flavius29663

You can still have those at state level, or even lower, by grouping counties.

The hill people from Appalachia deserve to be represented by someone local. The low lying coastal communities in the outer banks also deserve to have someone that understands them, rather than someone from NYC. The border towns in Texas are better represented by someone from there, rather than someone from Ohio. There is some value to local representation, it doesn't need to be all in.

Romania for example has a hybrid system: it's "first past the post" first and foremost, so people get local representatives, but all the unused votes that would otherwise get wasted (both winning and losing ones) are then put together in a big national pool and then you have the second round of MPs appointed because of that pool. That way popular vote matches the percentages in the parliament, but you also have local representation.

Apllo was not the fastest computer in the world. It was a small device enough to shuttle rockets around the moon and back.

should extend to H1b, J class visas and others, and for longer than 6 months, maybe 2 years. Give other companies a chance of getting those people, htey just proved they cannot manage them properly.

Google never had layoffs before 2022, so maybe they did?

maybe don't allow them to hire any visa employee for the next x years? That would make them much more careful with layoffs.

well yeah, because everything is so bespoke: plumbing, electrical, windows, doors, drywall, trimming. I hope to see some kind of evolution of housing where these things are not installed by skilled labor somehow.

In a stick built house you're paying a lot of labor. Material prices are not that much.

For example, the material list for a 3 bedroom house is 130k. https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...

Say the land is 130k in your region. You won't find 3b houses for less than 360k. If you're looking at not so cheap builders, it will be 500k.

I think there's a revolution coming in the way we build houses, it must be - because costs are through the roof. It could be either in the form of prefabricated walls, like we have now trusses, or lego bricks like the OP, or something.

but that's meaningless, because they're only counting 1billion plus events.

When you look at nooa data, it's not even a record, adjusted or not, 2005 and 2017 were worse by a lot. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/

> not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people

But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.

> That isn't an edge case thought, was it?

If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.

So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.

Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.

Clean code explicitly addresses situations like this: the code "seems" identical for the time being, but it's not in the long term, because it applies to different objects, that will evolve independently. This is in the book, so I am not sure why they're saying "bye Clean Code", it should be "I should read Clean Code again".

solar PVs are definitely producing more than put in. It takes years, as opposed to months or days for fossil fuels and nuclear, but it does pay back. look up EROI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

I think there are variables with a huge amount of variability for a ship: how heavy it is(heavier - less jumping around), how long, what seas it floats in, how much space they can spare. I agree that this article is too premature: before even tank testing has been done, but I can see how this is hard to calculate on a computer model.

> I struggle to understand why companies hold on to all this data

To sell it, did you miss the news? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-30/23andme-w...

I will go with 0-1 in whatever numerical system you have implemented, assuming only positive numbers.

You just can't admit being wrong, can you?

They are typically first wired in series to increase the voltage as early as possible, to make them safer. If you were to wire them in parallel you would keep a low voltage and increase the amperage, which would make their wires glow like Christmas lights.

That's the whole reason why they started selling micro-inverters that go on each panel: to increase the voltage and decrease amps before even leaving the panel area, to make them safer.

Look at a typical micro-inverter: input is up to 50 volts, 10 amps. Output is 240 volts, 1 amp. https://solartown.com/solar-products/enphase-iq8-microinvert...

For panels, the voltage is not dangerous part, the intensity is.

Again, the dangerous part is the intensity, the amps. Look at your panel in the link, it's at more than 9 amps. If you put them in parallel, you will keep the low voltage, but quickly rise the amps, if you have 5 panels in parallel you are at 45 amps!! That can cause the fires, not the voltage.

You want to tie them in series first, to increase the voltage and keep the amps as low as possible. 110V or 220V are not dangerous voltages, that's why houses are wired at these higher volts. People all over the world handle cables carrying 220V with very few issues. If you wired the house at 12V-48V, some wire in the wall would catch on fire every-time you wanted to toast a slice of bread, lol.

I am talking for hours when there isn't much renewables. If you set the timeline to 24 hours and look at the hours, you have periods with 55% gas and also 20% imports. You can assume imports are dirty coal, because that is most of Australia.

This is blown out of proportion in the US. EU has stronger laws for environment, worker protection, historical buildings protections, you name it. Yet they can easily install solar under 1 dollar per KWh. This is a self inflicted problem created in the US, and the solar roofs became a scam. For a 9KW system, installers can pay 2500 to the sellers/marketers. That is MORE than the cost of panels, this should tell you everything you need to know https://www.quora.com/What-are-commissions-like-for-a-solar-...

> they are relatively high voltage devices

On the contrary, they are low voltage (12V), which makes them more dangerous (because you need higher amps to carry the same amount of energy). To make them safe, you can install inverters closer to the panel, to raise the voltage to 110 or 220, making them much much safer.

> The glorious utopia where you buy a pallet of the things from Wal*Mart with your pocket change and stick them everywhere the sun shines runs into some logistical hurdles.

