stephen_g

Worst I've had over a day in the last few months on my home solar is about 25% of my maximum daily generation. It was one day in a very rainy week here in Brisbane Australia.

I did have one rainy day back in the middle of Winter that was 16% but that will end up being literally the worst day of the year.

It’s not even really an issue with DC either, like a lot of people’s battery systems have multiple DC loads and multiple sources (e.g. DC MPPT solar controllers) going to a busbar connected directly to the battery.

Current load pulls the voltage down, sourcing current pushes it up. No bother, as long as your sources cut out if the voltage goes too high, and your loads cut out if it goes too low.

What’s the issue? Electrons flow both ways… Just have to synchronise the AC signals of the inverter to the grid, have good limits on frequency and voltage fluctuation, and monitor for faults properly.

You’re potentially getting the wrong type of tradie. What, are you calling Fallon’s or something?

That’s absolutely crazy, in Australia you could probably get a 30 kW commercial system installed for that. On my house I paid about US$6.5K for a 6.6 kW of panels and a 5 kW inverter, years ago. You’d get the same thing for a bit under US$5K today here.

For the price you’re talking about, you could also get a system with 15 kW of panels with a good 20-30 kWh of battery storage too!

Sealand is a structure within Britain's territorial waters (since they were expanded in 1987)... From what legal analysis I've seen, a structure just wouldn't ever be considered as a 'nation' in any sense, and if anything happened there that the UK was really concerned about they would remove the occupants anyway... So unless they had a navy that could go up against the UK's...

They'd need satellite internet anyway to get connectivity that didn't go through the UK so not going to be great latency.

Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!

And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!

Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.

Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.

These tend to work fine down to -25° C or so ambient temperature (you lose some efficiency below -5° C or so), so should always be outside. Obviously you need an alternate source of water heating if you live somewhere where it routinely gets below that, but even in a lot of places like that you could set it up to use the heat pump 90-95% of the year and a cheap but far less efficient resistive heater for the very cold days, and still come out far ahead.

I have a heat pump that uses R290 (propane) (as well as an CO2 one for hot water) and would take that any day of the week over ammonia! The charge of propane is pretty tiny and the safety standards extremely strict, so not really concerning in terms of flammability, ammonia I would consider far, far more dangerous.

Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).

And still would all the same with a 20 year term instead of what we have now…

It’s so rare for any work to still be making money that long that it would hardly change the calculation.

I hear this a lot as a rumour but has it actually ever been demonstrated in the wild?

It’s not something anyone else in the world seems to struggle with, where there are *.gov.uk, *.edu.au etc.

If anything the .gov, .mil and .edu being just American is confusing, as well plainly inappropriate (it feels like an American cultural imperialist thing to people from outside the US). It would have been much better if those had been retired decades ago and moved to under the .us TLD, so e.g. whatever.edu would become whatever.edu.us like every other country. Any existing domains on .gov, .mil, .edu etc. should only be allowed to exist as 301 redirects.

The plane has since had a cabin upgrade and is still expected to operate at least until 2028. It’s operating SIN-LHR right now as I write this, currently flying over Azerbaijan.

The current spend on Firefox development is only about $290 million per year, not the $1.5bn you're talking about...

But at the end of the day, it's not the amount of money that matters, it's the goals of the people running it.

I use Firefox and I like it (especially being able to use uBlock Origin), but I really dislike what Mozilla has become over the last ten years or so. I think that's the key distinction, I can mostly manage Mozilla's crap by turning off a bunch of stuff in my Firefox settings, but I think it's really important for the web to not use a Chromium based browser.

I don’t know about that - yes it’s simpler to recycle but the cycle life is at least four times longer (I had accidentally understated in my post, did some more reading and lead acid is worse than I remembered), but apparently advanced LiFePO4 cells are getting potentially more like eight or nine times the cycle count!

So if you think about the amount of materials - lead acid are almost double the weight vs. lithium batteries per amp hour to start with, then multiply by two because of the usable capacity difference, times four to eight for the cycle life… So you’re talking having to recycle something like sixteen to thirty-two times the weight of the lithium batteries in lead, before the LiFePO4 batteries would have even reached their end of life!

It’s really almost unbelievable how much better and cheaper the lithium batteries have become!

Pretty recently, maybe in the last year or so?. It's pretty crazy to see it - CATL have started selling LiFePO4 cells as low as US$63/kWh while lead acid tends to cost more than US$100 per kWh! Obviously a finished battery + retail margin is going to cost more than those figures but we're coming to the point where it will just be cheaper than lead acid on an amp-hour to amp-hour basis.

Of course, on a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) basis, it was already cheaper quite a while ago (for the last 5 years I'd guess). It was a combination of LiFePO4 batteries having such longer cycle lives than any lead-acid chemistry, and the greater depth of discharge meaning you could use a lot more of the energy. So if you build a new lead-acid based system, you'd need almost double the amp-hours of batteries to supply the same amount of energy with a safe depth of discharge, and you'd still have to replace them much sooner. So you'd not only have to factor buying a lot more batteries with lead acid but also replacing all the lead acid batteries at least once while a LiFePO4 system would continue to operate.

