The AT protocol I was looking at the other day has a concept of choosing your own algorithm to aggregate content. I think that’s an important option in order for a dominant platform to be useful to society.
I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.
I'd like to think making the platform a more positive, constructive place would improve engagement and therefore be compatible with their business model.
However, I confess I'm leaning towards the more cynical outcome.
The most popular candidate with the party members was Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, so it doesn’t seem credible that people voted against Rishi Sunak mostly because of race.
Well, supposedly the most popular was a black woman, the most competent was an Asian man, and who gets the post in the end? The most incompetent of them all, whose only advantage is being white.
The members weren’t allowed to choose Badenoch, she was eliminated at an early stage by the MP vote, probably because she was too radical and lacked ministerial experience.
Rishi Sunak was claiming to be resident in the US while Chancellor of the Exchequer, while his wife was claiming non dom status to avoid paying tax. He was also hated by the supporters of the previous PM because he wielded the knife.
It’s not a shock that elections are not won on competence.
Different selectorates, different priorities. MPs who voted for the final two to be on the ballot had more established personal and political relationships with other candidates and saw her as an inexperienced MP with a few strange ideas about organising the Cabinet who was obsessed with culture war bullshit. The Conservative Party membership that didn't get to see her on the ballot were impressed with her debate performances and loved the culture war bullshit.
(tbh I didn't see much indication she was the 'most popular', but there were definitely plenty of members of the party receptive to her message, doubtless including many of those most likely to espouse racist sentiments)
I reckon racism would have played a part with some of the Tory party members. However, I think Sunak’s bigger problem was that he came across as very, very swish, fake, metropolitan and brown nosey which the traditional Tory party membership (country folk) absolutely detest. The City job, the expensive suits and short trousers with loafers, the pretending to drive a car, the “my favourite tv program is Emily in Paris”, the “I’m a Coca Cola addict”, the “Thanks PM” meme. He was Team Brexit, but everything about his personality screamed Team Remain. Contrast this with Liz Truss who was Team Remain but who “welcomes any Britain to go join Ukraine and fight Putin”, bellows for tax cuts for the rich and generally presents herself as a very traditional almost rural conservative person. I think when you look at it through this lens it makes a lot more sense.
Rishi Sunak was claiming to be resident in the US while Chancellor of the Exchequer, while his wife was claiming non dom status to avoid paying tax. He was also hated by the supporters of the previous PM because he wielded the knife.
Also, the most popular candidate with the Conservative membership was Kemi Badenoch, who is black, but far more radical than Rishi Sunak, who was forced to defend Treasury orthodoxy.
Yes, at a moment of inflation, they announce significant tax cuts which will have a big inflationary impact. The Bank of England was already behind on interest rate rises, and now the government is relying on them to not only counter global trends (high rates in the US causing devaluations basically everywhere), and also the inflationary effect of energy cost increases, but also extra inflationary tax cuts. That will force rates high (apparently the market is pricing in an increase to 5%), which will then cause big reductions in housing, and negative equity.
The thing I am confused about is why this happened at the announcement. The big measures had already been announced, an energy price cap (£60bn or more depending on wholesale gas costs), and reversal of planned tax increases in National Insurance and Corporation tax (about £40bn). The additional unannounced tax cuts were small (for instance the cut in top rate tax was £2bn). So it seems that most of the drop should have happened before.
Apparently the PM wanted the announcement to feel radical to distance her from the previous government, so maybe the markets were responding to the feeling of the announcement, and the implication of future radical ideological action, as much as the numbers.
> The thing I am confused about is why this happened at the announcement. The big measures had already been announced [...]
I'm far from an expert, but to be totally honest I think most people didn't really expect it to happen this way. The media were all talking about how it's not possible and no one knew where the funding would come from. Everyone was mostly expecting it to not happen to be quite different and more complex.
It turns out we overestimated both the PM and the Chancellor.
> Apparently the PM wanted the announcement to feel radical to distance her from the previous government, so maybe the markets were responding to the feeling of the announcement
My understand is that it’s exactly this. So much of the markets comes down to vaguely defined “confidence” and the new leadership simply isn’t inspiring faith from those in charge.
