It has everything to do with technology.

When you refuse to do the required research to understand capabilities and limits of technology this failure is only on you and nobody else. I've spent years designing solar systems and running numbers. Most northern off-grid nutters (no offense intended) burn things (often wood) during the winter.

The most critical issue with renewables there exists no storage technology that would allow the energy produced to be efficiently exploited at a feasible cost. It simply doesn't exist. The only thing current technology is able to do cost effectively is provide short term buffering.

Not only is there a significant difference in insolation between seasons easily running into 6x territory, seasonal temperature gradients are immense. In summer you are looking at a 30F differential, in winter it is easily twice that. In summer peak cooling occurs a few hours after peak sun. In winter it is dead of night. This doesn't just mean you need twice the energy in winter it means you need to double it again to account for the extra energy required to work across a much larger gradient. You are looking at over provisioning of well north of an order of magnitude and even that is comically insufficient to ride through crummy overcast winter weather so you still need to burn things even with a stupidly enormous system that costs as much as your entire house.

You failed to answer a simple question about what the heck your statements were responsive to in the first place. Now instead of answering you appear to be making additional statements also lacking a nexus to anything I said.

There is no reason to expect this to change anytime soon. There is no enabling technology on the horizon and no relevant enabling cost trends.

Over-provisioning at required scales is economically infeasible and environmentally unsound.

Say what? Where is this coming from? I made a single statement about renewables/solar not being up to the task. I've neither stated nor implied anything else about anything. Based on your statements one would think I was arguing for wood stoves or something when I said absolutely nothing to that effect. What are your statements responsive to?

Nobody's pretending shit. If you weren't paying attention since 2020, there has been a metric shit ton of censorship. X (pre-Musk), Facebook, YouTube, Google, payment processors, and search engines **all** coordinated to suppress stories, accounts, and views. That's not conspiracy theory; it's documented historical fact, from the Twitter Files to endless leaks.

And yeah, today if you say one sharply negative thing about mass migration in the UK, Germany, or Norway, you're at real risk of being censored, investigated, fined, or worse. The authoritarian left didn't "imagine" a damn thing; they built the machinery.

UK: Over 12,000 arrests in 2023 alone for "grossly offensive" online communications (many tied to migration talk).

Germany: Tens of thousands of "hate speech"/incitement probes yearly. Mostly fines, but jail happens often, too.

Norway: Hundreds of hate speech reports; @200-300 sentenced/fined annually in recent data, with occasional jail terms. Some recent years @1000 folks in all.

Hunter Biden laptop story (50+ intel officials + Big Tech suppression pre-2020 election)

COVID lab-leak, natural origin flip-flops, & dissent bans (YouTube/FB/Twitter)

JK Rowling, academics, & feminists deplatformed for sex realism

COVID vaccine skeptics, Great Barrington scientists censored bigtime. Doctors threatened with license revocation for skepticism

Payment processors (GoFundMe, PayPal, banks) defunding wrongthink (truckers, conservatives)

Campus cancel culture + disinvitations (thousands documented)

Old Twitter shadowbans, visibility filtering on election/migration topics

EU Digital Services Act / UK Online Safety Act / German NetzDG forcing private pre-censorship

Corporate DEI firings & "diversity" loyalty oaths

The pattern isn't "both sides equally" it's one side wielding institutional power to shut down debate on migration, sex, race, climate, and elections. Free speech is the antidote and the facts stand partisans are always censor-happy and right now, the Left is SUPER ULTRA MEGA censor-happy. Censorship is central to Communism. If you come up with a dipshit system that doesn't work you need to censor debate and discussion about how bad it is, lest someone get the idea to try something else that has a history of working and not getting everyone killed or starved.

You all know damn good and well they've POURED over the OpenSSH code, hoping for an RCE. So, super-bots, what's up? Why you failing to deliver the goods for all the scumbags in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe who are just salivating waiting for that "pwns everything" bug? Like fetch... it's not happening.

I've only seen the one, lame NFSd RCE for FreeBSD a few weeks ago. This "amazing" new LLM cannot seem to generate much beyond hype, just like their broken compiler. They claim there are "thousands" of bugs waiting in the rushes. However, they've only released about a dozen checksums for heretofore unknown "really bad bugs."

So far, you're mostly talk, Anthropic. A bare handful of LPEs, one RCE, and @200 unknown Firefox "bugs" (but few details there and no idea if they are all security bugs). Guys, when you say "thousands" and produce less than 20 real OS bugs (and that's counting your oh-so-scary-unknowns that are just checksums now), then some skeptical folks like me are going to say "Get to a 100 before you start talking about thousands... hell get to 50."

Suit weasels love to lie.

People typically want to keep warm by burning things in colder months when solar insolation is many times less than warmer months. You might even be able to get away with using renewables in mild southern climates.

Where it matters where most heating energy is used there is no economically feasible renewable solution absent technology breakthrough enabling seasonal energy storage.

Burning wood for any amount of time is a lot of work. I doubt anyone is doing it to be "trendy" except perhaps for special occasions. Wood burning is going to spike this winter in Europe due to increased costs refilling stores from supply disruptions.

Clearly the Google LLM investments are not panning out...

> All that stuff has to react rapidly

Just to add color ... equipment that has to do a lot of work quickly, even if intermittently, has a huge draw. Like your well pump or air conditioner when it starts up.

Now imagine you need to start a few dozen air conditioners simultaneously. The startup energy can be 10x the operating energy.

I've been doing the math on some of this for home solar. In my case I can ramp up the voltage over a few seconds but AIUI rockets still need instant action in many cases.

It's possible future reusable spacecraft could be more proactive, lowering costs and necessary chassis strength. Most of our technology starts off brute force and gets refined with more elegance but also more complexity over time. We're still early days in spaceflight.

Yes, probably. That reserve currency status is also on the way out.

More like OpenAIs advances skills in befuzzling people.

94% of Americans buying cars choose ICE engines, 6% choose EVs. 6% isn't "nobody" but it's pretty close. I love how merely stating a fact is a "troll" if you're talking to a leftist. That's probably because, in most places, they are the censors (the left LOVES censorship and stands for that concept more than any other) and are used to being able to shut people up when it's inconvenient and shut folks down when it's starting to get uncomfortable. You seem angry that you couldn't censor the bad man telling ugly truths about your pet subject. You angry?

Seems like owning games was already on life support. The only upside is that there are still a lot of used game shops selling cartridges and other freedom-savvy formats and, in my area, they are going strong. Ultimately it seems like what the elites want is for humans to be born and die with barely any artifacts created and with as little "load" on their "resources" as possible. "You will own nothing and be happy."

Well, I've been doing this for 30 years. If I'm "going to be disappointed" it'd better hurry up and disappoint me. More likely "I'll be retired"

I just asked it about local events this weekend and it gave a startlingly useful list in a few seconds. Cross-checking with sources, it's actually accurate. I spent several minutes Googling and couldn't find the same information in one place--the death of my local newspaper made sure of that.

We're being herded into an era of information locked behind automated gatekeepers, so get used to it. I expect ad-supported ChatGPT access to come free with cellphone plans soon, so OpenAI can identify you and the telcos can sell your information to an even wider audience. Everybody wins.