bruce511

Yes, and no.

So, as a rule of thumb, the solar panel loses approximately 1% per year. So after 30 years it's generating around 70% of rated capacity.

At that (or any earlier or later) point one could replace the panels. That's really cheap to do, and can be done with more-or-less unskilled labor.

If you are space-constrained (like your residential roof) then you'll likely do it earlier.

If you are a commercial producer, sitting in a desert somewhere, it'll likely be better to just "plant another field" next door. Keep the 70% (it's free), and bolster capacity by adding more panels, not replacing old ones.

And this is before we take into account places where the ecology under the panels has changed and become more valuable in its own right.

So 25 years from now, or maybe 10 years from now, it might pay to replace panels. Which may in turn lead to very cheap 75% 2nd hand panels becoming widely available.

I think most people here would say "jobs".

While it's true the US is a massive producer, it focuses on automation, which means more productivity per job.

And this is the crux of it all. US factory jobs weren't Los "overseas" as much as they were lost to machines. Each production line needs fewer and fewer workers.

Yes, you can cherry-pick examples (software jobs going to India or coal mines closing etc) but even mines use much less labor today per ton of say coal than they did 50 years ago.

So really, I think, the sense is that good blue-collar union jobs are what's dwindling. It's less about raw output and more about job losses.

I think the understanding of what a college is breaks into two schools of thought.

One group (mostly students) believe it is a skills training facility, training for specific job skills for specific jobs.

Another group (mostly faculty) believes it is teaching people how to learn skills.

Students in the first group are always panicking about their jobs going away.

Students in the second group learn new skills quickly, and see opportunities when the world changes around them.

I concur, a majority are not productive most of the time. However a majority is far from everyone.

Leaving aside for the moment people working multiple jobs for whom free time is a luxury.

Leaving aside working parents who are also raising children who choose to spend that time with them.

Of the rest, though we do see some productive outlets. Open Source Software for example being perhaps the poster child for work done without return.

Or what about those who volunteer? Perhaps in a church context or charity context or whatever.

Or all those with a side hustle, selling home-made goods in weekend markets. Some of that to earn more, some to exercise their creativity.

Yes, in countries where there are sufficient social nets that unemployed people can survive some choose not to work. And yet the overall unemployment numbers in those countries is pretty low.

So maybe "majority" isn't really the right term?

I understand your point here, between social media (for the young) and TV for the old, there's certainly a lot of sources of information.

I get the urge to find someone to blame. It's not the fault of the voter, because that would imply personal accountability. Or at the very least, it would imply a lot about the underlying character of chunk of the population.

On the other hand, you can't blame the media for gas price reports. Or the cost of housing. Or the people dying of measles. Or the men in masks rounding up people. The voter can see all that themselves.

The voter knows about the current conflict with Iran. That is not a "media bias". They are free to decide themselves if that is justified.

The voter who spends all day on Fox news is welcome to decide for themselves if they want a hand-out of cash promised for after the the election. (A promise they've heard before, but not seen).

So yeah, it eould be nice to blame the oligarchs, or the media, or China, or the church, or pretty much anyone, as long as that anyone is not the voter who can see what is happening, and votes for more of the same.

"Was" being the operative word there. It's been a long time since new (foreign) ideas were accepted, and the resistance to cultural change has been ever present.

American culture is capitalism, and that isn't changing, just getting more extreme. Equally American culture is "white European" and the resistance to change there (racially and culturally) is woven into US history.

I'm not American, but since those things are being done by the executive branch, with the approval of the Supreme Court, I'm not sure changes in congress will make much of a difference.

Short of impeachment (reasons for which are not in short supply, but which seems unlikely) there's not much congress can actually do to change things. 60 votes is a tough threshold to reach.

It's easy to blame the rich here. And certainly they are the ones doing the damage and reaping the rewards.

But a third of Americans approve of the current administration. Around half of the people who voted, voted for this administration. And a lot of the footguns you refer to were gleefully part of the campaign.

If you want to apportion blame you might include moderate voters who may not approve of the status quo, but alas are so partisan that they cannot vote for the other side.

With more elections imminent, it remains to be seen if it's really the oligarchs fault, or if the root fault is the real source of power.

It doesn't have to be cheaper than utility-scale. It only has to be cheaper than retail electricity.

In other words, it can be useful even if it's not the most efficient way to do it. It only has to be more efficient than the status quo.

I don't have thd capital to build utility-scale solar. I do have the capital to install residential solar. My electricity is now cheaper.

We have dashcams (and GPS trackers) in our business vehicles. They're a really important tool when our drivers are reported for "driving badly", or for situations where the vehicle was damaged.

Most reports are not supported by the evidence, but some are, and that helps us improve driver behavior, while at the same time protecting drivers from bad reports.

It's not an insurance thing, but more a "manager confidence in drivers" thing.

