Cynicism aside, there are genuine engineering and logistical problems with relying too heavily on solar power. Storage and distribution being chief among them.
Hard sell. Also, say through collective action we actually somehow get governments to pay for a $20,000 battery for every home. How will you make that many, who will install them, who will maintain and replace them? You need a very large number of trained electricians and manufacturing capacity to make that a reality. You also need to plan for and earmark funds for replacements to make it not a complete waste. Just throwing out batteries as a solution is way easier said than done. There are a lot of barriers. That is why things take time.
Nuclear is about $6k per KWatt. Solar with battery is about $5k per KWatt.
If it’s cost effective to build and maintain a nuclear reactor for $6k per KWatt, then it can also be done with the cheaper solar.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine. No one says, “We can’t have coal power, where are all the trained miners going to come from? Someone will need to drive that coal to the powerplant and that power plant will need trained electricians. It’s a huge problem!”
I hate to tell you, very few places are building new nuclear plants as well.
The Fossil industries have lobbyists and money on their side yes, but their infrastructure also already exists. That’s our biggest challenge. And it takes functional governments looking out for the interests of citizens to build and/or subsidize infrastructure. And functional government takes an educated and engaged electorate.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine
I think the problem from the capitalist standpoint is that its not a very profitable business model, well thats fine then the public sector should do it just like we do the roads and other essential services. But no politician in america would even have the balls to propose that.
*Hate to be nitpicky, but a lot of assumptions go into a “$/kW” LCOE. Your effective costs for the solar + battery are going to be very different in different parts of the world depending on factors such as seasons, land value & labour.
Also not a lot of nuclear is being built atm anywhere unfortunately.
Genuine question out of curiosity, do people think it would be more efficient to have some sort of battery substation for a neighborhood that’s funded publicly? I just think it would be really inefficient to have everyone fund their own private batteries. It’ll be way easier to balance a neighborhood than each individual house.
I’m by no means an expert just trying to think things through logically I could absolutely be incorrect in any of my assumptions.
That being said I believe inverters go up in efficiency as their capacity increases, add this the fact that they need to be over provisioned to allow for peak draw times and it makes sense that a substation that averages a neighborhoods demand would be able to cut down on cost by averaging.
You start running into major issues with regulation and ownership of equipment that there isn’t a vested interest in solving. If a local battery isn’t owned by the utility company, who owns it? How do you track power input and use? Can one house use another house’s power?
It is a lot less complicated to keep things separated.
The benefit of everyone having their own batteries is resiliency. If I have batteries I have power in an outage whether the downed wire is in my front yard or miles away.
There’s probably also some free market benefit in purchasing decisions - some people will choose to spend for more capacity while others have an incentive to save money/power usage
Redundancy could be achieved by multiple power stations run municipally, moreover buying in bulk gives the city more leverage to negotiate price than individuals.
Also supposing that the cost of the battery was fielded by individuals it’s just not feasible for the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck to have an additional $20,000 expense and this is something that needs to happen now not down the road.
If the municipal government is going to foot some of that cost it’d be really inefficient to do so in each individual’s home as apposed to a centralized site and project
In addition to other comments here, I think that there’s added risk to having such a starkly segmented way of running things. Having neighborhood stations (publically owned/owned by the utility service provider) reduces a lot of redundancy and hedges some risk for families. If a battery fails and gets spicy it’s less likely to put a family out of their home, when a substation could be highly specialized for managing that kind of risk so that even if a battery or several batteries fail, it doesn’t impact the whole. There’s also some specialization that goes into handling them at end of life, and trusting normal every day laypeople to both maintain and manage them is a tall ask when most people find themselves in a position to be unable to do larger maintenance on their homes already (it cost me 20k to put in a sump pump and encapsulate my crawl space to treat and protect it from mold and pinhole beetles, which I could only do by taking out a loan that I’m still paying for).
I don’t give a shit, and neither should anybody else (except power company engineers). Not only are those problems incredibly minor and surmountable compared to climate change, bringing it up is almost exclusively done in bad faith. And even if your intentions aren’t nefarious, it still doesn’t add anything of value to the conversation.
In other words, stop being a ‘devil’s advocate’ for the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists. They don’t need your help!
Manufacturing and installation manpower are very real problems that take many years to solve. We needed to start working on them a long time ago. And they should be the first step in moving forward.
They are both problems. They both can and do exist. Decentralizing like you suggested reduces the problems from my first comment, but it brings a whole new set of problems that are arguably bigger. Either way the capacity needed to attempt it will take huge leaps in manufacturing and installation capacity. And we need to get started on that yesterday if we want this to happen in a decade.
