> even if relative wealth disparities remain constant.
Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
> IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
There are two things I'd like to know more about for this:
1. Is the homeless person doing their survival in an area with a markedly lower median wage than the median wage their income is being measured against? (i.e. is "1/10 the median wage" an illusion created by including foreign communities in the 'median wage'?)
2. Is the homeless person's low income measured by excluding their income from in-kind handouts ("someone kind bought me a sandwich") and foraging ("I found a pizza in the dumpster")?
2) This was more a hypothetical argument than an analysis of a specific individual. Humans survived before electricity let alone AC. They can’t survive without food. What’s the minimum someone can meet the basic needs for survival paying market rates?
But the argument still stands if you want to raise the minimum in the US to 1,000$/month to account for hidden value and require shelter. 8 people sharing a 2BR apartment is very much a thing.
> Prior to the industrial revolution, the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant. We simply weren't efficient enough to fully exploit it.
This is just wildly incorrect. People started running out of trees during the early Iron Age. Woodlands have been a managed and often over exploited resource for a long time. Active agriculture vs passive woodlands vs animal grazing has been in constant tension for thousands of years across most of the globe.
The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.
There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artificial fertilizer. Etc.
A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. Not possible today. That’s not a push and pull played out over thousands of years, that’s a one-way trend.
The general point is not. Iceland and Easter Island were fully deforested way before the industrial age. Countless species went extinct in Britain and more examples abound.
Britain was a little bit industrialised even before the steam engine. There were windmills and water mills. Steam massively accelerated it, but industry did exist before.
Commons in England were being enclosed in the Tudor age. It caused a great deal of social unrest, even rebellion. It had little to do with technology, and was mostly caused by population growth.
Interestingly, clearcutting is part of it but another part is just grazing. If you let sheep graze in a forest they will eat all the saplings, so after a century of this, the old trees die out without new ones to replace them. I agree with your point but thought that could be of interest - Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty, is a good book discussing this (and why Ireland, which really should be all forest, is an ecological wasteland more generally)
This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place.
Still, that kind of underscores OP's point. Yes, natural resources were not completely unlimited prior to the Industrial Revolution; Jonathan Swift predated Watt's steam engine, after all. Still... Neither were information resources 10 years ago. Intellectual property laws did exist prior to AI, of course. The legal systems in place are not completely ignorant of the reality.
However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library.
The legal system and social systems in place prior to the Industrial Revolution proved unsuitable for an industrial world. It stands to reason that the legal system and social systems in today's society would be forced to evolve when exposed to the technological shift caused by AI.
Both animals and water power go way back. The early steam engine was measured in horsepower because that’s what it was replacing in mines. It couldn’t compete with nearby water power which was already being moved relatively long distances through mechanical means at the time.
Hand waving this as unimportant really misunderstands just how limited the Industrial Revolution was.
Irrelevant. Here's Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) explaining this distinction and precisely why those are irrelevant in the context of the Industrial Revolution:
> Diet indicators and midden remains indicate that there’s more meat being eaten, indicates a greater availability of animals which may include draft animals (for pulling plows) and must necessarily include manure, both products of animal ‘capital’ which can improve farming outputs. Of course many of the innovations above feed into this: stability makes it more sensible to invest in things like new mills or presses which need to be used for a while for the small efficiency gains to outweigh the cost of putting them up, but once up the labor savings result in more overall production.
> But the key here is that none of these processes inches this system closer to the key sets of conditions that formed the foundation of the industrial revolution. Instead, they are all about wringing efficiencies out the same set of organic energy sources with small admixtures of hydro- (watermills) or wind-power (sailing ships); mostly wringing more production out of the same set of energy inputs rather than adding new energy inputs. It is a more efficient organic economy, but still an organic economy, no closer to being an industrial economy for its efficiency, much like how realizing design efficiencies in an (unmotorized) bicycle does not bring it any closer to being a motorcycle; you are still stuck with the limits of the energy that can be applied by two legs.
So yeah, actual historians would be dismissive at your exact response, basically saying "I know, I know, but I don't care". You're still just talking about a society mostly 'wringing efficiencies out the same set of organic energy sources'. It IS unimportant, and you completely misunderstand how the Industrial Revolution reshaped production if you think it is important.
