Power (GW) is just as important for battery storage as energy (GWh), you need to have sufficient power to cover the 95th percentile worst-case load, and sufficient energy capacity to cover that load for the 95th percentile worst-case duration or something like that. Tesla touts the power capability of the powerwall more than the storage quantity, I suspect it's the larger engineering challenge... after all, to add storage capacity you just add cells, but to add power throughput in that application you need to engineer a better DC/AC converter.

There are also going to be a ton of other trade-offs involving upfront cost, maintenance cost, longevity and degradation, etc. Non-technical people like politicians and 90% of the people they are speaking to don't understand or care about any of that. When it gets to a high political level, these things always going to distill that complexity into a single metric that shows "we're 20% of the way there" which is all the non-technical people really care about anyway... whether it's power, energy, dollars, or something else doesn't matter, it's "how much progress have we made" that's the real takeaway here.

You should take a closer look, Netflix has some decent games. Into the Breach for instance is pretty good if you like turn-based tactics, great game design and retro feel to the graphics.

Not remotely true, unless you pursue something trivial and pointless (which, to be fair, a number of people do).

If you're going to college, you should do something difficult. If your coursework isn't teaching you to do something today that you weren't able to do yesterday, you're in the wrong classes. If you are regularly challenged in that way by your classes, then by definition, you are going to emerge from the experience as a more capable human being. That's one of the best investments you can make in a lifetime. On the other hand, if you choose a major because it's easy and gives you lots of spare time to party, there's a high risk that it won't pay for itself and all you're doing is saddling yourself with an extra mortgage payment for no reason at all.

I know my karma is going to be obliterated but here goes: Agile is a lot like democracy... it's the worst software management technique except all the others that have been tried. And I get that some folks may do Agile without scrum, but the general objections being raised are objections against the thing as a whole, which is why I'm addressing Agile, with scrum being the particular subset of Agile practices that people are taking issue with.

At the end of the day, people need to talk to each other to get things done, including communication between developers and non-developers. Agile facilitates that in probably the most objective and least stupid terms I've seen. Ideally scrum means that you get the right people in the room at the same time to discuss blocking issues and quickly identify anything that is preventing work from happening. It's easy for a developer to spend days working on something that a tech lead or another developer might be able to short-circuit, a daily check-in should mean that, at most, a single day is burned rather than multiple.

The core problem being addressed is rework. In the classic workflow, a user/lead/PHB says "Go build me this". Developer goes and builds it, brings it back, PHB says "that's not what I meant". If you're paying attention, the entire structure of Agile and scrum is to mitigate that problem - communicate better and earlier, and then do smaller chunks of work with more frequent review so that you pivot as early as possible. You try to have a day of rework, or maybe two weeks, rather than years of rework which has happened way too often with large software projects historically.

Show me something that is consistently working better than scrum, and I'll shut up and use your better method. I don't give a shit about scrum or agile for its own sake. I just haven't seen anybody come up with a better way of organizing a big pile of complicated work.

It always cracks me up that conservatives fancy themselves John Wayne rugged individualists, until it becomes a matter of putting up with things like rainy weather or less convenient packaging, whether for the sake of saving money, protecting the environment, or even stopping our dependency on foreign oil from dictators. As soon as someone suggests a *fully voluntary* effort to do something that's healthy, clean, cost-effective, and better for the nation, the party that cultivates a tough guy image starts whining about how unthinkable it is to do things like walk outside or use an umbrella. The Netherlands has famously awful weather, and also the highest biking rate in the world - they could teach us a thing or two about being rugged.

I miss Republicans like Teddy Roosevelt, who was the epitome of an outdoorsman, started the entire idea of environmental conservation, and actually saw inconvenience and discomfort as a valuable thing that would improve our character as individuals and a nation.

Despite your story being strange and only marginally related to the article and discussion, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

It's "no big thing" in the sense that the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs was "no big thing". Is it going to destroy all life on earth? No. Will it impact the existence of the planet as a lump of rock floating through space? No. But are we trending towards the worst extinction event in all of geological history? Yep.

