youzicha

i dont think women should take their husbands name but i DO think married people should be legally required to have the same last name. otherwise people may have secret alliances theyre concealing from you.

Conversely, in my college dorm there was a couple who coincidentally had the same surname, which seems highly deceptive. Although I think they did later legitimize it by getting married.

i feel like "but how do you quantify it" is like baby's first objection to utiltarianism and like, its common because it makes sense, but i dont think the quantification problem is as serious as it seems? like. its important if you think of it as formal theory but the property of numbers were using is not really being able to add and subtract them, were just working on orderings, if you think of ethics in terms of like, "decision theory", which act should you do. and like okay you can concoct situations that force you to construct ratios (is it better to kill x dogs or y cats?) but like. here in reality it works fine, to just talk about which action has superior consequences, and use math as a rough guide which you are loudly uncertain about.

anyway the REAL potentially fatal problem for consequentialism/utilitarianism is the question of supererogation (did you know there are TWO ers in a row in that word. fucked). at all times the BEST action ethically speaking is like. saint behavior. and were not gonna do that. so its not clear how we manage that

I feel I don't really care about doing good in an absolute sense anyway, I just don't want to be unusually bad. So I think one can rank everyone by how good they are, and then as long as you are in the interquartile range you're probably doing ok.

The saga of the Coyote vs. Acme movie and what it says about today’s overly complex media landscape. “Millions of dollars and thousands of hours went into creating something that could simply vanish into accounting.”

I still don't really understand what's going on here. Why is it more profitable to not release a movie than to release it?

The longest, cheapest, non-intersecting train trip “detour” you can take in Tokyo is by going from Mabashi to Kita-Kogane Station, traveling 1035.4 km for 150 yenalong the red path.

Lol LMAO, Europe is dead

is it possible to learn this power?

sometimes it's higher in france too. This was during a heat wave, in 2022:

it's just bizarre that germany and france, even though they do trade energy, don't seem to trade nearly enough to equalize the prices

these single day prices are super volatile, it's harder than i thought to find a time series by country, or even an average over a whole year...

ok this page has time serieses by country

damn ok Germans are paying more on average, but it's not the enormous difference in OP. Grey is EU average, blue is country. These numbers are not up to date, so idk how that spike develops

I remember the high electricity prices was an issue in the 2022 Swedish election, with the Left Party promising to cut electricity exports to make the domestic price go down. I guess it's a harder sell to equalize prices across nations than within them...

This article is actually about a very serious problem. If you overgenerate electricity it increases the phase frequency of the power grid, and if that goes out of sync with your generators (including solar panels) it can destroy them. In the kind of way where your power grid is fucked for months. It is very very very very bad.

California started a program to make solar panels more affordable by offering very low interest rates for solar panels, to allow people to benefit from their lifetime $/energy cost that's below fossil fuels, without having to worry about the high frontloaded cost. However they did not do this for batteries. And power grid quality batteries with massive energy storage and serious charge-discharge lifetimes, are expensive.

And they did this because while solar panels are cheaper than fossil fuels per kilowatt hour of electricity over their lifetime, solar panels plus batteries are not. And California wanted a supplemented free market solution and didn't really want to think about the part that direct government intervention in the form of taxation and paying for this change would be necessary.

So everyone in California just kept adding solar panels to the grid with no disconnect mechanisms, until eventually it hit a point where at noon, solar panels generated more power than the entire grid needed. With no batteries to store the excess. This is a motherfucking power grid killer. It is a scenario where people get left in the fucking dark for months because of how badly it destroys the powergrid.

So the power grid authorities did the only thing they could do. They called up every industrial plant with heavy duty equipment and ovens they could and paid them to turn it on full blast (because using that equipment costs money in wear and tear even without the electricity cost). And in doing so, avoided disaster.

That's what this article is talking about. They are solar panel researchers criticizing a capitalist adoption strategy and promoting direct government intervention to create renewable energy. However as with most newspapers they don't get to choose the title, the editor picks the most provocative title that will get clicks.

I think you're actually wrong and that this article is aboot how the incentive to build more solar panels disappears when the price of electricity drops.

idk if this is the right article but I haven't found anywhere claiming that California's entire power grid was overloaded by solely solar panels.

Right, @crazy-pages is referring to an issue not covered by the originally referenced article.

One that DOES reference this issue (but not such a temporary solution) is

https://www.yahoo.com/news/california-rules-allow-solar-batteries-073000852.html

Grid operators are used to having significant control over generation, with large power plants, and the current average small solar setup has none of this control.

It's not that the generation of electricity is bad, it's the fact that everyone occasionally tends to overproduce at once. Because they skipped the cost of having a proper buffer, because they were only thinking about their own install.

Ah woops. I think I was referring to a Princeton article with a very similar headline people get similarly upset about.

But yeah the general gist of all of this is: open market solutions to renewables aren't working and we need actual government led efforts for responsible installation.

Ok, but article that sudrien linked also doesn't contain @crazy-pages's story about calling up heavy-duty industry. It says that the installation of rooftop solar has been slow because power utilities wanted to make sure that the grid would not be destabilized. I searched a bit now, but didn't find anything about a near overload.

I think it would be surprising if there were, because California doesn't have that much solar.

According to the page linked above, the total installed capacity of natural gas (39 GW) + hydro (12 GW) is still quite a bit bigger than solar (17 GW, of which less than half is roof-top). Rather than calling up factories to consume more electricity, the grid operator can call natural gas or big solar power plants and ask them to turn off generation.

I think maybe a cause for confusion is article headlines like California’s electrical grid can’t handle all the solar energy the state is producing or Why are Californian solar firms paying to give away power. The first one claims that "to avoid overloading its electrical grid, California has actually paid neighboring states like Arizona to take surplus renewable energy". But the second article notes that it's "because of how their tax benefits are structured". I think what happened was the solar farms were paid a subsidy from the government for electricity produced, so it was better for them to keep producing and send the excess to Arizona at a negative price. But such a situation doesn't indicate a near-overload.

I think I found Yorick’s car.

Welcome back @yorickish

speed of grid battery construction is insane. I didn't expect this

the electronics industry is taking over normal industry. When I was a kid there were solar panels on hand calculators, we had the cylyndrical lithium ion batteries that we take out and put in a charging block. All handheld stuff. Now we're running big chunks of the electric grid on these technologies. Can't believe how fast they're adding it

i remember wehen i pointed out that grid battery storage to store solar overnight was feasible, @official-kircheis replied that the problem is storing energy for the winter. I don't think it matters. Just overbuild solar. You don't need summer solar in the winter.

Of course kirch is from europe, idk how it'll work out there because solar's main disadvantage is how much space it uses, but this is america, who cares

europe gets much less sun than the us, both from being further north and cloudier weather

I'm not sure if the difference is that big though? These maps makes it look like less than a factor of 2, while solar cell price has been halving every 5 years and is getting really cheap now. The limiting factor should rather be the cost of battery storage, which is the same in every continent.