I think I prefer the 'STEM people' approach of trying to say true things, rather than this superior approach of just saying things and then, when they turn out to be false, dismissing them as irrelevant. If the truth of the claim is irrelevant, why did you make it in the first place!
The statement IS true anyways, the problem is that you failed to distinguish between an example and a universal claim. You want to argue on logic? I'm an engineer, I can argue on precision too:
The (true!) statement is "However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library."
I said there is a major difference in scale between "modern strip mining" and "a preindustrial extraction method powered only by human muscle", and I made an analogous point about AI-enabled information extraction versus 1980s manual archival research. That statement is purely true. Nothing in that statement says the muscle-powered-extraction example was the only preindustrial mode of production, just as "someone using microfilm in 1980" does not imply microfilm was the only way information was accessed in 1980. The fact that other information formats existed in 1980 is irrelevant to the truth of the example.
So no, nothing I said "turned out to be false". You are attacking a claim I never made because you failed to parse the logic in the one I did. Most importantly, this direction missed the big picture dialectical synthesis that I was introducing as well, and just kept decomposing the argument into locally falsifiable atoms which lost the thread of what was actually being discussed.
Is your counter argument that you’re not wrong just attacking a straw man? Because it really sounds to me like you are just clueless.
Strip mining goes back thousands of years, it’s a simpler technology than making tunnels. And no it wasn’t limited to human power to crack rock several more powerful methods existed.
Roman mining literally destroyed a mountain, operating within an order of magnitude of the largest mines today. That’s what makes what you say false. It’s not some minor quibble over details you are simply speaking from ignorance.
It’s almost like you’re intentionally trying to be wrong.
You don't seem to understand how analogies work. I’m not talking about strip mining vs tunnel mining, I was comparing scale of human powered mining to mining with nitroglycerin.
I’ll let you figure out how the scale of mining “going back thousands of years” is very different from modern explosive mining on your own. Go google “iron production by year” or something. Hint: it took generations for the Romans to strip a small hill, that a modern midsize mining company can do in a few days.
How so, being precise and correct is IMO worth preserving in a world of handwaving slop.
The industrial revolution was from ~1760–1840, it was a major shift it doesn’t cover everything that happens between 1760 and now more did it overwhelm many existing trends.
Yeah - really struggling to understand why people are not grasping this point.
Yes, Easter Island was deforested far earlier - but you wouldn't compare the steam engine's capability in resource extraction compared to what people on Easter Island were doing.
It feels like people are almost straining to not understand the point - I think it's quite clear how ML + AI serve to extract resources of data at a unheard of scale.
It's the autism. And I say that endearingly. I'm an engineer who probably likes trains way too much.
I intentionally pointed out the STEM-esque responses of pedantic correction as a symptom of a disciplinary blind spot: technically correct nitpicking that misses the forest for the trees, a tendency to atomize arguments and lose the structural point, and that tendency is a weakness, not a strength.
There's also a lack of historical training to contextualize their own objection. That's also why I brought up Devereaux as an authority hammer: the actual domain experts consider those objections and dismiss it.
the conclusion doesnt follow from the premise is the issue.
the laws and enclosure happened basically orthogonal to the respurce constraints, so there's no actual comparison to draw.
if you insist on a causation, id go with the opposite - the laws making ownership and forcing people off of land enabled the exploitation and innovation, not that it was cleanup for exploitation that was already happening. existing exploitation across all kinds of degrees was already being managed without the enclosure.
if you just want to make stuff up, you can reference anything you want, like that some elaborate thing happened in star wars, and thus the same thing must be happening with AI
It is hard to convince a man of that which his income is dependent on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
You aren't wrong. There's definitely going to be a need to drag people kicking and screaming to enlightenment unfortunately. Too much money to be made at stake otherwise.
> There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner.
Unless you mean 'an axe', way before that there were deforested areas where the need for trees was larger than the supply and there were enough humans to fell them.
> A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Yes, but that wasn't possible in other parts of the world much sooner.
