I wouldn't call the breakthrough "recent", but batteries now make sense for at least part of the solution. If they manage to cut the cost in half again, it might start pushing things like pumped hydro into being uneconomic.

The real trick, I think, would be to have much more battery than necessary to soak up the negative power cost situations. That way, you use it for load balancing all the time - but you only charge up close to 100% when power starts getting close to negative, justifying the extra wear. Assuming they use a battery chemistry subject to wear - there are cheap batteries out there that are extremely durable that don't have significant wear from full charging, they're just too big and heavy for EVs.

I'd imagine that, at most, you'd idle the plant only when electricity is at the peak.

There's two major forms of desalination - distilling and reverse osmosis. Distilling I think has the lower equipment cost, but higher operating cost. RO is more expensive equipment wise, but cheaper energy wise - but you want electricity to run the pumps. Distillation can be run mostly on any heat, so straight resistive electricity is normally too expensive/wasteful for it.

The problem I see is that idling the RO system is an expensive waste of RO time. With Distillation, the efficient systems do all sorts of tricks to scavange as much heat as they can - such as cooling the outgoing water with the incoming water. Not necessarily kind to power interruptions.

However, depending on how severe the spikes are, it can still be worth it. Maybe you do a RO setup where it does less power intensive maintenance tasks when power is expensive. Or you might just turn the power of the motors down - you produce less water that way, but from what I remember, the loss is not linear. IE 50% power might produce 60% as much water.
With distillation, maybe you install alternate thermal sources, or maybe a thermal storage bank so that when electricity is expensive, you just don't use it - you can run the pumps and heaters and such later.

Permitting: Sounds like a California problem to me. Self imposed. Such a feature, if implemented by the car manufacturer, should be relatively cheap to permit.
Additional appliances and wiring needed: The requirement of additional appliances and wiring should actually be minimal. If you have a dedicated car charger, that should be all the equipment needed to to V2G. It should be mostly software changes. Maybe an inverter in the charger. That said, EVs generally contain a relatively massive 3 phase inverter designed to run the induction motor for the wheels. It's flexible enough that 50/60 hz@240V should be no problem for it.

And you go by laws of average for having vehicles plugged in. If there's money to be had, more people will try to plug in around those times, of course.

Hmm... Peak power is generally right after people get home from work and get to work on dinner and such.

Let's say that we're in a reasonable future world with the following characteristics:
1. Batteries, including BEV batteries, are considerably cheaper.
1a. However, powerwalls are still not entirely common.
2. Vast majority of cars on road are BEV.
3. So much solar has been installed that daytime power is cheaper than night time.
4. Infrastructure has caught up with the changes.
4a. The vast majority of people who drive to work can charge at work, during the day time.
4b. V2G is "standard".

So a standard user situation could be such:
They get up in the morning, do morning stuff, and drive to work in their EV. They then plug in at work, where they have roughly 6-8 hours to charge.
They drive home with a more or less full battery (we might knock off a few percent to preserve the battery more).
They plug in when they get home, because in ~20 minutes, electricity is about to get expensive as everybody else gets home and turns on everything - TV, computer, HVAC, stove, oven, microwave, etc...
Their vehicle automatically does V2G so the house doesn't have to pay those expensive rates. This works because BEV batteries have advanced to the point that they're cheap and durable enough that battery wear is not a significant expense.
Once that power spike is over, the car monitors electricity rates, and charges enough to meet the needs of the next day, with appropriate safety margin, if necessary.
The owner drives to work, the EV might be at half charge or so. Doesn't matter much, they'll top off at work during their shift, when power is cheap because the parking lot is covered in solar panels or such.

I was extremely disappointed by Three Body problem. I thought some of the concepts were pretty cool (I actually thought the part where the Trisolarians build the Sophons was great) and the the story through the lens of the Cultural Revolution was an interesting viewpoint. But damn, the writing sucked. Like you, I plodded on hoping it would get better and like you, I wondered if it was just the translation, or because I didn't have the right cultural background to get the cues, but ultimately... it's some good ideas that are just awfully executed.

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But they can't subvert/create a cloud of several hundred accounts easily.

And you also put some kind of metrics in place for upvotes that compares their voting habits to known human users. If the thing is upvoting 30 times a day and most humans only upvote 12 times a day (or none), then flag the account for closer observation.

And most of all, you need a really good moderation advisor for this kind of thing. I recommend Lance Modoman. He's the real deal. He saved my forum.

heheheheh.

Yes the FTC passed the rule. Chamber of commerce has already said they're going to sue to get it tossed. It technically abrogates existing contracts and the 'law' was made by unelected officials. I foresee that this will be tossed. It's too bad, because I agree that non-competes are a real reason why we don't have as much innovation and they are indeed one of the major barriers to new startups. However, I just don't think it's gonna make it.