Oh that's interesting. I feel like my visual recall/imagination is probably slightly below average but that I have incredibly unusually vivid auditory imagination and recall. I’ll have to read into hyperphantasia, I wonder if having one strong sense but average or below average in others is common or unusual?

I mean, yeah, I can sort of replay things that happen in my head (obviously it’s nowhere as vivid as real life but still imagining through things I saw), and then sometimes I do realise you saw something significant that I hadn’t realised when I do so. So if that’s what you mean by flashbacks, then yes?

That was my reading of it too - Curry's response seems to seek to refute something that the original quote didn't actually say!

I can definitely see how someone could interpret it that way, assuming it's implying that he didn't see them as real, but I think that's an incorrect assumption and the quoted observation wasn't actually implying that at all.

I find Mastodon fairly chill and a fairly wide range of opinions, I think part of it is that Bluesky attracts most of the more extreme political people who might otherwise go to Mastodon. On Mastodon people are more likely to just block people who they really don't like and move on so there aren't really pile-ons and all that and different opinions co-exist.

You obviously get more of the people with more 'popular' political opinions in the Trending feed but that's not the default and you don't have to follow that if you can find enough good people or hashtags to follow.

Yeah, I used to watch things like this, I stopped using Twitter the second it became called 'X' and actually find I don't miss it including the major event live-tweeting.

Since then I've had a look on XCancel when there have been major events once or twice and yeah, most of the flurry of real time updates turn out to be misinformed or just plain wrong later anyway... I don't miss it.

That's half correct (and yes I did leave that bit out as a simplification to the argument), banks do create money, but not in the mechanism called "fractional reserve banking" which is only found in textbooks because it would actually violate accounting rules (it's true that banks only hold a fraction of their assets as central bank reserves but the mechanism referred to as "fractional reserve banking" and related "money multiplier theory" can't work because the bank can't make a loan out of a deposit because it would require two entries on the same side of the balance sheet).

But it is true that when a bank creates a loan (which to them is an asset, but to the borrower is a liability - debt) it creates a matching deposit (a liability to them) which does increase the money supply. The amount of central bank reserves is not hugely relevant to the process, that's more of a liquidity management thing. The main limitation is actually capital adequacy regulations.

But all of that aside, a Government doesn't need banks to create money so they can tax it, it permits banks to do it by granting them a banking license.

FCC allows suppliers to self-declare conformance with EMI/EMC rules. You’re obviously taking a risk selling stuff if you haven’t had it properly tested so don’t really know if it passes but it’s unlikely to really be an issue for a small maker selling low quantities, especially if any intentional radiators (Bluetooth, WiFi etc.) are already-certified modules.

Your device tends to need to be causing problems, that the FCC then go and track down, and then come back to you. That is (hopefully, depending on the kind of device) extremely unlikely.

As for Ali stuff, probably lots of it is not tested but still comes with a FCC label - but if it is shipped from overseas, who is going to take responsibility for it? Nobody… So there is nothing they can do except fine the person who bought it if it’s really causing problems (and usually I doubt they’d even do that if the user wasn’t intentionally doing something they shouldn’t have been, they are just told to stop and maybe the device would be seized/ destroyed)

That’s not true, because it would have to mean that money is created by the private sector (or just magically springs into existence somewhere) and that taxing it is the only way for the Government to get it.

Money is a created thing, a creature of the state. We maintain certain fictions about it (like “tax to spend”, allowing the market to set bond yields most of the time and keeping track of the outstanding bonds as “government debt”) because people are scared that Governments wouldn’t be controlled enough to manage money creation if they overtly used the powers they have to issue currency… But effectively they still kind of do it…

And while it’s not perfect it’s actually far more stable than attempts at fixed exchange rates and pegging currency to commodities like gold (which always fails eventually, because it doesn’t stand to reason that the amount of gold or any other commodity in a country would correspond to how much money the economy needs. You can set the exchange rate but it always drifts, so those periods tended to swing between big deflation and then inflation, with panics, recessions, and financial crises every few years)

I think the problem is that it takes 30 years for the effects to start showing.

This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.

1. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/cancer-data-in-austra...

No, the OP is repeating a common misconception. Corporate law sets out a number of fiduciary duties, including to act in the best interest of the shareholders but “maximising shareholder value” is not one of them.

The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.

I tried Threads a tiny bit but its algorithm seemed obsessed with trying to rage-bait me. Like I get that it is one way to drive engagement but everything was just bad takes about my interests with lots of replies correcting them… It was never an enjoyable platform to use because of that.

I ended up finding a good group of people to follow on Mastodon so didn’t end up even trying Bluesky (although I do follow some accounts from there through the bridge)