(Not an economist by any measure) Can you explain "tax cuts which will have a big inflationary impact". The 20% bracket went down to 19%. The 45% bracket disappeared (now included in the 40%) which is only for £150k+ earners, which is a tiny minority in the UK. I don't think the actual numbers move inflation.
Isn't it more the conflicting policies (BoE and gov) in theory and the perception of them not being in the same page?
Increasing the money supply causes inflation. Rich people don't just put their money under their mattress. They invest it which means it's being given to other people who use it to buy things.
I understand why that might cause inflation. The projected cost is £55b, is this really enough to put the country in an inflationary meltdown?
IMHO the problem is that none of these measures actually guarantee (or even promote) economic growth and the realisation that the UK has economic illiterate leaders it's what's freaking the markets.
Real estate investing means either paying people to build things for you, or paying people for something that's already built. Obviously building things causes inflation as you compete for commodities required to build, but buying already built real estate also means the seller now has money that they invest and that will eventually get consumed too.
Yeah, the idea it's the tax cut isn't correct. That's not even a big tax cut. It's the energy price cap that utterly dominates. The left will insist otherwise because they hate tax cuts and love price controls, but that doesn't make it accurate.
The carnage happened at 9.30 am on Friday directly after the budget announcement, caused by the budget announcement. Energy subsidy was proposed earlier in the week. The market suddenly realised that kwasi and liz are irresponsible idealists and acted accordingly.
I think that tax credit withdrawal still exists, so now the effective tax rate is 40% from £50k to £100k, then 60% from £100k to £125k, and 40% above that.
Also, despite 10% inflation they’ve frozen the tax bands, so all workers earning above about £12k will have more of their income pulled into higher tax bands.
So they’re left with that artificially high rate which blocks progression, and most workers up to about £150k will pay more.
Hi, are there Jacobson papers for 100% renewables looking at geographical distribution of generation, storage and interconnectors, then modelling them against weather and demand, or are they cruder than that? If those papers exist, can you recommend an accessible way to understand these models, and their outcomes? For instance, are there areas for wind generation which are more valuable that others, to provide a balance to regional lulls, and is that data published?
Is model code available so that it can be run by any of us?
Great question! The studies do consider the spatio-temporal distribution of generation and demand. Here's a recent paper [1] that develops roadmaps for 145 countries and has infographics with links to additional resources.
I found the source code for the LOADMATCH model [2] used in the studies which can run on a laptop. You can email Mark about data, source code for the GATOR-GCMOM model [3], and advice on running it.
And here's a talk [4] he gave on the topic at NASA Ames Research Center a few years back.
Has anyone seen any good explanations or visualisations of how long term storage would be achieved? For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time. Using these resources to reduce gas use makes sense, but our current plans call for about 30% of electricity generated from gas using carbon capture and storage. How would this be handled under a 100% renewable scenario? Is it just generating Hydrogen?
Or it is that these intermittency gaps can be closed using long distance connectors? Has anyone done studies showing exactly where resources would need to be located and the length of connectors, modelled against weather and demand patterns?
Yes, long distance transmission for geographical diversity of wind power. This is studied a lot in the power generation industry. Without long distance transmission you need natural gas peaker plants capable of the same output as solar/wind, and solar/wind is more expensive than just building natural gas plants (but less CO2). We cant build enough batteries to use in place of peaker plants until sodium batteries are production ready and produced at large scale (this could happen by the end of the decade though).
Hydrogen for short term storage, ammonia for medium term storage. Both much less efficient than just using electricity directly, but the aim is to drive down the cost of generation so that the inefficiency doesn’t matter so much.
There are also tons of other short-medium term storage solutions, and we probably need all of them that we can get our hands on, but hydrogen and ammonia are the ones that feel most likely to operate at grid scale.
Suggests Great Britain would ideally have only 1% solar, and storing 8% of the wind production as Green Hydrogen
Doing it without Green Hydrogen, just solar wind batteries would double the cost.
Connectors help too, though they also cost money to build. As renewables and batteries have plummeted in price, connectors have become less necessary. Once you have Green Hydrogen you can ship it around and store it like LNG.