I'm running it locally on 2 different platforms, without an internet connection. It doesn't contain any code. it's just the model weights so there is literally no way it can be calling home (feeling the overwhelming urge to insert 'you idiot' here but I'm resisting.) Care to restate your alarmist rhetoric?

If you "sneak" amendments into an agreement, arguably said agreement would be invalid because you were duplicitous which prevented a meeting of the minds.

Quite often looks just like it though. Like, just like it. "From the river to the sea", "by all means necessary", etc. That's like the Hamas theme music. And if you're humming Hamas happy tunes, you're supporting Hamas and their methods. Further, support for Hamas remains widespread in all available polling in Gaza. So a lot of them are on board with the genocidal terrorists running their government and all their actions as well. Supporting them is also supporting Hamas.

False equivalence in the extreme. Israel attacks valid military targets, even when fighting terrorists who don't follow Geneva or any other convention on war. Israel goes above and beyond by broadcasting where and when they're going to strike so civilians can leave. Except Hamas often doesn't let them leave because as Hamas themselves have stated in television interviews: dead Palestinian women and children help their cause and they aim to maximize the dead civilians on their side. Meanwhile, you've got Hamas specifically targeting women and children for rape and murder and live-streaming the whole thing to the world.

So no, they aren't the same. And it would take one ignorant motherfucker to think they are.

My company, my rules. For example almost all people working for me are Ukrainians, my policy is that Ukraine must win in this war against the murderous ruzzian aggression. Anyone not aligned with my values shouldn't be working here. I also completely support Israel, anyone not aligned with my values, shouldn't be working here.

Ah. That would be rather silly, wouldn't it? Is there something I could have said to avoid this impression?

As for rally2xs:
The definition of "luxury" is buying new items for sale at retail or services above the poverty level.

There you go, him clarifying, at the very least.

Or, get this, we don't bother. We just send everybody the mandated precalculated prebate. Done, without lots of forms needing to be filled out. Electronic deposit is very very cheap. Especially at the levels the IRS does it at. In order to keep things simple (not a lot of forms), the tax is charged on everything the tax is supposed to cover, and "everybody" gets the same rebate.

I mean, we're totally adding up everybody's spending and sending it to the IRS on some equivalent of a 1099 why? What difference does knowing the number make to their tax obligation?

I think you're getting me and rally confused. He's the supporter of fairtax. I'm the guy who read up about it years ago during his more libertarian phase and thought it was an interesting idea. That said, I'm also something of a contrarian, so I'll let you know when I think there's a problem with your understanding or logic.

It is when you're talking about getting rid of and replacing a system that hauls in $4.8T/year and replacing it with one that hauls in $6T (before sending $1.2T right back out).

And I wouldn't really call it a footnote, it's a core part of the proposal: "Replace the federal income tax with a federal sales tax. In order to keep it progressive, give everybody a prebate equal to the tax that would be paid on poverty line spending." Heck, in my "quick explanation" to you, it's the second sentence. First sentence: $4.8T of spending transformation, second, $1.2T of transformation. Hardly a footnote, but still lesser than the prior change.

It's like the second sentence in the "extremely short proposal" form. On their site, it's the 3rd paragraph.

That said, remember, I'm libertarian adjacent. The actual Libertarians and Republicans and such? They oppose UBIs pretty much on reflex (and I'm a dude who supports a UBI on libertarian reasoning). So, at least for them, you're selling them on the "get rid of income taxes!" first, and avoiding calling the prebate a UBI in order to not spook them.

I mean, it's funny, the only state in the country with a sort of UBI is Alaska, and it's republican held, and god forbid you try to touch the permanent fund dividend. But having it elsewhere? Oh no!

When the solar companies are complaining that they're going to go out of business without more subsidies for their services, that is a good clue that they are not providing the value that they are taking. If they are going to go out of business because their customers cannot afford them, then they should.

government has long surpassed that threshold. Government shouldn't be so big, that its failure would take down the country, yet here we are, all of us.

Battery research: Already happening. Have you read about sodium-ion? Supposed to be a lot cheaper than lithium chemistries, last longer. Main downside is that they're bigger and heavier per kWh, but for grid storage, who cares?

They only store about 2/3rds the power by weight and volume. Which means that a 300 mile car becomes 200 miles with sodium. Battery pack is ~30% as much though. Given Tesla's upscale market position (for EVs)...

Well, this is actually something I've predicted for a while now.

If solar becomes predominant enough, it actually flips the idea of night-time power being cheaper. At which point the logical time to charge your car switches to the daytime, probably at work.

Put enough chargers together, with smart enough network management, and you should be able to soak any excess periods just by topping off "All" the EV batteries at that time. As well as powerwalls, BESS systems, and other such storage systems.