It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.

That wasn’t the real Tesla, though. It was actually the Goblin King.

Many kid movies raise some troubling implications about personhood and moral agency with anthropomorphized non-human characters (Toy Story and life/death/abandonment, what do obligate carnivores in Zootopia eat, etc.).

But Bee Movie inexplicably just dives right into it instead of leaving it unexplored on the edges. If the bees are fully intelligent beings with rich inner experiences, what moral obligation do we owe them? It’s a mess of a concept.

Human life absolutely factors into predicted lawsuit losses. Wrongful death lawsuits are expensive.

This whole thread is kinda wild to me, but I think this Princess Bride answer helps me distill it down to: I’m ok with you not liking movies that I love, but how can you say that you don’t understand other people liking it?

I don’t care for Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but never has it crossed my mind that this is more than just a matter of taste, that there are people whose preferences are outright wrong.

I’m saying that whatever it was your grandparents had 50 years ago, the costs (including opportunity costs) are totally different.

I can work an hour at McDonald’s, for $18, and earn enough to buy 10 pounds of tomatoes at $1.80/lb. Growing 10 pounds of tomatoes is gonna take me a lot more than an hour of work, even if the land is free. The tradeoffs for me in this moment are going to be different from what your grandparents faced in the 70’s.

Either way, whether it’s worth the effort to drive for Uber depends on whether you already own a car. Whether you can publish a cheap indie game on the app store or steam depends on whether you already own a laptop. And whether it’s cost effective to grow your own food depends on whether you have access to land, sun, soil, and water.

Also economies of scale is a poor argument when it comes to farming

For small scale food gardening it absolutely matters. Picking berries, planting seedlings, spreading compost, getting rid of pests (either through pesticides or things like ladybugs), productivity per worker hour depends a lot on the scale. It’s really, really hard to be cost competitive with the grocery store in just pure worker hours, even if your own time is worth less than $5/hour.

very very poor

had an acre

Sounds like they already had something that dramatically changes the cost/benefit analysis, compared to someone considering gardening from scratch.

Someone with a few raised beds isn’t going to be able to compete with the economies of scale of a full acre of farmland.

But my French toast slaps now.

The 787 has 8 main tires and 2 nose tires. The main tires are 218 lbs (about 100kg) and the nose tires are 114 lbs (about 50kg). So a set is roughly 1970 lbs/900kg, pretty close to a short ton. 5 metric tonnes would be about 5.6 sets of 787 tires.

It’s not about work ethic. It’s an openness to new things, and a willingness to coordinate and plan things.

And seeing “moving away” as a huge sacrifice, to where you’d tend to describe it as “uprooting your life,” is a particular worldview that you’re entitled to, but one you should be aware that many other people don’t share.

You’re attributing a lot of unspoken values in that comment that I don’t really think are there, and I suspect it’s because you place a much higher value in staying close to home than the typical person does, and because you seem to elevate the purpose of a career to primarily be maximizing one’s own money.

So take a step back. Reread that comment with the revisited assumption that some people choose careers for reasons completely different from money, and that people don’t feel a strong need to stay in the same city where they grew up. It’s just career advice at that point.

There’s more to careers than just money. The distribution of jobs in different industry sectors, job specialties, etc. aren’t going to be uniform throughout the world, so many types of jobs will require people to move.

It’s not even about money. It’s about wanting to work in something specific that isn’t as easily available in the town you happened to be born in.

that’s insanity

makes me feel sick

That’s a pretty strong reaction to the simple idea that maybe living your entire life within a 30 minute drive of where you were born isn’t the best way to experience this life. You don’t have to want it, but is it that much to ask to simply understand that some other people want it?

My hometown is, like, fine. I could’ve stayed. But its state government is insane, the dominant local industries and companies don’t really fit my moral framework, and the social aspect pushes people into a car-based lifestyle that I’m not particularly interested in. I left for a job, but I also was just looking for a reason to leave.

Lazard is a pretty respected analyst for energy costs. Here’s their report from June 2024.

In the U.S., peaker gas plants that are only fired up between 5-20% of the time, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is between $110 to $230 per MWh. The levelized cost of storage for utility scale 4-hour storage ranges from $124-$226 per MWh, after subsidies. Before subsidies, that 4-hour storage costs $170-$296.

Residential storage, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. That’s $882 to $1101 before subsidies, or $653 to $855 after subsidies.

So in other words, utility scale storage has dropped down to around the same price as gas peaker plants, in the U.S., after subsidies.

Yeah, people are working on it.

The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.

That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.

It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.

It sounds like the thesis to David Epstein’s book, Range. When I read it, it was a game changer for me.

If I recall correctly, the main examples were Roger Federer (who played a lot of sports and didn’t choose to specialize in tennis until much later than the typical tennis pro), jazz legend Django Reinhardt, Vincent Van Gogh, and a bunch of other less famous, but much more typical examples.

Sampling is important, and has value beyond just the things they sampled and abandoned. The act of trying many different things is itself helpful.

Van Gogh wouldn’t have become the artist he became if he didn’t fizzle out of multiple career paths beforehand.

David Epstein’s Range really explores this idea and puts forth a pretty convincing argument that sampling and delaying specialization is helpful for becoming the type of well rounded generalist whose skills are best suited for our chaotic world.

This comment is like telling Superman not to lift with his back.

You guys are getting diagnosed?!?

Maybe I’m not up to date on my porn slang but “BBC micro” sounds like an inherent contradiction.

It’s immunotherapy that prevents the cancers from deactivating the immune cells that would ordinarily kill the cancer cells. So it’s like a traditional vaccine in that it causes changes to the immune system to better equip it to fight disease, but it’s a pretty new methodology of accomplishing that.

In both of those examples, the actors played characters of their own race, pretending to be another race as the plot of the respective movies.