The cheapest way to heat your home this winter is to accrue so many cease and desist letters you can use them as fuel!
2,283 karma · joined September 25, 2016
Unhelpful, I know
Further, it is possible to run a heat pump at high temperatures: some use refrigerants specifically designed to do this relatively efficiently.
To those who work there, I'd be fascinated to hear an explanation that isn't about dollars.
We don't. People engaging in piracy have their lives ruined, companies engaging in piracy pay a tiny fraction of their revenues out to authors who can't legally outgun them.
(Sorry, I just wanted to air the juxtaposition as clearly as possible, I sense we are actually in agreement)
..but impossible to have unless you control the operating system that is distributed with phones that normal people will use.
An AI treaty could quite easily be offered by the US because it has multiple frontier labs. Most countries would quite happily limit the activity of their larger companies in exchange for their companies not being eaten alive by AI generally. It is pretty great fodder for international cooperation, and governments can move fast when it is timely to do so.
Ultimately a tricky thing to define though, no argument.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.
I'm also a member of the lovely https://kirkhillcoop.org/ - an energy coop. I own around 1kW of potential overall production from a number of pretty big turbines in southern Scotland, for which I paid around £1k. The benefit to me is I pay opex cost for energy according to the performance of that farm. I believe this is projected at around 5p per kWh - we're getting our first payouts this year.
The coop model means I don't need anything in my house. It is also, sadly, not accessible because of companies like Ripple Energy collapsing. They facilitated the coop being started in the first place. No more of them can be founded. Starting these things in the first place was just too hard and too slow.
Whereas batteries.. are an incentive to use domestic headroom to balance the grid at considerably lower costs than if a commercial operator did it. High costs generally mean time of use tariffs give an incentive to people to do what ought to be grid scale investments, but there's the problem: the only way individuals can capture the benefits of grid scale investment is via specially designed shareholdings in those investments.
Nobody is offering that chance now that ripple is gone. Buy shares in companies operating wind turbines, or retail energy suppliers, and your gains are so much worse than with a Ripple co-op like Kirk Hill. They're worse than a battery, too.
I'll be getting a plug in battery when the time comes, but it is truly insane that I have to personally take on that responsibility to feel the benefit, and that there is no easy route to buying at grid scale. Ripple were a very brief oddity I'll derive a small benefit from for a long time, but now they're gone, and all we have instead is the prospect of storing pretty scary substances in our homes instead, on time of use tariffs which also don't let us reap the full benefit from our investment. It sucks. Cooperativism and mutualism would be a nicer alternative.