> I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance.

And I'm saying you cannot effectively do load shifting without storage. Renewables tend to peak mid-day, especially solar, and the ability to soak up that surplus energy is dependent on actually having loads that can be dispatched at that time. We're talking about domestic energy use which is not very flexible; Okay great you can do your laundry with cheap solar electricity at 10AM but that's not helpful if you're not home at 10AM. There's very little a typical homeowner can do here unless they've invested in additional equipment. Storage batteries and water heaters are the most obvious choices and are easily scheduled to take advantage of electricity rates. Taking a half day off work to do all your household chores is a bit less practical.

> If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm.

That's exactly not how coal power works, and that's actually the core problem. You can't turn a coal plant on and off on a whim; it can take north of a full day to get one of those things started. This means you can't afford to turn off a coal plant from 10AM to 3PM when renewables are peaking because you won't be able to turn it back on in time for the 4PM peak demand. The coal plant stays on, and now you have to soak up the surplus energy to avoid blowing up the grid. In case you missed it, this is *exactly* the reasoning discussed in the article.

This is not about saving you, the consumer, money. If electricity is expensive to buy then that cost gets passed on to you. The only economic factor at play is the cost of curtailing renewables - curtailment also costs money and those costs CANNOT be passed on to the consumer. Utilities want to avoid curtailment and would rather give electricity away for free than absorb those costs. This point is, again, in the article.
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Not exactly. Electricity must be consumed at the same time it's generated, and the stability of the grid hinges on supply and demand being balanced. Load shifting requires storage, which there isn't enough of, so using electricity now usually does not help much to avoid using electricity later unless you have some form of storage (e.g batteries, thermal storage tanks)

That's happening is you have inflexible electricity sources - your so-called "base load generators" - that cannot be throttled down, and renewable power that is very "use it or lose it" since they cannot be dispatched on demand, resulting in a surplus of generation. Wholesale electricity prices go down because supply exceeds demand, and continues into negative wholesale prices because you cannot tolerate a surplus of generation without destabilizing the grid.

So yes it's about "using power when it's there" but it has nothing to do with "not using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on." It has to do with the fact that you can't turn some plants off and they need to encourage extra usage during times of glut to avoid crashing the whole system. Operators have no problem with people using "expensive" electricity 'cause they're gonna pass those costs on to you anyway.
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This just showed up so I thought I'd follow up on your stupidity.

https://www.wired.com/story/op...

lul.
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> It's a part of their forced app suite preinstalled on their phone that you can never fully switch off.

I've had good results with Universal Android Debloater so far. It's a bit extreme but... again, results.

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> They assume that AI is some kind of sentient technology with personal and unpredictable goals that are inevitably in opposition to humanity's goals.

It isn't, of course. But when humans manipulate it, blindly trust or obey it, and absolve themselves of responsibility for the outcomes because "the AI did it" ... then for all intent and purpose, it may as well be.

"Its" goals are unpredictable because it's functionally random. They are in direct opposition to humanity's goals because it is the tool of a small class of the wealthy and powerful and the goals of that class are in direct opposition to humanity's goals.
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> No it's not. Multifunction devices existed long before enshitification. The two concepts are not remotely related.

Enshitification predates the internet. It is a concept as old as human invention itself. We just don't see it int he historical record, for the most part, because shitty devices generally don't become popular enough for examples to survive the scrap heap. However, if you dig into some antique catalogs (catalogs that are antiques, not modern catalogs listing antique items...) you'll see lots of dubious devices being advertised.

  > Your phone's main purpose is to make phone calls.

A phone's main purpose is to make phone calls. This is a categorical error on your part; a modern smartphone is, despite the unfortunate etymology, not a phone. It is a portable internet terminal more than anything that just happens, perhaps merely by virtue of its history and nothing more, to be able to make live voice chats.

> given this is an optional extra that costs money it is clear that someone deemed it a benefit

Yes. that someone being the manufacturer, who can add $20 worth of parts and sell it to dipshits like you for an extra $500 because apparently you're a toddler easily distracted by bright colors and movements. You're like the living embodiment of that Simpsons gag Nuts and Gum. And of course, apropos to this story, the manufacturers see extra benefit in that they get another way to harvest your behavioral data and shove advertisements in your face. You're being sold a solution to a problem you don't have in exchange for your privacy and attention. You are paying extra to become the product. You are both a figurative and literal tool.

> Man if only there was an internet connected screen in the kitchen from which to pull up my recipe...

It's amazing to me that you can have the solution literally in your hand and still sarcastically complain that there is no solution to the non-problem you have already solved. Just... fucking amazing. Is carrying a tablet from one room to another such a heavy burden that it justifies building another, shittier tablet into a random appliance? Even if you absolutely needed a tablet in every room of the house, could you entertain the idea of just.. buying them separately?

A true luddite would argue if you even need an internet connected device when printed books dedicated to recipes are a thing, and they'd at least have a solid point to make in that at books don't need batteries and continue to work even when the internet doesn't... and they don't actively spy on you either.

> False equivalence. A leatherman directly trades off primary function against additional functionality.

And a tablet built into a fridge door trades primary function (portability) for... actually not even additional functionality because a tablet in a fridge door does literally nothing to make the fridge better at its job, and attaching a fridge to a tablet does not make the tablet better at its job either.
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> The premise of a device having "one job" again is the position of a luddite.

