cosmic_skillet @ cosmic_skillet @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

In the U.S., buying is a mistake if you don't think you're going to stay for more than 5 years.

Rather than selling the house, you can consider renting it out if you move. Depending on the terms of your mortgage, you may be only roughly breaking even when you first start renting it out, but after a couple years rent will likely increase so that you're cash flow positive and you're also building up equity in the house.

If you're single and childless, but anticipate maybe getting married and having children later, do you buy the place that works for a single person today, or do you buy the place that might work for raising kids 10 years in the future?

If you've bought a small starter house 10 years ago then you have lots of options when you want to upgrade. Your starter house should have appreciated and a good chunk of your mortgage payments have gone to increasing your own equity.

So you could sell the starter house and reinvest the profits into a larger house. If you do a 1031 exchange then you avoid paying capital gains taxes, so the starter house essentially functions as an appreciating savings account.

Or you could do a cash out refinance and keep the starter house as a rental property and use the excess equity to invest in the new house.

These are all good options to have. It's going to be rare where you're upset that you bought a starter house 10 years ago and are now looking to upgrade. That's pretty much an ideal position to be in.

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https://chargie.org/

The existential dread over losing your loyalty points...

Super interesting

I mean, yeah, but isn't it carbon neutral? The coffee comes from the earth, returns to the earth. And couldn't coffee also be used for biogas?

Yes you're right, the overall process of a plant growing and then the plant dying and breaking down is carbon neutral. Sequestering the carbon would interrupt this process and make it carbon negative. This is generally speaking a Good Thing since so many other processes are carbon positive.

There are currently many efforts around the world looking to ramp up biochar production and use in remediating agricultural soils. For example, in many places after harvest time, leftover wheat stalks are gathered up and burned to get rid of the waste. This creates a lot of smoke and air pollution. Some companies are instead picking up the waste, transforming them into biochar and then tilling it back into the soil. https://farmland.org/biochar/

A Spent Coffee Ground project could be analogous to this.

What further puzzles me is how they decided to use coffee. Surely there are many other waste products that have the required structure. Is coffee the first thing they tried?

Could probably also use other sources of biochar. Since you're replacing sand, it may be an advantage that the coffee grounds are already ground up very finely. I'd imagine something like wheat stalks or corn cobs might be too large to replace sand and require further processing.

So sounds like... a good name?

Here's a video of that .exe running:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIgpWGVvfjA&t=203

Hmm, I guess, sort of... The details in animal locomotion are really interesting and the gist of it is that there are different kinds of "swimming" and different kinds of "flying" and while some of these share similar mechanics, not all do.

As a quick example, there are some fish that power their swimming mostly with drag. With this kind of swimming they push their fins backwards on the power stroke, propelling themselves forwards by generating a lot of drag in the water. Then they need to retract their fins, and to minimize drag they might collapse the fin so it has a small area and produces less backwards thrust.

A duck's foot works the same way. When pushing back the foot is splayed out, allowing the webbing to maximize drag. When retracting the foot it collapses down, to minimize drag. This kind of swimming is mechanically different from most forms of flying.

Contrast this with the fins of sharks that lay flat and have a single leading edge that cuts through the water. These fins work by creating lift and don't get pushed and pulled through the water. This is also how penguin wings work and why it's often said they "fly" through the water. So this kind of swimming is very much like flying.

In the air, wings generally need to generate lift to keep the animal airborne, while this isn't strictly necessary under water. Also water is very dense, so many animals generate a good deal of thrust by undulating their bodies and rear fins. This isn't generally very effective in air.

Here's a good Wikipedia article about this kind of stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_locomotion

This is amazing news

This article is not clear. I'm not sure if this issue is directly related to the planned waste water release since that hasn't happened yet. Here's a few scenarios off the top of my head:

1. Ground & rainwater continue to seep into the power plant and become contaminated. Maybe some of this water is not collected and instead flows out into the breakwater, continuously carrying additional contamination with it. In this case the release or non-release of the separately stored & treated water is not related to this issue.
2. The stored water is leaking out and contaminating the breakwater area. In this case the contamination could indicate that releasing this water is a bad idea because it will release more Cs contamination. Or maybe not, because I don't think the currently stored water has been treated yet for release. The treatment plans for the stored water includes filtering out Cs.
3. The contamination in the breakwater is leftover from the initial disaster a decade ago and not new. Cs-137 has a half life of ~30 years, so most of it would still be around and it's known that a lot of this stuff got into the seabed sediment in the area. In this case it again would not be an indication about anything related to the planned water release.
4. Some other scenario.

Unfortunately there's just not enough information in this article to say for certain what the origin of the Cs contamination is and what consequences that holds.

It's free

I've been happy with duck

https://duckduckgo.com/email

I think you need to use duckduckgo browser to set it up, but afterwards you can use the API with something like bitwarden and generate email aliases from there. They also have a chrome extension that will allow you to generate addresses from email fields in your browser.

It's free and addresses are all through the shared duck.com domain. Worth checking out.

It's attributed to Jonathan Swift, 1721

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/10/reason-out/

Goddamn Google+ and Vine sucking up my data

Lol

Yet another example of modern day slavery

But where is this 50% efficiency number coming from? Are you familiar with the Shockley–Queisser limit on PV efficiency?

I mean I could "expect" internal combustion engines to be at 75% efficiency by now given the billions of dollars of R&D spending over a century and a half of time, but that would be ignoring things like the Carnot cycle.

Besides, the most important metric for solar power is typically cost, not efficiency. We do have multi junction solar cells with efficiencies approaching 50%, but they're not widely used because they're incredibly expensive. It's a much better deal to use solar modules that are half as efficient, but 1/10th the cost.

The final point I want to make is that a single percentage point gain in absolute efficiency is huge when the overall efficiency is low. A single percentage point gain in absolute efficiency is small when overall efficiency is high. For example, if you increase a 5% efficiency solar module to 6% then you've actually increased energy output by 20%. That's a big improvement. But if your base rate efficiency is already 50% then going to 51% represents only a 2% increase in energy output. Not really a big deal. This is why improving a 20% efficiency module to 25% is a big deal. It's a 25% increase in energy output for the same cost. For energy economics that's insane, even though it's "only" a 5% increase in absolute efficiency.

By far the biggest story in solar energy over the past few decades has been the collapse in costs to the point that large scale solar projects are selling electricity at ~3¢/kwh. This means that in many locations it's now cheaper to build brand new solar generation than to operate old, fully capitalized coal power plants. The other big point is that given the scalable nature of solar PV, new projects can be up and running within a year of breaking ground. Now obviously intermittent energy sources like PV without storage are not the same as a baseload coal plant, but this crude cost comparison represents an ongoing seismic shift in energy markets.

But why are you surprised? What's driving your intuition to expect it to be higher?

Oh yay