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Comment Re: Wasn't this Musk's pitch 10 years ago? (Score 1) 163

It is pointless for your daily energy consumption. But it is very useful that one day of the year when an ice storm takes out the grid and you are stuck sheltering in the home for 24h waiting for power and everything to get back to normal as well. Here is Texas outages usually come together with stay-at-home directives for many workers, anyway. So it does not apply to everyone, but it could help lots of people those rare cases. And that in turn hello first responders.

Comment Re: Has solar panels, but he needs the EV? (Score 1) 163

In practice, when a solar system without a battery is installed, power is routed from the panels to the grid. There it gets âoestabilizedâ by being blended with other power with the right frequency (60hz). Then you get your power from the grid, from that pool of mixed power, yours and others.

So if the grid is gone, your panels are configured to shut down, because there is no place to push excess power (when panels are overproducing) or pull extra power (when you home wants more than panels produce)

A battery is needed to stem the ebbs and floods so to speak.

And yes this is a simplified way of looking at it. But it should help.

Comment Re:Do Not Fuck With The Ocean or Atmosphere (Score 2) 109

Tipping stuff into the oceans or the atmosphere, or scattering dust to screen out sunlight, is insanely risky.

And yet, that's what we've been doing for the last 200 years. It isn't long ago the common practice for getting rid of toxic stuff was to simply put it in barrels and dump overboard.

Comment Five times the sodium content, this is healthy? (Score 1) 174

I am an old guy who is supposed to be watching his blood pressure, and people constantly suggest these manufactured products as a substitute for meat. The impossible burger has 370mg of sodium per 4oz portion, while an equal portion of ground beef has about 70mg. The Impossible people like to compare their 370mg patty with the typical ~370mg of a commercial burger but that ignores the 300mg coming from the cheese, bun, and condiments. So a BASIC single impossible burger prepared the same way is going to be almost 700mg of sodium, more than 1/3 of all the salt a typical adult is supposed to have in a day. The impossible patty alone is about the same salt as two pieces of fried chicken. I'm supposed to be on a low-salt diet, and this impossible stuff would give me a damn coronary. My doc (yes, a real GP with certifications in nutrition) specifically warned me away from novelty foods such as manufactured meat because of the sodium content required to make them palatable. If you want to cut back on the meat, then eat a vegetable. But once you've reduced the volume, honestly, the real thing is much healthier at least for old folks.

Comment Re:So much for Tesla (Score 1) 87

I like the competition, so seeing more upcomers is good news.

Why i'm not impressed with the Mercedes announcement is the limitation. Sure, it is lvl 3. But only at slow speeds, on highways. Even a basic lane assist and adaptive cruise control of an entry level vehicle can easily handle that. Follow the car in front of you at slow speeds, staying in the lane.

Comment Re:Republican war on EVs and the IRS (Score 0) 71

While you are right that not paying interest on your debt is a bad idea, you draw a flaky conclusion. There are other ways to afford paying debt and interest than borrowing even more money. Generally, living within your means is something every person of this planet should strive to do. As well as countries.

Comment Nope. The answer "No" is entirely sufficient. (Score 5, Insightful) 221

Yeah, no. I might not be in the exact center of the target demographic, but I'm definitely in the group. This whole notion of avoiding interaction with other humans even for basic tasks like getting food... why? I mostly work from home, and I can avoid people by staying home, and ordering shit from Amazon. If I leave my house, part of the reason I walk out the front door is to get a break from the silence and to interact with other people. Then I find they've been removed from places where they're expected... without lowering of prices or actual improvements in service. On top of that, why should I participate in the demise of the lower half of our economy? When you shove people out of low-level jobs like this it's not like they magically get some other better paying job, or simply die off and disappear -- no, they become poorer and more dependent on aid, which in turn jacks taxes and costs for everyone. So the smooth brains at McD's and YumCorp decide they need to cut corners even more, and it gets worse. Race to the bottom.

I'll pay more for my damn cheeseburger. I'm ok with that. But I'm not shopping at any brick-and-mortar that is eliminating entry level jobs, still delivering crap service, and charging me the same. I've walked out or ditched my cart when I've been refused service by a human, and that's ok. (Kroeger and Lowe's, I'm looking at you 15-watt geniuses.) My shopping and cooking at home probably won't really slow this damage to society, but at least it won't be on my dime.

Comment the old folks home of security (Score 4, Interesting) 21

Former member of InfraGard here. I went through a long and silly hazing/vetting process to join, and then came to the realization that it's organizations like this that are part of the problem. You know that weird sensation of being an actual old person in a crowd then listening to what they're saying and thinking "oh my god these people are old" even if they're younger than you? Yeah, that. That was almost every InfraGard session and meeting, with olde dudes in DC and Redmond giving powerpoint presentations about vulns known 18mo prior, grossly mis-attributed threat actors ("the APTs are comin for yew!! Fancy Bear!!1!1!!!"), 101-level errors in data gathering and basic analysis, hopelessly outdated kill-diamond malware circle-jerks, results from clustering algorithms they'd picked but couldn't explain, and other wheezing exhortations to vague action made by people who smell like mothballs and coffee with too much cream.

