bjelkeman-again

A good visualisation for this I think are linked. Petrol/diesel use about 20% of the available energy and electric vehicles use about 80-90% for moving the vehicle.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/electric-vehicles...

We solved our humid air in the bathroom with an active extraction fan that starts when it registers humidity and light (I think) in the room.

We have a wooden house from 1909, insulated, but not to modern standards and many windows. The heating and hot water is provided via a 10 kW (out) modern heat pump with a 100 meter borehole into the ground. This is a fairly standard installation in Sweden. It provides all the heat needed, except for extremely cold days (-20c or lower) when a 7 kW immersion heater can provide support. This is not needed more than a few days a year where we are.

We have added a small solar installation (7kWp) and a battery pack (18kWh). It provides 90% of power needed in the summer and allows for decent peak shaving in the winter, to lower network costs.

Additionally we are Co-owners in a windpower cooperative that provides more than our share of electricity into the network. So we are essentially operating our home on wind and solar, as well as powering the electric car.

It would be interesting to figure out if these that do the dogpiling are real users or not. It does not reflect my experience on BlueSky. But I am just a single datapoint.

Why would a country cut off the International Criminal Court? Not a big step to cut off a country.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2026/feb/18/international-cr...

We sold web traffic analysis software to Dell Europe, around 1998 or so. They never kept their data more than a week. As the traffic and purchase behaviour they were analysing in the store changed so much every week they said (if I remember correctly) it didn’t make any sense to compare the data over time. I took from that that what they sold every week changed all the time. Of course, data storage and processing was then not as cheap as it is today, so maybe there was more to it.

How does it work then?

It is probably a naive point of view that I hold (I haven't thought it through properly) but the western capitalist version is that investors providing money to do dumping of prices is ok (as long as you are not considered a monopoly) and the Chinese state sponsored capitalism is considered dumping as it goes against the agreed WTO rules for how international trade is supposed to work. The western capitalist governments (probably with a lot of lobbying support) wrote the WTO rules. Not trying to defend either way, but it seems to be different economic and political systems trying to gain dominance over each other.

It is true, but my house has some many dormers (a new word for me), chimneys and air vents, that I hardly can get a meaningful set of panels in. Solar tiles would have been great. Alas.

I did want it. Would have looked great on my quite old house where it is highly impractical to have conventional solar panels, as there is essentially not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location, and I need new tiles soon anyway.

I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).

It is still a very small number compared to all that practice music, and which they could live of it.

In the Nordics (SE, FI, NO, DK) it is pretty much the same. A large part of the year your shoes are a mess and you don’t want that indoors.

I think that the main difference right now, and I think it matters, is that the concentration of power and wealth is very high today and this is going to be a real detriment to our society.

If it is that or starve, the I would probably have taken the job. But yeah, if there where alternatives, no thanks.

At the same time, I think some kind of aggregator will emerge. In music, the tools to create music are so inexpensive that the market is flooded. In games it is becoming the same, now accelerated by LLMs. But there is always some type of aggregator ending up earning the money from most of that, rather than the people creating the content. Not sure how it will work out here, but I predict it will be another type of aggregator.

Sounds like the book was The Ministry of the Future.

The world reached peak fish catch in the mid-90s. [1] And we now eat more grown fish than caught fish. The problem is that with increased acidity in the oceans, as part of the ocean absorbing mor CO2, we get less algae and eventually less fish. [2] But, yeah, let’s keep fishing until the stocks collapse. [3] They take a very very long time to recover.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/capture-fisheries-vs-aqua...

[2] https://www.ioc.unesco.org/en/articles/ocean-acidification-t...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...

Destroying ecosystems beyond a tipping point. And the politicians just care about being re-elected. Focusing on short term gain.

” The decision taken by the Council of Ministers earlier this week on the 2024 fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea is in many ways unique. It shows a remarkable historical short-sightedness, ignorance of the fish and fishing in the inland sea, inability to understand the scientific advice of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and - perhaps most of all: the ministers are bending the laws that regulate fishing, ecosystems and the marine environment to the limit.”

https://balticwaters.org/en/baltic-sea-brief-60-the-final-he...

One time purchase, then I would have been interested. Yeah, a free version, but subscription…

When there is a cost. Please show it on the website. I couldn’t find if for wander.

Even better: pick up Rocksmith, or one of the many clones being built by people using <ghasp> LLMs, and learn to play a real guitar.

I did, and I now play bass in a hardrock/metall band. One of my guitarist started with guitar hero, moved on to Rocksmith, and here we are. Band practice tonight for a gig at one of the best little music venues in Stockholm, Sweden next month. (Which I am arranging.) Good things come from doing fun things.

It is, as the USA has a large population. We can be more nuanced.

By absolute dollars, single country: US > EU institutions > Germany > UK

By absolute dollars, bloc vs. bloc: EU/Europe combined (~$237bn+) now exceeds the US (~$130bn), especially after 2025

By per-capita/GDP burden: tiny front-line states (Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania, Norway) far outstrip both the US and the larger Western European economies — the US actually ranks closer to the bottom of the pack on a relative-effort basis, behind Germany, the UK, and virtually all Nordic/Baltic states

Between February 2022 and January 2025, average expenditure per European resident stood at $394; by April 2026 that figure had risen to $618, driven by the total spending by European NATO countries on Ukraine exceeding $237 billion, including $96 billion contributed just since January 2025.

Average European (across NATO's European members) $618 per person (2022-2026)

United States (my estimate: ~$130bn total ÷ ~340m population)≈ $384 per person

The video at the beginning looks disturbingly enough like training to hunt humans, or hunt drones that do that, in east Ukraine or something.

Yeah. I subscribe to a mailing list from a data security company that sends me a summary of breaches, daily. I know it is in their interest to keep me worried. But they aren’t making these stories up.

It is interesting to see CEOs of big tech companies are so convinced they are always right that they start sidestepping any internal review of communication. Often to the detriment of the company.

I have an acquaintance that works as a consultant on one of the ”egg” (closed or semi closed) floating fish farms. I also know a professor who thinks they are going to be much more viable from an energy point of view. Personally I think they will have a big challenge economically until we start charging for the externalities of the open pen systems. Much like a carbon tax.

Technically it works. Superior Fresh, as in the linked article, has a viable system. The challenge is that in the beginning it is hard to reach a scale that works economically. Added to that, in Norway it is challenging to grow leafy greens in greenhouses in the winter, compared to the latitude where Superior Fresh is located. It can be done, but is energy intensive. We ran a fully indoor pilot facility for five years in Sweden, it is still operational, under a new team. My ambition is to document what we learned in a CC licensed book. At the moment it is partially documented in a blog. https://cirkularodling.se/build-an-aquaponic-indoor-farm-par...

So much modern GUI design is really poor for those a bit older where contrast is important.

> Linux has never been better

I replace Windows with Linux on my last Windows computer this week. A mixed bag of old motherboard, new-ish graphics card etc. I think I would have had a hard time to get an acceptable usage experience without using an LLM to guide me through the hiccups. (Odd window manager boot problem, sound device issue). But I agree, the Linux ecosystem seem to have something for everyone and on modern hardware it behaves relatively well. LLM as your local tech support works surprisingly well too.

That said. The wardrobe is still there and working great many years later.