I also saw a theory (not sure how credible) that the reason humans started doing agriculture was in fact because we killed all the megafauna we used to eat.
This was over 10,000 years ago. Well before the Industrial Revolution, indeed, before even the original Agricultural Revolution.
> The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.
It's not, because the Malthusian trap was all too real going into modernity, as in recurring famines were a thing, they were quite real, nothing "literal" about them.
First of all, the study is written by an economist, might as well have sent me an Oracle of Delphi pronouncement. And second, he mentions the Malthusian trap being a real thing in his very first sentence, so not sure what I should have gotten out of this.
I agree. Although in this specific point, I would say we always had depletion (since the most basic microorganisms, after all otherwise life would replicate until it faces depletion limits; all the way to our close primate relatives and throughout human history; food depletes locally which drives competition), but rarely faced degradation or permanent depletion.
I'd say degradation involves a lasting depletion or lasting damage (potentially permanent until restoration efforts happen) to the environment's output and ability to support life. Permanent depletion is what can happen to e.g. shallow mines and fossil fuel deposits.
I think I'd agree the legal system was created mostly for the former, depletion, and only recently had to contend with degradation and permanent depletion. I feel like we still struggle collectively to coming to gripes with permanent depletion.
Permanent depletion is also usually the result of shortsightedness or a competition gone awry. Famous case where nobody wants the ultimate results but people may selfishly march towards it (tragedy of the commons).
I believe running out of trees was always a local issue - there weren't enough trees where you were at because getting trees had to be gotten locally, you didn't go get trees from far away. So yes that was in constant tension, the thing is that the problem of having enough trees turned from a local problem to a global problem, with the side effects of not having enough trees globally that the world needed to maintain the environment humanity first conquered.
I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description, resource depletion was always local before mass industrialization. Being able to exploit the world as opposed to just your local area is also a mark of efficiency.
By local you mean over 5 thousand of miles? Because yes moving wood was always in competition with growing it locally. But pine forests in the far north were untouched because of the low quality of the lumber they produce not the distances involved. All of Africa Europe and Asia ran out of the most valuable natural lumber a fucking long time ago.
> I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description
Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations. But American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development. I’m not sure exactly your counter argument even is here.
We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table.
So sure we are very slightly better at extracting resources but on the absolute scale it really isn’t that significant pre vs post Industrial Revolution compared to the sum total of human history.
maybe, "local" is a function of a lot of things, it is only fairly recently in human history that the "global" functions the way that "local" did centuries ago, meaning that it is cheap enough to source things from across the world that it does not need to be made in the next village.
>> I think the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant is a reasonable description
>Very little of the world’s woodland was untouched at the time of the Industrial Revolution and forests in the Americas survived as long as they did largely due to disease drastically reducing native populations.
things seemed appeared abundant prior to one event, soon after that event the thing no longer appears abundant, there's a correlation is the point, not a causation, but
>American forests were on the clock independent from industrial development.
sure, the Native Americans would have used up their forests if they had kept growing and not been killed off by disease brought by Europeans. Nonetheless they had been killed off, the world appeared infinite, because all you needed to do when you ran out of wood in one place is go to another place to source it, hurray, but now that is no longer the case. We have ran out of places to go get more wood.
As noted I said I felt the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" uttered by the original poster in this subthread is a reasonable description, and I mean obviously that is dependent on the impressions of the people of the time, and from my readings it seems like this was more the feeling than oh noes, we are running out of wood.
Although we got into a side track on wood, because that is what the first response to the OP was, that wood was always a problem, which that some natural resources were constrained still does not really disprove the phrase "the natural world was nearly infinitely abundant" since the word nearly can be seen as a cheat, and really what it means is that the world felt infinitely abundant at one time now it does not.
>We still can’t reasonably extract most resources from the ocean bottom. That’s ~70% of the world’s mineral wealth just off the table.
see, it sounds like you still feel like it is closer to infinitely abundant than dangerously used up. All we need to do is up our extraction game, at least were minerals are concerned.