Seriously, we need an organization LIKE IngraGard to share information as a coordinated community. But running it with the organization of a stereotypical frat combined with the speed of the feds ... there's no there there, and even if there was or will be, that org moves too slowly to be useful, by at least an order of magnitude. But hey, if you like a dependable flow of disappointment with absolute consistency, there they are.

Comment The absolute end of surface privacy (Score 1) 83

I was a beta tester for Starlink and just canceled my service after about 18 months due to quality of service. I love the idea of sat internet for the world but it's real purpose is 100% military. Providing internet to to war zones, and you and I, are a nice side-effect of that purpose.

Comment a prison that fits on your head: new "panopticon" (Score 3, Insightful) 53

From ethics.org.au: "The Panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched." https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Now imagine that instead of just building a watchtower in the center of the circular prison to see your movements, it can see your eyes. And everywhere you look. And it can see those things too. And it fits on your head. And you *paid* for it.

This is the beginning of some true horror. "Orwellian" doesn't even begin to do this justice.

Comment Re:Like vegetable burgers? Meal worm protein? (Score 1) 129

If you don't like my source then perhaps you can provide one that is better.

I just reviewed every result on the first page of Google search for: beef greenhouse climate. EVERY SINGLE ONE explains, in one way or another, that beef has a significant and grossly disproportionate impact on the climate. The Economist, Scientific American, The Guardian, Forbes, World Resource Institute, Vox, BBC, Science(published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Sciencedirect, the United Nation's FAO, and countless more. Take your pick. Or you could try
Environmental impact of meat production with over 200 sources cited.

Global warming in general, and the impact of beef in particular, are all way past the point where denialism requires actively avoiding and disregard wall-to-wall sources saying the same thing.

If we are concerned about the global warming impact of eating beef then I'm thinking we did so well with the big emitters of coal, petroleum, natural gas, cement, and metal refining, that we are looking to the teeny tiny impact of beef.

If you are bleeding from multiple wounds, I'm sure you know full well that was not a valid argument AGAINST bandaging the easily fixed bleeding immediately, while experts attempt to get the more severe and difficult bleeding under control.

We have not remotely halted global warming. We have barely begun to slow it down, due to decades of sabotage by denialists. The only way we can possibly solve this problem is a few percent at a time in many different ways and many different places. As all of the top Google search results explain, reducing beef consumption is the quickest and easiest thing we can do to immediately and significantly shift things several percent in the right direction. Several percent translates into years of difference, and a lower peak temperature.

As for the rest of your post, I very carefully checked and double checked. Not one sentence was remotely addressed how much impact beef does or does not have. I'm not sure why, but you spent four paragraphs 100% dedicated to arguing that your signature is false and absurd.

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Comment Re:Like vegetable burgers? Meal worm protein? (Score 1) 129

Beef is one of the top cause of climate change?

Yes.

I thought I'd look that up and a study from Oklahoma State University says beef production causes 1.9% of the CO2 emissions from human activity.

That's called confirmation bias. You went looking for a specific answer, you ignored all of the reliable sources and all of the evidence contradicting the answer you wanted, and you latched on to the first random thing that kinda-sorta looked like the answer you wanted.

In this case you quote a fragment about CO2, and you utterly disregarded methane. Methane is 25 to 80 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and beef production accounts for approximately one third of all human caused methane in the US.

Beef is indisputably an order of magnitude more environmentally damaging than any other category of food. You could buy anywhere from 10 to 200 pounds of virtually any non-meat food, eat one pound and literally burn all of the rest, and it would have less environmental impact than a pound of beef. Beef is obviously only one of many contributors to global warming, but it is a significant factor.

Global warming is not remotely "solved". Temperatures are rising, we haven't stopped the increase, we haven't even managed to slow the increase. Temperatures are still on a basically straight-line increase. There are various initiatives to eventually try to get things under control, but we're nowhere near achieving that. Temperatures are going to continue to rising for decades to come, because denialists have spent the last decades devoted to sabotage.

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Comment In related news (Score 0) 76

Nvidia will reduce the number of GPUs it sells to manufacturers of graphics cards and laptops so that those manufacturers can clear out their existing inventory.

In related news, Ford has decided to reduce the number of Edsels it will sell so car dealerships can clear out their existing inventory,
Microsoft has decided to reduce the number of copies of Vista it will sell so Computer makers can can clear out their existing inventory,
CocaCola decided to reduce the number of bottles of NewCoke they sell so supermarkets can clear out their existing inventory,
and Republicans have decided to reduce the number of their voters they send to vote so that... ummm elections can clear out their inventories?

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