The fossil record shows us multiple catastrophic events that have culminated in the extinction of over 90% of species on Earth. Not the death of 90% of animals, mind you, but the outright extinction of the actual species. Pick 10 animals out of a hat and 9 of them don't exist any more. And, chances are, the ones that survive are going to be the prolific pests and scavengers, things like cockroaches or little scurrying rodents. From the planet's perspective, if that's not a "big thing", I don't think anything else qualifies.

If we look at the current rate of extinctions, and the rate of change in climate, the current period we're living through is on track to cause more extinctions, in less time, than anything before it. Of course, not all of that is climate related... some if it is due to habitat destruction, pollution, and good old hunting things into oblivion, but the general trend is clear - the stuff we're doing is as bad or worse for our ecosystem as an ice age or a massive asteroid impact.

You can't blame BMW for fleecing high-end consumers who are buying a vehicle as a status symbol - it's their whole business model. With the luxury market, the entire point is that you pay a stupid amount of money for trivialities, so you can fit in with your friends that are doing the same thing. Being pointlessly expensive is a *feature* in this market. If you buy a BMW, you know what you're doing, you're paying too much for something to try to impress people, so don't be surprised when they continually invent new ways to gouge you.

To add insult to injury, studies show that having a BMW or other luxury car actually makes people like you *less*, not more, and yet people still fall for the delusion that spending stupid amounts of money on meaningless status symbols will make you happy, popular, or attractive.

In other words, the average American?

It was added in the 1950's as a way to repudiate the godless commies, so it's a quite recent trend.

Almost all of your criticisms go away if you 1. Don't rely on net metering and 2. Have a battery backup. Which is true of all Tesla installs, and the better systems from other installers.

I agree that net metering in most places is poorly thought out and encourages suboptimal system sizing. So, don't take net metering into account for your system... in your economic analysis, plan for it to supply something less than 100% of your load. Net metering isn't required to make a solid ROI unless you have a system way too large for your needs.

The other concern, placing extra demands on the grid, is also overstated thanks to the fact that the main electric load (running A/C) coincides exactly with the periods of highest solar output. If you have a backup battery, even better, as the surplus goes to charge up your battery during the day, and slowly releases it at night.

I suspect you may live in a location that is bad for solar... low A/C costs, lots of cloudy days. If you are in the West/Southwest, the economics are much more attractive. But yeah, there's no question that there are lots of cheap energy improvements that ought to take precedence over solar if you're trying to engineer an optimal solution - once you've insulated, planted trees and swapped out lightbulbs, though, it's a pretty excellent thing to become your own microgrid, power your own vehicle, insure against inflation, protect yourself from grid outages, and get a reasonable return on your investment at the same time.

In the west/southwest of the US, where AC costs are the biggest part of the electric bill, the case for solar is a lot better than places that have less abundant sun and less electricity consumption. In Colorado, which has more days of sun than many states, the economics work out a lot better than they will in PNW or northeastern parts of the country. Cooling costs are likely to increase over the coming years as well, and electricity demand as EVs become dominant.

As far as wind, it's much more situational - the output of the systems is pretty miserable unless you live somewhere really windy and/or can get your turbine 40 feet up in the air.

I won't argue with you that utility scale solar is a better way to go except in the sense that I think decentralization and improved self-sufficiency is a huge benefit to an individual and community, and makes us more resilient to a lot of nasty issues. Even if utility scale solar has better ROI, when rooftop solar has comparable or better ROI than many alternatives, a lot of people should be considering it. It's not like we can't do both, and pursuing both will eventually get us a diversified, distributed power infrastructure that will be a lot more robust and flexible than our current setup.

Inflation doesn't specifically target wealth hoarders. Sure, it hurts them, but minimum wage sure hasn't gone up by 8% in the time that consumer goods have increased by that much.

When you have a fiat currency (as the US does), taxation on a federal level literally *is* money destruction. The government prints currency, and can issue as much or as little as it wants. To keep inflation from spiraling out of control from just printing that currency, you have to remove some from circulation. Taxes are how you do that.