NOTE: I think maybe the world feeling infinitely abundant thing is actually an American thing, this has been remarked by others in the past, that the first European settlers felt this was a world that had not been touched because in comparison to Europe it was under-exploited in many areas, it was big and had everything, and there is a whole part of American frontier myth that as soon as one area got settled and used up all you had to do was to pack up your stuff and move west and get a bunch of resources to use up, like locusts, or maybe just colonizers.
In this case the OP's idea of writing this up is that really what they are dealing with is not how the world was - infinitely abundant - but how it felt to people coming from one overly exploited area to an under-exploited one. They believe there is a narrative of economic constraints and results playing out, and that the two situations were analogous, but the source of the analogy - the world before the industrial revolution - was perhaps not as the analogy would have it but really how a memetic framework of exploration and conquest had interpreted the world.
Sorry my note went overly long, but that sometimes happens when I write what I think just as I'm thinking it.
By that the token humans drove a great number of species to extinction long before the Industrial Revolution. So by that line of thinking we were already running into the limits of natural resources in the Neolithic.
Obviously we’re becoming better at extracting resources over time, but humans ran out of new land to exploit long before Europe's conquest of the Americas. Land only seemed empty because disease decimated native populations, people lived in San Francisco thousands of years ago.
Most of humanity survived on agriculture and sometimes hunting-gathering for last 10k years. People that survived on hunting whales is minuscule. Comparing those two is nonsensical.
But you seem to be missing the point, parent is talking about the industrial scale of means to create a lot more destruction to the environment which the OP point hinges on. Parent does not say humanity survived on hunting whales, quite the opposite, when they had the means people nearly drove whales to extinction.
The industrial revolution is generally understood to have started somewhere around 1760, Moby Dick took place in approximately 1830, about 10 years before what some historians mark as the end of the agrarian to Industrial shift that is generally termed the Industrial revolution
I get sort of wishy-washy from 1830 on, because lots of people put the end of the Industrial revolution as being 1900, but 1840 is a defensible and commonly held position.
This, and going back further, people literally would brutally massacre neighbouring tribal groupings over control of fishing and hunting and gathering grounds.
The rapid dispersal of our species over literally the entire planet (minus Antarctica) likely also has a lot to do with constantly moving on to new opportunities further away from rivals.
That said, starting in about the 18th century we ran out of new places for that. And intensification truly began.
from an global perspective it isn't. Some places sure, like Western Europe, who in some cases had completed enclosure, but remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.
Just google maps the north part of South America, even today there are large swathes of undeveloped land across it and back then it was considerably less exploited. At that time it would have appeared infinite, especially to the European industrialists.
we're talking about the fucking industrial revolution, of course this defaults to the European perspective. Unless you wanna spit some new bars about Aztec foundries and train lines connecting meso-america in the 19th century, then the point stands. At that time, the world appeared to the industrialists of the industrial revolution to be infinite. Nor had humanity discovered the terrible side effects of fossil fuels on the atmosphere.
Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to.
Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?
Yes, just the other day I saw someone make a comment about write performance in SQLite without considering the plight of the Baltic peoples in the Northern Crusades. It was really convenient of them to do that, fucking typical.
How do you think they're enabling the mass surveillance tech? SQLite got reach bruv.
Your continued erasure of the Baltic people's continues to cut deep into my heart, and your callous candour to their plight, as you discard any chance to mention them, continues to shock me.
Nobody said anything about Europeans having a "natural right". Bad enough to derail a conversation with irrelevant political nitpicking, unforgiveable to use a strawman to do so. Boo.
GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.
Also doesn't justify doing the same damn thing again, which is exactly what all the people long on this technology fully expect to be allowed to do. Any further investment they have to do to ensure the outcome will just be chocked up to cost of doing business. And the capital funding all this is in so few hands, and in the hands in particular of such characters that don't concern themselves with not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways, that it is virtually guaranteed we're on the road to societal scale disruption. 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.
> not repeating atrocities of the past in new and interesting ways
sorry, are you suggesting that colonialism and LLMs are equivalent in terms of atrocity? I don't feel like they're really comparable.