No, it's the position of being anti-enshitification.

A refrigerator's main function is to keep food cold. That's the reason you buy a refrigerator. If putting a screen on a TV actually had a demonstrable benefit to that purpose then fine; but it doesn't. It actually has no objective benefit whatsoever, and the increased complexity not only increases cost but also reduces reliability. That's literally the definition of enshitification.

If having a computer screen in your kitchen, mounted to your fridge, is that useful... get a tablet and mount it to the fridge. Not only would that be cheaper, but if the tablet fails it doesn't make the refrigerator scrap metal and vice-versa and you can upgrade one without throwing out the other. Bonus is you can take the table off the fridge and put it where you need it.

I have a leatherman multitool that I keep on me whenever I'm out of the house. It does a lot of things, but it does none of those things as good as a dedicated single-purpose tool of the same kind. It's a good knife but it will never be as good as an actual knife. It's a good pair of pliers but it will never be as good as a proper pair of pliers. It's a decent screwdriver but I will always reach for a normal proper screwdriver if there's one available. Does it make me a luddite to not want a single item that does all things kinda shitty instead of many items that each do their one thing well?

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> Wouldn't I be better off having the package delivered to an Amazon Lockbox right next to or even inside of the post office, and then not pay any fuel surcharge?

You realize this is already a thing the post office does, right?

You can also have items shipped to, say, a UPS store or have it held at a FedEx shipping hub for pickup.

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> It may be a shitty project, but the people all had at least an indirect say in it.

No we didn't. Nobody votes for what NASA does, not even indirectly through their choice of congress critters. More often than not even Congress barely gives more than a passing thought to NASA's budget, and even then all that matters is how much of that budget will be spent in their jurisdiction and not what it will be spent on.

I do not approve of congressional (or presidential) meddling in NASA's projects, but not because of what the projects necessarily ARE - I care because you cannot hope to make progress on a project that'll take 10+ years when the project changes every 2-4 years.
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It's funny because if you go back in time about 40 years you could replace "Chinese" with "Japanese" and get the exact same sentiment. And we all know Japanese auto makers definitely didn't learn any lessons and definitely didn't eat US automaker's lunches, right?

> There are plenty of good used cars if price is the issue.

Fun fact: There can't be any used cars if nobody buys new cars.
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> It's money-neutral for everyone involved

Not only will the LNG plant absolutely cost more than $1B by the time it's all said and done.

Not only is LNG something that needs to be paid for in perpetuity, unlike wind, which means an ongoing expense that will be paid by utility customers.

Not only is the price of that LNG linked to global markets which are, for lots of reasons, more expensive and volatile now and will be for the foreseeable future.

But the LNG plant will be built in Texas, and does not generate electricity at all. Do you know what an LNG plant actually does? Generates Liquefied Natural Gas. Do you know why you'd do that? To put it on a boat and export it... not to burn it for electricity. Not that generating electricity in Texas - which has an isolated grid from the rest of the US - would be of any use to the people in the Northeast US and Canada who would have definitely benefited from cheaper electricity.

So not only are you wrong about it being cost neutral in both the short and near term, but it could ever be neutral 'for all involved' either. The people of the Northeastern US are fucked out of cheaper electricity, and the people of Texas don't get anything out of the deal.
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Yes, I'm aware there are forums full of people with no personal experience with X complaining to the people doing X every day that X simply can't be done. A forum full of truckers saying EV trucks can't meet their needs doesn't mean EV trucks can't meet their needs. It only means they have opinions about it strong enough they feel it necessary to post online about it.

Meanwhile, all-electric trucks doing 800km (500mi) trips across Europe has been a thing long enough that it's becoming mundane, and they only have rated ranges of ~300-400km (190-250mi) loaded. Again, I'm not going to say a 500-mile range is never needed, but I'm absolutely saying the necessity of that range is way overstated. The tech is very clearly good enough for the vast majority of real world use cases and has been for some time, evidenced by the fact that it's successfully used in real world use cases and has been for some time. Those guys can post on their forums about how it can't be done until their fingers fall off, but it won't make their opinions into truths.
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> Allow me to rephrase with exactly the same meaning, "The problem is customers could receive a $2 discount for coming in on the low-demand day." Are you sure that is... bad?

I'm gonna guess that you're one of those idiots who think Amazon sales are a great deal, rather than the 'sale' price being the normal price and the non-sale price being inflated by 20% (because fuck you what are you gonna do about it, leave the house?)

The flip side you're not seeing is if they peg you as someone who ALWAYS buys Maxwell House coffee even when other brands are cheaper or on sale, they will charge YOU SPECIFICALLY more for that product because they know you're likely to pay it. Amazon already does that shit (try looking at the exact same item in a different browser or device while not logged in...) and with the use of digital price stickers on shelves it's likely gonna start happening everywhere.

And in case you're wondering how; the security cameras are already face-IDing and tracking you from the moment you walk through the store. All they'd have to do is set that coffee's price to $20 and give you a 'discount' as you approach, which of course won't be as much a 'discount' as someone they aren't sure has a strong preference for that brand.
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> However law makers should probably get in front of any dynamic pricing issues

New York just straight up banned it.

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I can only assume you mean fast chargers for trucks since essentially all DCFC stations currently installed for passenger EVs and light trucks/vans do not include any form of intermediate storage...

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