The big tech companies are cash-rich, can afford to hire (and pay) top people and are looking for things for those people to do.

In other words their motivations and your and my motivations are different. I have limited cash, and my primary goal is expanding my ability to get more cash.

By contrast, the Google's of this world have too much cash. Their primary goal is finding things to depend the cash on (billions at a time) that can return, or at least potentially return, either mountains of more cash, or a competitive advantage.

So yes, for them, hard problems, the harder the better, are desirable.

>> Europe is the only place which shows a little less potential. They can build solar farms in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and add transmission lines.

Traveled a lot in Europe earlier this year (by rail). Saw quite a lot of solar installed, both on buildings and in open land.

Saw even more wind turbines. Europe may have less solar potential, but clearly they still have enough sun to make solar economically viable. And the addition of wind turbines makes sense; that co-exists very well with farm land, and nicely balances solar production.

Ahh, plain text, wherein "plain" does some heavy lifting. If plain text had something as simple as a 4 byte signature it could have been soooo much better.

As it is programs have to guess the following;

A) encoding. If ANSI which code page? If unicode which encoding? In the case of utf-16 big or little endian?

B) line endings? CR? LF? CRLF? I guess no-one uses LFCR... right?

C) number formats? 100.000 or 100,000? Date formats? is that mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy?

D) what human-language is it in?

E) CSV? Don't get me started...

Yes. Text is a lot easier to load, parse, make guesses about than say XLS. Yes all of the above things can be "guessed" to a greater or lesser extent.

Yes BOM exists to at least try solving the encoding question. Of course most files don't use them. Lots of tools don't support them. And they don't solve any of the other issues.

But sure, ASCII files in English with US date formats, and Windows line endings....no problems at all...

There have been series' like that, but its equally bad, in the other direction. In that scenario drivers qualify in speed order, then they do the race in the same order. It's not much fun to watch.

Every track is the same because all the cars have the same strengths and weaknesses.

In other words, there are too few variables.

Good races are where teams are involved to make the best car, drivers are involved to execute the best driving, strategists are involved to make the best decisions, and luck creates jeopardy for all.

With different cars (any they are remarkably different given the extensive regs) some do well at high speed tracks, others prefer corners and so on.

I'm assuming you're talking about people born in SF? Because the rest have already demonstrated a willingness to give up their community once in the pursuit of quality of life.

Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.

So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.

On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.

The language students were however better at writing and communications in general. They ended up in sales, marketing, advertising and everywhere else.(all under threat from AI as well.)

But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.

To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.

There's a lot to unpack in your question.

First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?

Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.

And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.

You're right. There are several occupations which have legal entry requirements. You can't be a doctor without getting a medical degree.

However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.

Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.

So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.

But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.

What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.

You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.

Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.

yeah, I get your point - technically Iran closed the strait, not the US. But that's equally disingenuous. The closing of the strait was the result of a chain of events (a short chain at that) which originated with the US bombing Iran.

In your analogy, the crims performed the burglary. That lead to the police arriving. That lead to the police closing the street. You can argue that the crims "didn't close the street", and sure, they didn't. But the street is closed purely as a result of their actions.

I've been reading a 15 year study by a well known (here) sports psychologist. He studied why children played sports, and why they stopped.

The single biggest reason, by far - kids stop playing sports because of parents who come and watch. Turns out parents think winning is important, which robs all the fun out of it.

As a counter anecdote; in high school I played 2 or 3 sports per season. I enjoyed them all immensely, despite the teams being (usually) objectively terrible. No parents ever came to watch (outside the ones offering necessary transport). We'd occasionally go a whole season without winning a single game. No expectations. Just having fun with my mates...

I'm really thankful it was my time, not my parents time.

The point is made in the article; Art is about branding not quality.

He made original art in Vermeer's style. All the experts of the day authenticated them as Vermeer's. Frankly, had he not confessed, they'd likely still be Vermeer's today.

Their value was locked up in the Vermeer name; the brand. Once they weren't Vermeer their value dropped by 3 orders of magnitude.

To all creators, heed the lesson. The brand is the valuable part. Building a brand is the expensive part. AI might replace your product but it can't replace your brand.

Wine has the advantage that it keeps really well, and in some cases improves (becomes more valuable with age.)

So when demand softens it may be advantageous to hold back the excess rather than lower prices. Yes, there are cash flow issues when this approach gets out of hand, but financial interests can cover a lot of that as well.

Referring to countries as "shithole countries" does not help in understanding the current dynamic between rich and poor nations. So perhaps it is helpful to understand what that is, without the pejoratives.

Firstly, each country is different. So the relationship between say the USA and Mexico is different to the relationship between the USA and say Ethiopia.

By "richness" we might also be better off thinking as less "spare cash" and more "standard of living". Which includes food, housing etc but also security, safety etc.

