Don't put words in my mouth. I never said batteries were cheap. I said wind is cheap. It's very very cheap. Both land-based and off-shore, but the $/MWh for land-based wind has fallen below natural gas and solar concentrator. Solar photovoltaic is roughly the same or a little cheaper than wind now, but the two can complement one another in regions that have reliable winds that come in just as solar is ramping down for the evening.

As to your battery question. Feel free to look it up if you want to know the economics of batteries, specifically when used for large-scale energy storage. There's not a lot of large scale sites up and running (there are a few notable ones). In the last two years come to a point where the prices for batteries have dropped enough that building more of them becomes attractive.

For us home users. The whole house batteries prices have dropped noticeably over the last few years. But having no battery and being grid-tied is cheapest, and I'd recommend that unless you have other reasons for a whole house battery than trying to time shift your solar or wind generator.

P.S. I was pretty deep into installing wind at home, but I backed out. so I'm solar only. Even though I have the paperwork approved for my site.

Agreed. I think the whole argument is difficult to swallow. Here's a "solution" I pulled out with 5 minutes of thought: Use an AM/FM 1-chip radio or SDF radio placed in a module within the antenna pod near the outside of the vehcile. And route the digital outputs back to your entertainment center, and tuning controls over a bus, CANbus for example. Now instead running a beefy coax cable for your antenna around motors and controllers, you can route some cheap little ribbon of noise immune anywhere you want.

I mean, seriously. These auto companies hire thousands of engineers way smarter than me to work on this full-time. I need some solid proof that they can't make AM radios work before I'd accept their excuses.

  If a stereo store's techs could put a CD changer in my trunk in the 1990's, I think actual engineers could solve a slightly more difficult problem when designing a vehicle from the ground up.

I guess we'll all have to find some other way to pretend that we regularly go to Yoga workshops. It's a bit shocking to think of how people did yoga 50 or 100 years ago without foam mats and stretchy pants.

Dealerships give you a free 3 months when you buy a car. And if you sign up, they get some money. It's zero effort for them on the sales side, and the salesperson doesn't get a commission, it just goes to the dealership.

It's like an antenna and a digital tuner chip (whatever automotive equivalent to the Si4844 is) to receive AM radio these days. I suspect a replacement air filter on a car is more expensive than the components for AM reception. It can't be about the component cost.

They want to sell a certain segment of the population a Sirius subscription. In many parts of the US, the FM band is popular music and Spanish-language programming. If someone wants to listen to right-wing talk radio they need AM or a satellite.

I'm discussing wind too.

Feel free to look up your own numbers. People have been making money on this shit literally for decades. I don't know what more you want out of this discussion but I'm out.

If energy cost is negative during peak solar, a battery is a means to harvest free money. The cost of your battery system represents how much capital you want to invest into harvesting free money. The economics are not difficult to understand.

But when you're grid tied, you don't really need batteries to make a profit on wind power. We know this because we have examples. Businesses have been doing wind turbine installations successfully, and at scale, since the 1990's.

That said. As an owner of my own registered residential generation system, the amount of money you save is waaay overstated. You basically need to be buying and selling wholesale power and operating large installations to make money in this.

By any measure, wind energy is super cheap. Even if we have bad years for wind power, there is financial incentive to produce power with wind turbines. Can wind alone supply an industrialized nation with power? Not today, and perhaps not ever. But as long as energy production is a for-profit venture it is tough to stop wind turbines from going up. Sorry that they are ugly to look at.

The small engineering team I used to be on would sometimes get $30k bills one month but sub-$1k another. Managers were obviously upset with us, but it's not like we were doing it on purpose. We were just reproing bugs and developing tests to fix issues, mostly customer reported ones that needed some peculiar AWS setup. In the end we make the money back when we continue our relationship with customers, but managers didn't like my excuse of "cost of doing business".

I feel like working out Amazon's billing magic for a complex set of services on S3, EC2, etc is really a full-time job that needs a fair amount of expertise. It's frustrating because there are calculators and tools to tell you exactly how much you will be billed. And we still were sometimes off by a factor of 10.

Lear Siegler was like 1/10th the price and didn't chew through reams of paper every day. Also it wasn't 85 decibels or whatever an ASR33 was when it was going at full tilt.

The real dream terminal for me was a Tektronix 4010. Kind of horrible for watching systemd's boot spam scroll by, but pretty awesome for so many other things.

Ooof. This kind of stuff becomes a bear to audit.

But I never asked for this. I already have sudo and sudoers. I even have it configured correctly on a cluster with LDAP so that machines imaged for engineers to use for testing grant only the person who reserved the machine root access. I'd be dollars to donuts that systemd is not going to handle all the use cases we need on day one.

I'd like to see more effort put into configuration of cgroups configs. And the much harder problem of TAP/TUN/VDE-2 network configuration so it's not a nightmare of filenames with @ in them that don't quite initialize or handle dependencies correctly.

In many ways this stuff is easier if the initd and rc system stands back and does less. A lot of the complicated scenarios can be a shell script instead of baked into the service management layer. But systemd doesn't really let you get away with that if you have two services that need the same service or resource configuration (like a virtual network interface)

I have no idea why I thought it was.

In my defense it was 6am and I was in bed deciding if I should go to work early or go back to sleep. I should have went back to sleep.

Humanity never fails to disappoint, but at least I'm entertained.

The wiki's motto should be: "I reject your reality and substitute my own"
But that's religion in general.

I'd love to see it for the lulz. The Earth being only 6000 years old, Jesus was white, etc.