Pumped hydro and hot sand batteries should be enough if we get our act together and actually commit to something. There’s also no reason solar from Spain or Morocco couldn’t be wired in at some point. Obviously we currently have a chicken and egg situation where it’s not worth building the X times our peak need in renewables without the storage and not worth building the storage when renewables are a fraction rather than a multiple of our current supply.
The problem with getting electricity from Spain or Morocco (or any other country) during winter is not a technical but a political one. Once a nation energy security depends on an another nation you may end up in situation Germany found herself in
Wind has higher average output in winter and at night, but even in winter and at night, it has lulls which last for many days. Look at the wind and solar generation numbers for Germany for a month last winter:
days is already way less than seasonal - and it can't be averaged out entirely even across europe -> storage capacity still needs to be increased when approaching higher shares of renewables across europe
> For instance in Britain solar in winter has 1/10th of the output in summer, and we can have lulls in wind output for many days at a time.
Grid expansion can average over regional lulls. Renewables also need to be built to provide significant overcapacity. Storage can help, but you can do it with only those two.
* Have you considered putting the books onto the official store? It would make it much smoother to get books on the device. You could charge a small fee to pay for the effort, I’d pay the extra to support the project and avoid the hassle of doing an upload. I just saw above you now do bulk downloads, which will help also.
* Although your covers are beautiful, they only appear in a small corner of the screen for the Kobo devices I’ve used, even using the Kepub format, is that a known issue?
And also to thank you for the effort. This project plays a really important role and has been a source of pleasure for many of my friends and family.
We've been in touch with Kobo but they haven't expressed a lot of interest. We do have an integration with the Google Play store, so if you search for an ebook we have in our catalog, it should appear near the top.
I use a Kobo eink device myself and haven't noticed the cover art problem you're describing. Make sure you're on the latest firmware, and that you're transferring our kepub files using a USB cable and not Calibre. (Calibre may attempt to apply their own conversion on top of our own conversion, which can result in unexpected things happening.)
If I may interject, overriding Kobo's firmware with KOReader (simple drag-n-drop of a file) gave a second life to my Aura 2. It's made it responsive and snappy while providing more features. It may not be necessary for newer ones (or for cover art on sleep), but I was on the fence to upgrade my 5 year old e-reader before trying it, feels like a new device now.
Yes, that's going to happen. The books are in the US public domain and anyone in the US can do anything they want with them, including reselling them. Obviously we are not the ones selling these.
That's fair, but I'd think the issue was less about copyright and more...trademark infringement? Since they're selling as "Standard Ebooks", I think there's reasonable grounds for confusion that someone browsing the Kobo store might see one of the books being offered as coming from you and make a purchase as a kind of donation, thinking that it's going towards SE's upkeep rather than into some random's pocket.
This is a problem Project Gutenberg has had for years, on Amazon and other platforms. It's a game of whack a mole and ultimately not really worth pursuing. As soon as you shut one guy down, another one appears with the same great idea.
In any case almost nobody is buying these anyway, as there are so many other free ebook editions of just about all of these books already.
I'm not a lawyer, but I believe failure to defend a trademark is a great way to lose a trademark.
I'm surprised Kobo doesn't have a list of banned seller names for situations like this. It would take zero effort on their end, and they're clearly opening themselves to liability.
Off to create Amazon and Disney stores over there... /s
The stories may be public domain but your arrangement, and more importantly your trade name are protected. You may not have the desire to take action like a dmca takedown, but you're definitely within your rights to do so.
You can stop the third-party vendor from saying "I am Standard Ebooks", but you can't stop them from referring to the book as coming from Standard Ebooks, because that's true.
I've taken to just opening the SE website in the Kobo experimental browser and downloading the books directly onto the device that way. The browser is pretty sluggish, but even then it only takes a few clicks if you know what book you're looking for.
Based on the progress Asahi Linux has made in the last year, I expect linux to be a reasonable option (for folks who are comfortable with a Linux installer) within the next 12 months.
It “works”, but not really well enough for general use. There’s a project called Asahi Linux dedicated to getting it to work, and it does run, but a lot of peripheral hardware (Bluetooth, accelerated graphics) is still not supported.
I’m not aware of any distribution other than Asahi (which is based on Arch) that can boot at all.
I think the submission is exactly wrong, the culture of an online space is heavily linked to the technology of the platform, interlinked with its business model.