Problem here is that the engineers are saying “this problem is hard for these reasons” and people like you are screaming that you don’t care, fix it. And when they say it’ll take X years, your scream that it isn’t good enough. Or that the goal posts are moving (problems are complex and involve more than one thing). There standard you’re setting is unreasonable.
Calm down (helpful I know). Stop yelling at people when they are trying to work the problem. It isn’t going to get done the way you like but it can get done if you stop asking for impossible.
Really? I’m an electrical engineer and your understanding of the problem indicates you aren’t an engineer or you suck at your job (or did you not just positively assert production capacity and storage are minor problems?). Any decent engineer wouldn’t call out moving goal posts on a complex problem. Public awareness of difficulties is a way to get support for decidedly unsexy problems (nothing gets people hard like utilities). And layman screaming about shit they don’t understand is also a problem.
your understanding of the problem indicates you aren’t an engineer or you suck at your job (or did you not just positively assert production capacity and storage are minor problems?)
I said that they’re minor compared to climate change.
Failing to understand context is a way bigger indication of an engineer sucking at their job than anything I did.
And that comparison is worthless. Fucking everything is minor compared to the destruction of the planet, but that doesn’t help. It’s dismissive of real issues and only makes things harder.
Thus I hold that you suck at your job if you aren’t lying on the Internet. I also note that you neglected my other points.
Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.
What’s your point in bringing bud light up? I’m not trying to start shit, genuinely curious. What is it that we need to know? What does “never trust” mean in this context? I can’t make heads or tails of anything you wrote
Last spring bud light sent trans influencer Dylan mulvaney a personalized beer can as part of a broad marketing push. This drew criticism/calls for a boycott from various prominent transphobes and caused a slight slump in sales. Bud light responded by laying off/“laying off” various senior marketing execs etc, and did not afaict support support mulvaney after it (no loud anti-transphobia pr statement). Very illustrative story of how corporate support of lgbt people under capitalism works
Like SqueakyBeaver and omniraptor pointed out, it was last years campaign Budweiser made with dylan mulvaney. They featured her on some bud light special editions.
Kid Rock made a video with him shooting the beer and the target demographic “cancelled” bud light making a big fuss about it online.
Budweiser was short of apologizing on their knees for their “mishap”, the Creator of the campaign was fired, etc.
People online were pretty harsh with dylan mulvaney. Budweiser dropped her like a hot potato. From what she posted afterwards, i figured they never contacted her or reached out to her in any way, in order to check if she’s ok.
That’s what i meant, they invest in “inclusion” , because it brings them cash. It’s not like humans became enlightened over the past decades. There was progress, sure, very slow progress in all things around being inclusive of others. Corporations are adapting to a demographic that is growing and are potential future customers.
A more challenging route does lower the odds of encountering other people though which is a plus. Nice to have the solitude even if that means extra effort.
I mean you see other people for a matter of seconds as you pass them on the trail, maybe give a head nod or a quite hello and keep going. Going out of your way to avoid this seems extreme behavior that probably means you need help.
I beg to differ. I like to pick a treeline and just dive in, and I’ve had a ton of weird encounters. Like once I was walking through the woods, and I very suddenly came to a clearing… There were two dudes in their underwear and a single moped
I had so many questions… Like why didn’t you stash the moped closer to the trail? Or did you have your underwear on already, or did you hear me and scramble? Are your clothes in the moped saddlebags, or did you ride out like this?
I had no idea how to react, so I just gave a nod and nonchalantly walked between them like I was on a trail
The best way to avoid that is to not start at a trail to begin with. But that is difficult in many places of the world. Since I’m from Sweden I’m free to roam pretty much anywhere I wish and that gives me an unfair advantage.
Human trails or deer trails? Because my absolute favorite hiking experience was when a group of friends and I said ‘fuck it’ to the people trails and spent the day wandering the deer trails.
Nice, met my now wife on bumble, hooked her with talk of my love of video games and Golden Age Sci-fi novels…or maybe despite of, she’s pretty tight lipped about it.
In fairness, hiking is a great first date. Shared goal, nice scenery, and you can just talk about what you read about the length, difficulty, view of the hike if you’re flailing for smalltalk
Then you hike, and you can point out what you see or ask random philosophical questions with time to think in silence without it being weird
And then, you spend some time seeing a nice view, maybe have a small picnic, and by the time you get back you already know each other without the awkward “interview” stage of a first date
If tinder wasn’t a cesspool at this point, I’d probably have it in my profile
Wouldn’t say I love it, but I don’t mind hiking, trees and mountains are cool. I also live in a part of new england where it’s basically just trees mountains and hills so any sort of walking around turns into a hike
2024, scrollbars? What scrollbars? We decided that you don’t need them. Sorry but your adblocker and script blocking, broke our own shitty implementation of scrolling. Please enable all scripts for our large ad family to feast on your data.
