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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I always thought this was an argument for properly racking everything. If it takes more effort, more time to remove, maybe they won’t bother.

    My understanding is that for most individuals, theft is mainly

    1. Targets of opportunity. Lock your door and make sure nothing expensive is visible
    2. Smash and Grab. The goal is to act fast and not care about what you break, so anything harder to smash (without tools) or that causes delay is good.

    I do have outside cameras but they’re not as useful as you’d think. Maybe they have some deterrent value but they’re not going to alert anyone fast enough unless they’re already in the house and you’re not going to identify anyone even if you catch a good shot of their face. If the do catch someone, perhaps the video is enough to say, yep



  • Plus a little pollution.

    • Supposedly they were really affected by how bad the air was getting but their most available fossil fuel is coal
    • China needs huge growth in electricity, both to run manufacturing and to continue bringing a billion people up to developed world standards of living. But they don’t have much oil resources and don’t want to depend on outsiders
    • renewables and EVs are the future and they have a path to dominate those industries. Might as well go all in on new tech rather than try to compete with old tech incumbents




  • The sole remaining factor is heating in winter. Which can not be solved by better battery storage

    My parents house used to have thermal storage heating which seemed to work well. Each room had what looked like a standard sized radiator that stored heat, much more cheaply than a battery: nothing toxic, nothing expendable, nothing expensive. Overnight when rates were low, the unit heated up. During the day when rates were high, we just needed a small circulation fan to keep room temperature consistent with almost no power use.

    I just had to get a new heat pump installed and looked for similar functionality but it doesn’t seem to exist.

    Thermal storage heat would make a huge difference in shifting power usage from heating to account for factors like solar energy, and it would be much cheaper than batteries.


  • A prerequisite has to be smart appliances, and not in the current sense of a great way to milk more money from a customer through advertising and lock-in.

    My thermostat, dishwasher, washer, dryer, car charger have timers so I can schedule them overnight (typical for cheaper electricity in the past, before solar). But other appliances don’t, and none can respond to less predictable changes in rates.

    Do standard solar installs have the smarts to trigger appliances based on what they’re generating? Most of them are “smart” but they’ll only talk about monitoring and bill paying. I’ve been trying to find that out all summer but solar providers don’t know or are otherwise unable to answer.

    I’m all for dynamic pricing of electricity but we don’t have the appliance intelligence to support it. That can take decades to roll out so we need to nail this down NOW



  • Getting to 95% non-nuclear renewable is relatively easy. It’s much harder to get that last 5%, but as you say, we don’t actually have to go to zero carbon emissions.

    Yeah, I don’t see why this isn’t a good end goal. 95% non-nuclear renewable, including storage. Supposedly we can do this cheaper than the current grid and with today’s technology.

    Would it really be so bad to have natural gas peaker plants for the rest? The problem is it’s not a consistent 5% but that 5% of the year and you can’t really keep up, assuming affordable renewables and storage buildout. Natural gas is good at powering up on demand, instead of wanting to be on continually.

    So we’re still emitting carbon, but much much less than today. Maybe we can add it to the pile of things that will be tough to convert, like shipping, aviation, metal refining, plastics