AI claims that you can still buy AZW books and read them on one of these old Kindles. The claim is that if you buy from your PC account for the old Kindle it will be supplied as AZW, which will be readable on the device after transfer to it from the PC by USB.
The claim is that what has changed is that you can no longer buy directly from the Kindle, because purchases are now KFX only. But that you can still buy books for it over the web using your PC and they will be supplied as AZW.
If this is really true, the change is not only not a bad thing, its positively a good thing, because the account details on the old Kindles were stored very insecurely so it was a real security hazard wandering around with this very stealable device with all your Amazon credentials stored in open format.
Is it true? It was true before the latest change, but is it still?
The problem is going to be the following. Sometime roughly 2030 there will be 90GW of wind and 45GW of solar. Demand will be roughly 60GW peak winter and 50GW summer. The lows will be about 25GW summer and about 40GW winter.
Are you starting to see a problem? No, not yet? Lets continue.
Its January 2030. Its a cold, calm, clear early evening. There is no solar because its dark, and wind is delivering 5GW owing to the usual winter blocking high pressure zone. It has been below 10GW for a week, and will be below 20GW for another week. Nuclear is supplying around 10GW - if they haven't closed down the legacy nuclear by then, Gas has fallen to less than 10GW because the plant has hit end of life.
Where are you going to get 30-40GW from to meet peak demand?
But if you think this is a problem, now lets turn to early July. Solar is now putting out its max, around 30GW at midday. Nuclear is still delivering 10GW. Wind, well that is going a bomb because this is a time of pleasant summer breezes. Its midday. Demand is dropping to 25GW at midday.
Now the problem with solar is that most of it is not under the control of the grid operator, so they cannot turn it off. They turn off all the wind and pay constraint payments to the operators. They can't turn of the nuclear. They are looking at supply of roughly 40GW and demand of 25GW.
At this point, summer or winter, for different reasons, the flight data recorder has a pause in the dialogue between the crew, broken by someone saying 'Oh dear'. Or something a bit stronger. And then all the lights go out.
Two weeks later they are still trying to find enough spinning capacity to get the thing restarted. If its winter, people are quietly dying of cold. Their heating needs power to operate the gas boilers and cookers. If its summer they are taking cold showers, eating cold baked beans.
Meanwhile the government of the day considers the situation and comes to the conclusion that the problem is that they do not have enough solar power installed, so they adopt a plan to install a further 45GW of it. That should fix the problem. Now, how to communicate this plan to the country? That is a slight problem, Prime Minister. A lot of our communications facilities seem to be, well, out of action... because of the, well, the...the temporary interruption to grid services...
Do the math how you want. If you move a country to a generating system where peak demand is bound to coincide with low supply, and peak generation with low demand, the result will be blackouts.
Pushing more and more people into dense urban landscapes that are hostile to life does not lead to happy people? You don't say...
We are facing the same problem that Gutenberg created in the 15th century: a proliferation in the ability of everyone to create and communicate whatever they want and whatever people want to read. Due mainly to a dramatic fall in the cost of production of books. But its far more extreme than Gutenberg because the drop in costs is so much greater. In an era in which everyone has Internet access, a smart phone and/or laptop, writing in publishable format has become much easier and publishing itself has basically become free.
And the problem arises in the same areas it arose back in the day: pornography, religious heresy, political subversion. The same thing happened in 17c France, where people took their manuscripts to Holland for printing which their local booksellers in Paris were afraid to touch. Holland was also a center of piracy, where you could get a run of some best seller quickly and smuggle it back to Paris or London to sell at a discount. A sort of early predecessor of the Pirate Bay.
There is really no solution to this. You can see the same sorts of measures being taken up - the creation of a sort of index, the banning of some materials by righteous jurisdictions, For instance, as late as the 20c the works of \Joyce being banned in Ireland, Lady Chatterly in England, lots of books in the US. In the end this, and the Papal Index, were dropped because they were widely ridiculed and were not working. When the main result of your policy is to drive your best regarded novelists abroad and their works to be published in France, something is not working. And its not achieving its goal, if anything its increasing the interest in the banned material.
Governments however do not feel they can simply stop trying - and one understands this. Along with kinds of freedom of speech most here would find important and valuable, there is also the darker side of human nature that flourishes at the edges. What do you do about it? Do you decide to just give up? One understands why they feel they cannot. And one also understands that regulation and censorship of the truly vile is only possible by measures which have a dramatic negative effect on privacy.
Its a bit like speeding. You can pretty much stop speeding dead if you have enough cameras and you have number plate recognition. The side effect is that all trips and all car use then become trackable. You lower accidents. But the temptation to increase the use of the data is enormous. Similarly with facial recognition - you probably could use it in conjunction with other draconian measures to stop phone snatching and shop lifting. And there seems to be no other affordable way to do that. But the cost in privacy of such a total package is not small.
I see the problem and its historical parallels clearly enough, but don't know the answer.
More like the total opposite, I'd say.
I can't imagine what's the business value of having ChatGPT doing a BloodNinja impression. It's not good for PR, it'd risk exclusion in serious environments, school and the like, it'd risk legal trouble, the list goes on. The potential for trouble far outweighs any possibly benefit, which is what? There's only downsides because it'd go wrong in some way sooner rather than later.
No, doubling down on serious, well paying uses and removing controversial ideas of little worth is exactly what looks like a clear, decent strategy here.
You ask: "And how does *also* allowing non fossil-fuel energy, like wind and solar, hurt any of that?"
Answer: intermittency. Adding wind and solar to the generating system just adds cost for no benefit.
If you want detailed case histories of this look at the UK, the usual canary. You will find that the useless intermittent supply from wind and solar comes in, on the bids, far higher than conventional. Regulation is needed to force utilities to buy it. And that is for an intermittent supply. There is no way to deliver dispatchable power from wind and solar at a cost which is competitive with conventional, ie gas or coal.
You doubt it? Go through the UK wind bids and add up the total cost of the UK electricity Net Zero push. Adding wind and solar to a conventional generation system just pushes up costs. Among the costs it adds are constraint payments. There are wind farms in the UK which are making a majority of their income from being paid not to generate, because the wind is supplying when there is no demand.
By the time you factor in the increase in gas consumption consequent on having to rely on open cycle rapid start gas to cover calms and nights its doubtful you even save any emissions either.
Its a great mystery why people who are persuaded of a climate crisis from CO2 emissions have this blind faith in wind and solar generation. Whether or not there is a climate crisis, wind and solar are not a viable generating technology and are not any kind of solution to it.
Paul Homewood has covered the UK wind constracting process in detail if you want that. Most advocates of wind do not. But here he is, as a for example, on constraint payments:
https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...
and here he is on the recent AR7 auction
https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...
Lots more on costs, subsidies and constraint if you explore the site. The political consensus in the UK seems to be turning against the so called energy transition. The situation in the Gulf is clarifying minds. The absurdity of the idea that moving to intermittent wind and solar is either possible or is going to increase energy security or reduce energy prices is becoming obvious.
A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.