Search engine optimizers.
If you spend more time on a site, it looks higher value, so they do everything to increase the time you need to find the info you came for.
I didn’t know why I was seeing acorns all over my feed but I think I can hazard a guess after seeing this. I’m guessing an acorn dropped on a cop car and the pig emptied his clip into someone?
No. His partner also opened fire on the unarmed person in handcuffs because he was rolling around in the middle of the street screaming about being shot, so she said to herself “Well, he must have been shot because he’s rolling around in the middle of the street like a jackass even though he should be taking cover.”
After reading the article, apparently her actions was deemed “reasonable”? What?
Shooting an unarmed, handcuffed man because you can’t differentiate between a gun shot and an acorn, and have zero directional hearing is “REASONABLE”?
From what I read, they didn’t shoot at the unarmed suspect but at their own cop car. Stable geniuses. I can understand why the sergeant’s actions were deemed reasonable though, as she was trusting that her partner was in a life and death situation and not hesitating to back him, the truest of idiots, up.
A Florida sheriff’s deputy mistook the sound of an acorn hitting his patrol cruiser for a gunshot and fired multiple times at the SUV where a handcuffed Black man was sitting in the backseat, officials said.
I wanted to laugh at the idiot cop until I heard the victim’s very real screams thinking someone was dead because she did what is supposed to be the right thing to do by calling the cops :(
You can find the same problems with any fast food chain. And neither of those things affect your anus specifically, so they can’t be what OP is referring to.
Two major outbreaks are still two too many. Stop simping for a megacorp that doesn’t respect it’s employees or customers enough to pay enough to care about hygiene.
They’re not isolated events unrelated to how they run things, though.
One might be a fluke, but two or more (and there’s probably more, those were just the first results of a couple quick searches) is indicative of a more systemic problem of Taco Bell not taking food hygiene seriously.
If you add to that conditions like IBS, IBD, Chrone’s, etc, you’ve got a recipe for blowouts.
Mind you, Taco Bell has nothing on places like chipotle with even higher spice levels. But it’s the grease that fucks with most people. Since there’s also far less in the way of soluble fiber and/or things that can hold onto the grease in the bowel, even someone without an unusual sensitive gut can have trouble if they aren’t used to it.
I've got terrible digestive problems myself and Taco Bell is something that doesn't set me off, so I'll never get it. It's not spicy, it's not super greasy.... But I guess I tend to get the less un-food-like options (such as a regular bean burrito, which has nothing particularly bad in it unless you're sensitive to beans).
Gotcha. Their standard ground beef is maybe a 3 or 4/10 on the grease scale, with the steak notching up to maybe a 7.
The spices aren’t so much hot, really. They don’t add much that carries a lot of capsaicin afaik. But they do use chili powder and cumin in there, both of which are hit-or-miss in terms of being IBS triggers. I can handle both fine, but I know folks that can’t. It’s the grease that gets me, because I can use similar spices at home with no issues.
Then again, not every store is the same grease level. The one in my town is greasy as hell, to the point that the wrappers around the tacos are falling apart sometimes. But the one in the nearest city is nowhere near as bad.
A couple in an elegant restaurant in Texas. The waiter appears, dressed in a tailcoat with a bottle wrapped in a napkin: "Chateo de Sauce, 1985" and pours a little into the customer's glass, the customer tastes it and nods. The Waiter leaves and the other couple says "Wow, you were right, really a high-class restaurant."
"I already said it, and this was just the ketchup."
Holodecks are a terrifying technology.
Imagine your friends beam you into a running program while you are sleeping.
Everybody, when something out of the ordinary happens, would at first say: ”Computer, stop program!”
I have to believe an experienced holodeck user would be able to detect some of the telltale signs pretty easily. Like replicated food, if you see it enough you probably notice “holodeck vase #5” showing up scattered around the background of scenes as clutter. Or even minor visual distortions where it switches from 3d to the false horizon.
I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I randomly rewatched ‘Ship in a Bottle’ and even Data only recognizes they’re still in a simulation due to a blank transporter log. No visual clues, no glitch in the matrix, an empty log that could have been empty for any other reason.
slrpnk.net
Top