> 'Tis the reason such inconvenient points are in need of being pounded home until they are impossible to ignore.
and what do you think is going to happen here? People so basic that this will never happen. At best you gotta create a grassroots political movement with political representation and clear legal aims and get that past the electorate. However see how the casuals lap up generated content for how ambitious an vision that is. LLMs will prevail and even if public boycotts were extreme, it will just move further and further behind the curtain and the end outcome will still be the same.
I don't see how derailing conversations on hacker news by taking issue with a particular analogy to grind a colonial axe is really furthering that. At the end of the day, regardless of the perspective of our identity, we'll get fucked by network effects and rounded out of systems by those with more influence and power. Sometimes by those who even share our perspective. So to use perspective as a point of division just further fragments what needs to be a whole to enact change.
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
Trump’s campaign had financial backing from a number of oil and gas industry investors. Following the money in this case is not very difficult. He’s just a useful idiot, the whole industry put him there and are profiting at the expense of the rest of us.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden?
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make?
China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
Responding to your edit: A wider version of the same argument might apply. The US has (historically) benefited considerably from global stability and this does seem to help with that because if basically everybody has energy independence and the overheating doesn't get much worse they might chill the fuck out?
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much?
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
Once you have PV panels, they (on average) last 20+ years - that's not being dependant, particularly when PV panels can be mass produced anywhere.
( They do not use rare earths (inverters use trace amounts) )
China cornering rare earths (for now) is an "own goal" by every country that chose to let China (and to a lesser degree Malaysia) take a hit on the toxic by products of processing concentrates.
The US is easily capable of producing it's own rare earths, it's certainly not been backwards in asking Australia to do that for it.
Gotcha, you prefer to be daily dependent on fossil fuel delivery rather than get new panels every 20 years, particularly given you're in a country seemingly incapable of manufacture and minerals processing.
The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense.
Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.
That is only marginally better in the scheme of things. They want to take farms for food out of commission in some places to replace with fragile and unreliable solar systems. Imagine installing this stuff on a large scale. If you plan to replace all the panels after 30 years and incur no losses from high winds, hail, vandals, etc., then you would need to overbuild the system by 20% at minimum. This is assuming modern panels are as durable as those old panels from the study too. 30 years ago, solar panels were built in the West and cost 10x as much as the ones we have now. So it seems reasonable to assume that brand new panels might not have the same characteristics, and be less durable. It would make a lot more sense to just put these panels on roofs and in parking lots where the real estate is already consumed, and the power can be a backup source instead of a grid-scale vulnerability.
That's a lot of guessing though, newer panels might as well be more durable and longer lasting. Even if you lose 20% in 20-30 years you don't need to replace the panel unless the cost of replacing them can be recouped within a reasonable amount of years. As long as there is more space for more panels you don't need to replace existing ones unless they stop working, so capacity just increases for decades until you reach some saturation point.
The real estate would be more valuable than the panels, presumably. So it's not like they can just keep expanding forever. As for the vulnerabilities, this is not based on guessing. We've produced solar panels in the West even recently. They are not competitive with China on cost. They are actually fragile. We are facing geopolitical challenges.
We (literally, I know where some are) have 30 year old panels and 95 year old men, their existence doesn't negate an average.
Also, PV panels are kinda non uniform in performance, long term studies show that one fifth of them perform 1.5 times worse than the rest.
Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
That's more than enough time for any G20 country to be making it's own PV production chain.
>Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
It's not sufficient. We have had plenty of time to start making all of the critical things we import, and that never happened. In most cases, these things used to be made in the West in the first place. Just because you CAN make a thing doesn't mean it makes sense. The economics of solar would be totally different if you had to pay 5x more for solar panels to replace Chinese-subsidized slave-labor-backed imports.
There are other arguments to be made against mega-scale solar. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of solar because it is on a small scale one of the best ways for an individual to get a bit of electricity without reliance on fuel supplies. But it has a lot of disadvantages at scale which make it unsuitable for many regions. Hail, snow, dust, vandals, and strategic vulnerability all make it look precarious. The supply chain concern is that much worse.
The economics of petroleum would be totally different if you had to pay 5x more for crude to replace Straight of Hormuz blocked imports. Weird that it took way less than 20 years for that to hit.
