Ideally the ground should be as close to the cold water pipe entering the house as you can get, yeah.

Honestly, I wouldn’t want to just use my cold water line well into the house as a ground for exactly that sort of reason.

In many jurisdictions, connecting to the copper cold water line is acceptable. The copper line runs through the ground and so is essentially the same as a grounding electrode.

IMO, AI is a really good demo for a lot of people, but once you start using it, the gains you can get from it end up being somewhat minimal without doing some serious work.

Reminds me of 10 other technologies that if you didn’t get in the world was going to end but ended up more niche than you’d expect.

I feel like a lot of people don’t understand that you can’t consume your way to using less.

#1 is “reduce” because if you just use less, then you don’t need to mine anything more, or farm anything more, or build anything more. Ideally, if you care about the environment that’s the most direct way to improve things.

That isn’t to say that we don’t need to build out greener infrastructure. What it does mean is that anytime that we are doing industrial scale manufacturing like this, we have to be very careful because it’s going to inherently damage the environment, and if you’re going to do that you need to do the math to figure out if you’re doing something that’s net good.

I think a lot of people aren’t there yet, they just assume that you do the thing that’s good and you’re doing good without regard for the cost.

I can actually see this for most solar panels. A few of them are going to fail catastrophically, but if it’s a giant piece of silicon, of course it’s basically going to be fine.

I’m responsible for a device that is installed in 1996, and people have said that I should replace the solar panel but I don’t see why I would – it’s been producing a small amount of power non-stop for every summer, why would I want to replace something that is doing exactly what I needed to? You’re just producing waste that is still fully functional. As a society we do that way too much as it is.

Lots of posts on here have me arguing against solar, but I totally agree with you here. When you need AC you usually have sunlight to help you run the AC.

Isn’t going to help with heat or light, but AC? Definitely. Especially paired with some batteries to smooth out higher load and lower load periods.

Au used to have power that was comparable in price to the USA. Since then it’s gone up in price by several times. Used to be like 7 cents per kwh, now it’s like 30 cents per kwh.

It’s ok though, people can just trade houses between each other! That’ll pay for all the solar panels!

And don’t worry, Australia sells only the greenest coal to Asia (second largest coal importer on Earth), and as we all know, burning coal doesn’t produce CO2 if it happens over there instead of over here! Putting the coal on a boat before burning is making a pretty noticeable difference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaSdC0QOUM

I was going to say “I don’t use em-dashes in my books for when they sole all those books” but then I went into my first book and found 22 em-dashes so… oops. I thought the word processor changed – into an en-dash and not an em-dash.

I think you’d probably be ok with using em-dashes (I typically use en-dashes myself but I’m lazy), but don’t use cliche phrases like “It’s not [x] – it’s [reframed x]”

“This is not just a leak – it’s a blueprint for mass exploitation,” the researchers said.

Are the researchers chatgpt? Because that looks almost word for word how chatgpt would write something like that, right down to the em-dash.

China still burns more coal every year than every single other country on earth put together.

This matters a lot, because it doesn’t matter that you’re “using electricity” if it’s coming from a big ol’ coal pollution factory.

In some ways, it’s preferable to directly use the coal in some applications – changing from chemical energy to thermal to movement to electricity back to thermal energy can be less efficient than just changing the chemical energy to thermal energy and using that directly.

Well, don’t I feel silly. haha

If your blog uses WordPress, there is an activitypub plugin so people can subscribe using mastodon or whatever you’ve got.

Except that that solar farm doesn’t produce energy at night, so you’d need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you’re looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you’d need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.

Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required – for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.

Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It’s fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things – like ethanol fuels.

That’s where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don’t need to be oversized and don’t need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren’t available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn’t enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they’re probably just shouldn’t be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.

Interesting. It doesn’t take any energy to produce solar panels, and no part of the process of building one produces any waste. Til!

Seems like a good region for geothermal.

Not saying nothing, but there’s always luanti and voxelibre.

Of issues I have with solar, “we won’t be able to farm” isn’t one of them. The amount of space required for even gigawatt level solar farms is relatively trivial. I think I did the math and it was like 30km square or something, which is enough to convince a lot of greens it’s a bad choice because it’s big and ugly, but on a map isnt really that that much.

Of issues I have with solar, “we won’t be able to farm” isn’t one of them. The amount of space required for even gigawatt level solar farms is relatively trivial. I think I did the math and it was like 30km square or something, which is enough to convince a lot of greens it’s a bad choice because it’s big and ugly, but on a map isnt really that that much.

California is a best case for the worst renewables. I always use Manitoba and Quebec as examples of good renewables done well. Norway as well. Cold places that need heat or you die, and lots of people can afford to heat their homes with carbon neutral hydro power.