interesting piece of trivia: In 2003ish, there was a major power outage across the northwestern US and much of eastern Canada. One major issue was that the grid became desynchronized so resynchronizing was a major problem they had to solve to bring the grid back up. The province of Quebec uses high voltage DC lines (and also massive amounts of hydroelectric power, but that’s a conversation for another day) so they didn’t have that same problem and had returned their power to normal long before the rest of the region.

I really like this post, it gets down to nitty gritty brass tacks and brings some data.

That’s usually the thing that gets me grumpy about such conversations, people don’t bother discussing the realities of actually doing the thing, they just trade feel good articles about how everything is fine.

One thing about the paper is, the cost of high voltage DC lines is likely assuming you’re on land. Bringing the energy in from sea could be even more expensive, since you need much more expensive equipment, the environment is brutal, repairs involve sending people and material into that environment, and I have a feeling but I don’t know, I think that the movement of the offshore wind turbines could be mechanically stressful on cables that are relatively safe up in the air only dealing with wind (and they still can cut right through insulators swinging in the wind and vibrating at 60hz)

It really isn’t.

Hydroelectric and geothermal are utility scale renewable energy. Solar just drives up electricity prices.

Hydroelectric.

I always end up looking like I hate green energy because I’m critical of wind and solar, but geothermal and hydroelectric are actually super practical.

My NFTs may be down 98%, but they’re going to the moon!!!

I bought my pets.com stock on this logic back in 1999, as well as my beanie babies.

They’re focusing on NFTs now.

Look, if you want to argue with me that the US healthcare system is broken, you’ll get no argument from me.

The US government spends more public money per person than Canada, and yet most people in the United States need to pay for entirely Private health insurance. It’s a fantastic example of the brokenness of the US system. For the amount of money being fought for in the US healthcare system, there should be one of the world’s best single-payer options.

And you can’t even get partisan on it because the current system was put into place by supermajority democrats. Most people forget that.

But that’s the problem. When you’re dealing with a corrupt government, it doesn’t really matter what nice ideas are on the table. They take your money or the money from your great-grandkids, and they hand it to their buddies, you ain’t in the club.

And that goes for healthcare, that goes for green energy, it goes for whatever you’ve got.

All you’re seeing here is a changing of the guard where money stops being sent to one set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own so that it can be sent to another set of rich people who probably could have afforded to do something on their own.

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You can’t break even you can’t break even.

How many guys shovelling shit for a living get taxed to high heaven so some farmer can have 800,000 in government money?

The only ones that seem to not be like that are hydroelectric and geothermal, since they’re baseload. Which is why they’re the two I advocate for the loudest – why not use stuff that works?

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]”