Perhaps, but solar panels will NOT get cheaper as a result of oil becoming more expensive, even if the price hike is somehow permanent. They are manufactured through an energy-intensive process. Unlike the solar manufacturing cost problem, there are solutions to the oil shortage issue for the rest of our lifetimes, most likely. We depend on oil and gas for our existence in many ways, not just for energy.
In the very long run we need to find alternative sources of energy but I think solar is not going to be that solution. Solar is most likely going to be a fringe backup alternative to nuclear power. Batteries have tremendous disadvantages. In the long run some kind of biofuel or synthetic hydrocarbon might win over batteries.
>Weird that it took way less than 20 years for that to hit.
No, it's not weird. It hit in the 70s and is an actual avoidable problem. Don't kick the hornets nest. The issue of the Strait of Hormuz was known to nearly everyone for decades, and we got a bunch of leaders all over the West who are collectively batshit crazy.
We already have an electric grid we don’t need to build a new one from scratch just replace infrastructure that gets to old and add more for whatever extra demand shows up.
Obviously other energy sources are going to exist and non solar power will be produced, but nuclear is getting fucked in a solar + battery heavy future. Nuclear already needs massive subsidies and those subsidies will need to get increasingly large to keep existing nuclear around let alone convince companies to build more.
Nuclear costs are massively skewed by the compliance costs.
Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
> Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary energy source…
Batteries don’t consume lithium, battery recycling doesn’t consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.
I don’t think humans will last that long, but if they do I’m unsure what technology they’ll be using. Theoretically dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who knows.
Compliance costs are there because the government takes up the burden of accident costs. If the government does that, you can expect the government to then have a say in how things are designed and operated.
1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
It is interesting precisely because we know it wasn’t smallpox and we know it killed a large portion of the native population in places like Mexico. 1545 was just the first year the disease was documented by Europeans. There have been a dozen epidemics of this into the 19th century and then it just disappeared, long before smallpox was eradicated. It also didn’t spread indiscriminately across North America, it was correlated with specific types of environments.
The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.
You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.
We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.
Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.
Missing entries don’t get corrected by looking at the LLM output. That only helps when the LLM makes something up from thin air or mangles the output.
Of course it’s not the kind of question you can get an objectively correct answer for, but you could come up with the correct answer for a given methodology.
You can only correct for missing entries by doing the same work you’d need to start from scratch. But after that you now have a second list to consider.
That subtilely implies it’s a decision to view oneself as a different gender from what was assigned at birth, but it’s not entirely clear it’s a choice in every case. Edge cases in biology get wild and sex assigned at birth can be a near arbitrary decision. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
Parents making major medical decisions has a huge precedent in a wide range of procedures with significant risks and consequences. Separating conjoined twins for example.
There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
> There is a logical flaw in suggesting that something that occurs with a small percentage of a population such as “detransitioning” implies anything about every member of a population.
> Child abuse exists, but doesn’t imply anything about every parent.
This is funny because that's the exact argument that transphobic opponents say about trans people themselves and the argument as to why gender fluidity or gender outside of sex doesn't exist. "Just because an extremely small number of people believe they are a different gender than their biological sex doesn't mean that gender is different from biological sex" is almost exactly the argument that transphobes use.
I think you fundamentally fail to understand what I just said. Proper unbiased random sampling allows you to create sub populations that tend to reflect the characteristics of a larger group, biased populations don’t share that relationship.
“Because some animals hibernate, all animals hibernate” is just as flawed as saying “Because only a small percentage of hibernate, no animals hibernate.” Instead the relationship is “Because some animals exist that hibernate, there exist animals that hibernate.”
I do not suggest that detransitioning can indeed extrapolate to the whole group.
I am saying that it exists, therefore at least some people regret their transition, therefore they should not be allowed to make that decision at 12, or for their parents to do so.
That’s pretty flawed argument on the face of it, very few things win a cost benefit analysis if you disregard the benefit and thus require exactly zero cost.
The real question is whether detransitioning or other negative outcomes are greater than the number of suicides prevented by allowing early transitioning, and that’s a rather more complicated hurdle to jump.
So-called "detransitions" represent way less than 1% of the trans population. In particular, the proportion of people regretting their transitions is much smaller than that of mothers regretting having their kids. They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of bigoted narratives.