In truth much of the US "richness" depends on other nations. If there was no Latin labor the US would have a fresh produce problem. Indeed the very premise of DJT is that the US has a trade deficit with just about everyone. Much of US "richness" is thus dependent on the "poorness" of others.

Yes automation, cheaper energy, AI can reduce the labor content of goods and make them universally cheaper. Yes I believe in a future where the overall standard of living increases.

But it would be a mistake to believe the US is "leading" US there. The US achieved its current position at the barrel of a gun, and uses the military (and threat of military) to interfere with countries and regions either overtly or covertly. The entire premise of the cold war (outside of western europe) was premised on interventions to resist countries switching their political model to something the locals preferred.

And yes, maybe the locals preferred wrong. But the US didn't promote democracy, they promoted "willingness to keep supplying us". Countries which were leaning away from the US had to be punished. (Shah in Iran, Vietnam etc.)

I could go on, but I'll stop there. Suffice to say that an equitable standard of living is not in the (current) interest of most US citizens.

Every industry goes through a cycle of birth, explosion of creativity, enormous profitability, followed by consolidation and a small corporate class, and a large hobby class.

A time ago, sewing and tailoring was a valuable skill. Cheap clothes made it unnecessary. Today sewing is a hobby and most people who sew do so at a lower quality than a machine. You can say the same about pottery and ceramics.

There was a time when there were hundreds of car companies. Folks who wanted to could build a car, or plane, from scratch. That's not possible anymore.

Today lots of people cook at home at a level far superior to (at least) fast food restaurants. But of course fast food still exists.

I have been lucky to spend my career at the birth of the industry. It is now moving into the next stage, the commoditization of the skill set. I've seen the industry change before though, this is just the next cycle of that.

Lots of people will make a lot of software for themselves. But they won't sell it. Lots of other people will buy software because programming (ai or not) won't interest them. Programming isn't the skill here. Everything else in the business is.

Thanks

I'm going to side-track a bit, but since I'm being courted by PE I thought I'd ask.

>> The employees of the PE also co-invest

Is this voluntary, or mandatory?

I ask because I've seen clauses along the lines of "75% of bonuses are paid in shares, not available for sale for 5 years."

Using bonus money to buy shares props up the share price, but delays the employee actually seeing the bonus for 5 years. Seems pretty win-lose to me, and kinda puts me off.

Is this a standard practice you mean by co-invest?

(As an aside, I'm not a fan of buying shares where I work, that's not a good portfolio-diversification model. If the business goes under it's not good to lose both your job, and investments, on the same day.)

It's worse than that. When the owner retires, all staff lose their jobs. That's a fairly big bummer.

I'm currently part of a "small" business/factory (around 50 employees). The owner is nearing retirement. Are all 50 of us gonna hit the streets tomorrow? Should our customers, many longstanding over 20 years get their contracts terminated? Do they get any warning? Can they easily switch to other suppliers? Is our offering somewhat unique?

Frankly, I think the thought-experiment is very incomplete if you can't see major downsides.

Fiction is not real, but I would add a "yet" into the sentence.

But that's not the point. Science Fiction (speaking generally) takes a specific hypothesis, and then imagines a society that derives from that.

For example "The Space Merchants" (Pohl & Kornbluth, 1952) imagined a world run by advertising. Or "Profession" (Azimov, 1957) explores education. I offer these as the tip of a large iceberg.

Science Fiction is seldom about science. It's mostly about people and society interacting with that science. It doesn't seek to predict science advances, but rather predict how those advances will affect the society we live in.

Sure Terminator isn't real. (And frankly not something I'm terribly worried about.) But the impact of AI on society is real, and that impact will manifest in ways we have predicted (eg the movie Her) and in ways we've not yet explored.

What happens when there are no engineers left? Nobody knows how to use a slide-rule anymore because we have machines to do that work. What happens when building a bridge becomes "Claude please design a bridge", which it does then perfectly well? Why should coders, or accountants, or engineers even exist in a world where AI exists?

That's the kind of question Science Fiction sets out to answer.

Stamp collecting in particular is a very good hobby. Where "good" is defined as "time consuming, pleasurable and cheap".

Well cheap to most of us. You can spend a lot if you want to, but you don't need to. But finding, and importantly organizing, makes for many restful hours.

My father was an avid collector and spent many hours cataloging his collection.

I will say though that as a whole, a collection (and indeed any collection, not just stamps) has almost zero net value. The cost of selling the collection dwarfs the collection value.

My advice to collectors is to have as much fun -selling- the bits in the collection (-especially- the valuable bits) before you pass. Do Not expect your heirs to sell it; they'll basically take pennies for it just to make it go away.

My father sold (or separated out) everything of value so we could dispose of the rest (basically donated to a dealer) with a clear conscience.