That can work if you install them as fences, or just on the ground in general. If you install them on rooftops then yeah, you need some serious consideration. The installations are still grossly overpriced, if both EU and Australia can do it under 1USD per Watt, so can the US.

It's relatively easy to generate that amount, especially when you can easily import 20% of your power(very dirty coal power), and also run gas turbines for another 40%, like it is at this very moment https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/AU-SA

When you're talking about changing the US, it couldn't just import 100GW, Canada and Mexico couldn't provide that much, even if they were clean energy. There is just a difference between providing for one small region vs a continent. Also, Uruguay has huge neighbors, they could easily import-export clean energy from them (they are all hydro-centric).

But yeah, I will see the US going to 70% pretty soon, considering where panel prices are. The one big thing missing is the low cost to install on rooftops. In the US is costs at least 3 dollars per watt to install panels, whereas in the Eu or Australia it's under 1 dollar. The panels themselves can be bought for 15-20 *cents* per watt, so there is a lot of room for improvement. Rooftop solar in the US is a big scam at the moment, they are fleecing the consumers. On the other hand, utility size in the US is cheap, so they will cover the gap.

uhh, you're right. I took their first listed dimensions, but if you look at the specs, it's your size. Anyway, same ballpark. I was actually considering using some second hand panels to build a fence, that's how I know.

> If you don’t consider the capital of a panel then sure free / cheap as dirt.

That's what I meant, the capital cost is already so low that you could use them as fence panels. They will only get lower with the looming supply glut.

Look at this monocrystaline (higher eff) panel in china: 15 cents per watt. There are cheaper ones too: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Haitai-Solar-Panel-Pr...

A 400W panel will cost 60 dollars and has a size of 1.8mx1.8m. Per square meter that is $18.52

A generic plastic fence panel from lowe's 6ft by 8ft costs $120 https://www.lowes.com/pd/Freedom-Actual-6-ft-x-7-82-ft-Ready...

price per square meter: $26.87

> Because if you still think this is about hydro access, and not leadership

I looked up the McKenzie report[1] where I think the 5.7 trillion comes from. In short, the renewable energy would be 1.5 trillion, and batteries 2.5 trillion (transmission is the rest). If you have 50% hydro, then you don't need batteries, so the cost for the US would drop by 2.5trillion. Having hydro is a big reason why some countries can do it easier than others. It's not a white and black situation, after-all, the US is already investing a lot in renewable energy.

Second, the report says it provisioned for 900 "gigawatts" of batteries. If they mean GW rather than GWh (Which I think they do), that is not nearly enough, that is just 2000 GWh at today's prices. The US needs 500GWh on average each hour, so you only get batteries for 4 hours. You need to either build much more PV, or buy many more batteries. Also, 2000GWh is about 2 years worth of current global battery manufacturing. It's just not the same building out a small country or a large country electrical grid.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/shifting-u-s-to-100-percent-ren...

That being said, it will happen, we'll soon switch to PV production, and it will happen faster than people think. It will be a disruption previously only seen in software. By 2030 we'll probably be pretty much powered by PV panels.

from the article:

> By comparison, France’s much-vaunted nuclear power construction spree accounted for roughly 60 gigawatts of capacity between 1975 and 1990, and China built about 400 gigawatts of solar PV capacity between 2007 and 2022, though today China is building about 100 gigawatts of solar a year.

This does not capture the sheer size+speed of the PV revolution. We're at 800GW production of PV panels EACH YEAR. This will increase to 1TW by the end of 2024. For comparison, the whole world fossil fuel electricity capacity is around 5TW. Accounting for a lower capacity factor, solar could provide almost all of the electricity in just 15 years. This is shorter than the life expectancy of solar panels, so prepare yourself for some major disruption.

Panels will be cheap as dirt, we'll install them as fences, roofs, sidings, you name it. Electricity during daytime will be free. We'll see some changes to the structure of electrical companies: they will charge a higher subscription to connect to the grid, and much less per KWh. Net metering is obviously going away.

When you have 50% of your electricity made using hydro-power, it's really easy to integrate as much renewable energy as you'd like. This is not even the best story, there are countries with close to 100% clean electricity, like Norway or Austria. It just doesn't scale that well for large countries where hydro can't amount to more than 10-20%.

Most humans on earth already eat way more than what they need. Exercising might actually make them eat less in the long run, because they'll lose weight and not eat so much anymore.

Gold does not corrode, and can be formed into thinner parts.

Even a used one will be priced pretty high. Paid 400 or so for a used one, then immediately took it to someone else to verify it's real...they offered 75 for it(I didn't ask, she just said how much she'll pay for it).

that is not nearly enough. You need to make sure the system still works after the update, so you need to carefully control all the versions that go in, test them in lower environments. Also, for any serious application, you will need to do this multiple times, for hundreds or thousands of machines even for small companies.

I am on your side, actually, I think managing machines is better than serverless, but it's not that easy.