So-called "trans" represent way less than 1% of the world population. ... They receive massively inflated media attention because their stories are picked up and turned into propaganda in service of [self-serving] narratives.
The vast majority of trans people wish their demographics received much less media attention... The issue is with right-wing bigots who feel it is their life missions to make their lives as miserable as possible, when they just want to be left alone.
It is quite common for babies to come out of the womb with blonde hair, only for it to darken to brown later in life. The baby isn't blonde, it just looks blonde right now.
Same with gender. Doctors observe a flavor of genitals, make a reasonable assumption, and legally assign the gender which seems appropriate.
Only in theory is it so easy to separate clerical errors from other issues.
So in practice clerical errors cause all kinds of long term havoc. Once declared dead it can be a monstrous effort to prove to various systems you are in fact alive.
Sometimes people use something called analogies or similar examples to help explain a foreign concept. In this case, the poster was trying to explain that our traits are birth do not always reflect who we are as adults. Gender is one such trait. Hair color is another.
There’s this phenomenon in this thread where commenters are taking something that’s superficially similar and then making an extreme claim that, upon inspection, does not hold up at all or is completely irrelevant to the argument being made. That is what is happening here. “An adult’s hair color can be different than what it was at birth” is a true statement, but of course is not relevant at all to the claim that one’s gender is just as malleable as one’s hair color, which is what this so-called analogy attempts to do. Real analogies do not do this, and when people deploy the above formulae it’s easy to recognize as bad faith.
Except gender is as malleable as hair color. Sex isn't, but gender is. Gender is the social expectations for a human in the context of a specific culture.
If I live in Virginia until adulthood, then move to American Samoa, my gender expression is going to radically change. I'll start wearing skirts. If I then move to Qatar, my gender expression will change again. I might still think of myself as a man through those changes, but whats expected of me and how I view myself with those cultures will shift. "What does it mean to be a man?" Is very different, globally.
So even if I consider myself a man, that definition regularly changes for different contexts. Clothing, conversational style, physical affection (it's common for men to hold hands in parts of the Middle East, and considered uncomfortable in the states.)
Given gender expression and identity can change as you transit cultures, surely you can see that some people might belong to cultures whose definition of "what does it mean to be a man" might be "whatever the fuck you want". Punk and queer subcultures, for instance, have different gender expectations than say, the Vatican.
For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA.
Incredible statement, and you contradict yourself later on in your response. If I go put on a skirt that does not change my gender. You are, perhaps intentionally, injecting commentary on differing cultural norms on gender expression in order to deflect from prior statements that are more definitive on the malleability of gender itself. There's that motte and bailey, again.
>For some cultures, genitals have little to no bearing on one's social expectations. Fit into the role that feels right, who cares about what is in your DNA
This is fantasy, but I'll play a long for a minute. If one's physical characteristics have little to no bearing on one's social expectations [for gender], then why is it necessary to implement significant physical alterations via medications and surgery to "fit" into a role that feels right?
> why is it necessary to implement significant physical alterations via medications and surgery to "fit" into a role that feels right?
Good question, there's three answers here:
1) It's not necessary. Many trans people do not want or do not get bottom surgery. It's an incredibly difficult surgery, and many folks also believe it's unnecessary to be trans.
2) The cultural group that the trans person belongs to will only accept them if they have the surgery, so the trans person must perform it to be recognized.
3) Some trans folks experience sexual dysphoria, seeing one's birth genitals causes anxiety, discomfort, and depression.
One cannot ask a baby what social role they would like to have. Typically, in approximately 97-99% of cases, that aligns with the genitalia. So no, no coin flip. It's typically done by looking at genitalia. You'll be right almost always.
Of grid homes are vastly more concerned with the energy efficiency of their appliances and thus DC refrigerators generally have more insulation. Most AC customers prefer more internal volume for food over slightly increased efficiency.
AC motors are using way more power than the puddly control boards in most home appliances. So you lose a little efficiency on conversion but being 80% efficient doesn’t matter much when it’s 1-5% of the devices energy budget. You generally gain way more than that from similarly priced AC motors being more efficient.
