist utopias where the downtrodden mix rap with ceilidhs. They are shit, they are devastating to any real investment and growth, they hold no opportunity whatsoever to any decent person of any ethnicity, and discussion of policing shouldn't ignore that.

Even without the Algorithm, Twitter would be awful.

Quite simply: when was the last time you went in Twitter to see an intelligent argument that opposes yours? Never, because such a thing simply requires more than 280 characters, and multiple cited sources.

280 chars with a single source is enough for a "look how bad my enemies are" hot take, however.

It's a shame, because getting off social media fully is hard now - so much actual research and professional interaction requires it as well. But eurgh.

It definitely strikes me as thought-terminating cliche. If people were calling themselves woke maybe, but I've only seen it as pejorative for several years.

I don't think it's fair to entirely dismiss either, there really is a lot of incredibly toxic behaviour in communities labelled "woke" (and agreeing with further up the chain, I can't help but feel being a bit less "inclusive" and demanding some commitment to the product might help, gatekeeping be damned). But we should strive to accurately describe what those behaviours are.