sxates

I'm not arguing against Nuclear, just pointing out that it's one of several low-pollution options.

Have any of these studies found places where insect populations have not declined at all?

Or Solar or Wind or Hydro. In places like California and parts of Europe renewable sources are 1/3 or more of the electricity mix.

How are you opting out of the air raid sirens?

It depends. If you live in the Sunset neighborhood that's not true - in SOMA, yes.

Has a power company ever voluntarily lowered rates?

Something I've realized recently is how over lit our homes can be. Like most homes, mine have always had a bunch of lights I didn't really choose with simple on/off switches. But I'm remodeling my house now and have been testing different led lights and smart lighting systems, and in the process have discovered how much better the lights are when they're dimmed!

Setting aside the blue light issue for a moment, I wonder how much a simple reduction in lumens would be helpful. Just putting our lights on a smart dimmer solution (noon home for the curious) has made a big difference. I rarely turn the dimmers above 50% and it's plenty of light with a lot less glare and using even less electricity than having leds on standard switches.

With the remodeled part of the house the lights will all be LED, but 2700k and every one of them will be on a dimmer switch.

The difficulty is not just in coding the UI, but crafting one that's easily and intuitively understood by users. We haven't yet established a universal design pattern for GUI's yet, to the parents point, just a bunch of conventions that are often tossed in favor of something new.

A 'solved' UI example would be of a car (not the radio, but the operation of the vehicle). Learn to drive one car, and you can pretty much drive any car - same pedals, steering wheel, gear shift, turn signals, etc. I don't know if we'll ever get to something like that for software though.

Problem is it doesn't scale well for people. Imagine if everything you did in slack was via CLI - there are dozens, hundreds of commands to learn? Imagine if every app had dozens of commands you had to learn and memorize. Sure you could do it and be blazing fast, but that's a really steep learning curve a lot of users wouldn't adopt.

SolarCity installed the PV system, so I figured it'd be easier for them to continue with the upgrade. But it sounds like things are kind of a mess over in Tesla/SC land these days, so who knows...

Well, I'm not sure what happens to it if your house catches fire - but if your house burns down I don't see how the battery could have made it worse.

So I imagine scenario 1 is your house doesn't catch fire, in which case it's fine, and you have power even if the grid is down, or scenario 2 where your house does catch fire, and maybe the battery contributes to that, but it would burn down either way.

But keep in mind that the 'red flag days' I'm describing where PG&E would cut power are not days where fires are actually burning in the area - just days where fires are more likely to start. They're shutting down their power lines so that if the wind knocks one down it won't start a fire. This is a response to last years devastating fires in Sonoma county, which were believed to have started by downed power lines in high wind and dry conditions.

This is something I've been thinking about recently due to a potential new policy from PG&E (Northern California electric utility) in which they would preemptively shut down electricity to high fire risk areas when red flag conditions are present. I live in the Oakland hills which would be affected by that plan. PG&E says they expect such an outage would occur 2-3 times per year in October/November, and that because they have to do a lot of safety checks before restoring power, that we should expect those outages to last 3-5 days.

So 3-5 day outages 2-3 times a year sounds like a right pain the ass, and certainly has me looking at adding a powerwall to our PV system. I had wanted one anyway for backup in the event of an earthquake or other event that might disrupt power for an extended time, but now we're almost guaranteed those outage events, rather than it being a hypothetical.

Oh wow. At first with the way he was thrashing around I thought he was some kind of idiot. But the fact that he didn't die makes me think maybe he's actually some kind of driving god.

Good for self-driving cars as well I assume.

I'm assuming that the figures parent laid out as an example don't include the cost of the timeshare itself. So you're mortgaging the cost of the time share at a high interest rate, then it's $1200/yr./week on top of that for "maintenance".

If something changed, it's nice for everyone else to be made aware as well. I had noticed the same thing.

I have AT&T fiber and am forced to use their modem.

Perhaps being young and single and not having any large financial obligations like a mortgage contributed to my willingness to walk away. If my family depended on the paycheck I brought home with my misery, maybe I'd summon the strength to stick it out.

I got a summer job in college as a web designer for a startup in Texas. It paid $40/hr, which was a ludicrous amount of money for a 20 year old in 2001, or at least it felt like it after having made $5.50 in high school.

So I spent about a month working on the website, and doing buttons and other stuff, and then I was out of things to do. I literally might have a 10 minute task in a day, and no other assignments. I could (and did) watch full-length movies in my cubicle uninterrupted.

Awesome right? It was the most miserable job I've ever had. I'd leave early and forgo billable hours because I just couldn't stand it. Being without purpose, but still showing up and pretending you should be there is really demoralizing.

This only seems to happen for accidents that turn into national news, speculating that Tesla was at fault (or with drivers actively accusing them of fault). Their response is (understandably I think) to defend themselves when they can show they weren't at fault. I'd assume that if you have an accident and don't make it a media story, they don't publish your driving errors.

You're under-stating the return. Unlike other investments you can leverage the house with a mortgage. Assuming you put only 20% down you're making 50%/year gains.

I'm unclear how the modified mosquitoes replicate and spread if the genetic alteration sterilizes them. Do you just have to continue releasing the GMO versions, or is it not entirely effective, or what am I missing?

At least it was an honorable death.

Berkeley can tax Soda but Oakland can't tax Coal?

What's the carbon footprint of a thousand rocket launches?

When walking a few blocks to find a scooter doubles the travel time of just having it at the start, it reduces the utility of the scooter.

I rode a Bird scooter for the first time last week in SF from the Ferry Building to my office on Montgomery. Setup in the app was easy, and I got the hang of the scooter in just a couple blocks. It made me want to go buy one for myself - I think the model Bird uses costs about $500.

My biggest gripe with using the Bird scooters is that there aren't enough of them. I had to walk a couple blocks to get the one I rode, and at 5pm going back the other way there were none available near me - or the ones near me would be taken by the time I got to them. Just owning one solves that gripe, and $500 seems like a bargain when compared to the time spent walking, or the cost of parking, or the cost of taking Ubers around.

So I for one welcome the electric scooter trend.

The panels on my house are warrantied for 25 years, and expected to last years beyond that. There are no moving parts, not much to degrade, so the useful life is quite long. Though I expect in 30 years the newer panels will be more efficient and super cheap.

Right - Solar really just front-loads the energy costs of the building. You pay for ~5-10 years of energy up front, and then recoup that investment over the next 30+ years, coming out ahead in the end. You could argue that this sort of policy is a win-win in that it both reduces the longer term cost of housing (both for the first and subsequent owners) and also reduces the amount of net energy required (saves on new power plants, carbon).

Human-readable modem handshake.