I agree with everything you said, except it seems like a false dichotomy. We can clearly build DC refrigerators with more or less insulation. We can clearly build them large or small. If you want to prioritize volume, then surely you could do that with DC. Right?
I know that a long time ago DC-to-DC voltage converters were very large in size, which meant AC would win on space efficiency. But unless I’m mistaken, that’s no longer the case. Wouldn’t a DC refrigerator with equivalent insulation and interior volume have nearly identical exterior dimensions as an AC refrigerator?
> Wouldn’t a DC refrigerator with equivalent insulation and interior volume have nearly identical exterior dimensions as an AC refrigerator?
Sure, but it’s important to separate what could be built from what is being built based on consumer preferences and buying habits. The average refrigerator could be significantly quieter, but how often do people actually listen to what they are buying? People buying Tesla’s didn’t test drive the actual car they were buying so the company deprioritized panel gaps. And so forth, companies optimize in ways that maximize their profits not arbitrary metrics.
Waymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it.
I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
I am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.
What levers are there, really? Waymo has a monopoly and it seems like they will for a while, so they have a lot of power, but all I really see them doing is making it expensive. Anything that makes the experience worse takes away from their ability to take market share away from Uber/Lyft.
Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance. Yet there's nothing like the FAA to enforce a minimum equipment list, maintenance intervals, or signoffs by approved mechanics.
Is there a scratch or chip in the scanner dome? Are both the primary and backup steering actuators working? Is there any damage to the vehicle fender sensors? Is dispatch allowed with some redundant components not working? If so, for how long?
Here's the FAA's Minimum Equipment List for single-engine aircraft.[1] For each item, you can see if it has to be working to take off, and, if not, how long is allowed to fix it.
There's nothing like that for self-driving land vehicles.
What's the fleet going to look like at 8 years of wear and tear?
> Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance.
That's a hyperbolic false equivalence.
Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.
The question is how broken can a car be when dispatched. What's the safe floor? See the other article today about a Tesla getting into an accident because of undetected sensor degradation.
> Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground.
Cars are more numerous and could spontaneously either plow into pedestrians, or rear-end someone, causing chain damage and, quite often, a spillage of toxic chemicals (e.g., a cistern carrying acid/fuel/pesticide).
Plus, you have a problem of hostile actors having easier access to cars compared to planes.
Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.
Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.
Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.
I don't think the vehicle performance really matters in the typical case. They're using like 20% of what the vehicle "can" do. They're probably hedging against the long tail of variance on the road somehow. Kinda like how private people can tow whatever the f they want with their pickups but in a work setting you need to keep it fairly stupid proof.
I suppose owners will be motivated to have the thing do the driving (and so seek defeat devices and such), but at least the software can have "do nothing" as a safety mode if it manages to detect that the vehicle is not configured as expected.
And maybe the software can be designed to be coupled to a vehicle dynamics model that can be updated.
The new (as of now than a year ago) Waymo cars still had human safety drivers last I saw one (a month or two ago). I also don't see them taking customers. So they do seem to slow roll hardware rollouts.
The way I see it, self-driving cars have the potential to deliver us from the burden of ownership altogether--maintenance, insurance, liability, parking, and all the rest. This hinges on availability, quality of service, pricing, and a rather large shift in the culture around cars and driving but I have hope that we can get there with time.
It's not obvious that will exist in the near future, anyway. Waymo aren't planning on selling their cars, and the economics and liability structure of self-driving strongly bias towards just running a taxi service.
We're not even a decade beyond some poorly conceived software crashing two otherwise functional aircraft into the ground and now it's going to save us all...
Because raising taxes was never part of their deficit reduction strategy. Not that it matters, being fiscally conservative was never an honestly held belief but simply a campaign slogan.
Raising taxes was never part of their deficit reduction strategy, sure. But we're talking about the fact that they cut taxes. You can't fix a deficit by reducing income.
Relative wealth disparity increases as absolute wealth increases because below a minimum level of income people starve. IE you can’t make 1/10th the median wage in a subsistence economy long term you just die. But a homeless person can survive for decades in the US on ~500$ a month.
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