Sonori @ sonori @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Firstly, the standard lifespan for modern solar panels is typically 25 to 30 years, while nearly all grid scale batteries are rated for 5000 to 8000 0-100% cycles, which is 13 to 20 years of daily cycling. If you are not completely discharging the batteries every day that lifetime can be far longer.

Secondly, it’s worth remembering that said rated lifespan is not when the pannel or battery stops working, but rather the point at which it hits 80% of the capacity it had when installed. This means that when that happens if you just do nothing for another decade or two, you are still getting well more than half of a brand new power plant’s worth of output for free, as this output is often not calculated in the cost of the plant. This also means you only need to replace panels on the same timeline as nuclear plants need far more expensive complete refurbishments.

Thirdly, yes, solar outputs less than it does in some parts of the world, which means you need proportionally more space and funding to build it. Still far less than the cost of a nuclear plant of the same output, and as for land use, I was unaware that Canada was such a small dense country, completely devoid of parking lots much less vast grassland parries.

Finally, you realize that nuclear plants have far higher operational costs than wind and solar, with the Pickering plant for instance requiring over three thousand staff to keep operating, while most solar fields don’t even have a single full time employee?

Ultimately however, the largest demonstration that nuclear will not clean up Canada’s energy is that in the quarter century that Canada had known without doubt that it must replace its oil and gas plants, it has not tried to do so with nuclear despite building nuclear reactors only getting more and more expensive with each passing year. As such, of the government has so thoroughly demonstrated it is unwilling to replace oil and gas with a more expensive option, maybe we should focus our efforts on getting them replaced with less expensive options instead.

Fun fact, the US first developed a hypersonic interceptor in the 1960s with the nuclear armed Sprint missile.

Moreover, the US demonstrated the ability to successfully identify and shoot down incoming ICBMs launched from the other side of the ocean with the Aegis system in 2012, and said system is now installed on a number of our and our key allies ships and bases.

The problem is not that it’s impossible to shoot down an ICBM, far from it, the problem is that to provide a reasonable margin of safety in a full scale nuclear extange you would need an absurd number of said missiles, as an opponent an just choose to focus all their missiles at a few key targets, so you would need to have all your cities and bases to each protected by enough missiles to take out the entirety of your adversaries arsenal by themselves.

So if you actually wanted to actually improve the US’s missile defenses, you would just be ordering more RIM 161 SM 3’s from Raytheon and Mitsubishi, not throwing money at Musk’s cronies for their ‘invaluable insight’ into this new idea.

The risk with nuclear isn’t safety, it’s in the cost overruns and ever expanding build timelines. When it at best takes ten years and twice the funding to match what battery backed solar can do in six months, there is significantly more time for things like inflation and fossil fuel funded lawsuits to turn what is already a questionably profitable investment into a significant loss.

When the primary thing limiting the energy transition is lack of funding, it makes sense to foucus said funding on renewables which can be built cheaply and quickly over more expensive and slower build methods like Nuclear, conventional Hydro, and deep Geothermal.

No, That’s a different object that just needed confirmation of orbit. This is 2024YR4.

Do Japan and Italy just not count as part of the world? I mean Japan took over half of Asia and the Pasific while Italy took the Mediterranean countries. Germany took over part of northern Europe and helped a bit of North Africa.

Given the sudden change in course after being instructed to cross behind the CRJ, the pilot likely misidentified the plane before the CRJ in the line that was just landing as one they were being instructed to watch out for, and because they were focused on the wrong plane didn’t pick out the right one directly in front of them against the city lights. Between the limited FOV of night vision goggles and the light they needed to see not moving at all from their perspective this seems more like a demonstration of the limits of see and avoid at night than gross negligence on the part of the pilot.

All that being said, the helicopter appears to have been a hundred and fifty feet above the upper bond for that route, but when the routes only two hundred feet high to begin with you don’t exactly have very much in the way of a margin for error either way.

Because when you’re whole job is flying vip’s around DC at night, it helps to actually fly the route you’re being trained to fly at some point.

As for why the heavily used helicopter route goes right beneath the approach path, that’s because people mapped out all the routes helicopters can fly without going through restricted airspace, and along the river is one of the most useful of them, same reason as the runway’s approach path follows the river.

Counterpoint, I grew up in a smallish town in Idaho and was still absolutely surrounded by Democrats. State wide, only sixty percent of the voting age population actually turned out, and of those one out of every three people voted against Trump.

Hell, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in some countries and again, this is fucking Idaho.

This means that if you talk to an a Idahoan at random, there is a more than fifty percent chance they either largely already agree with you, or they are largely insulated from and not paying attention to politics and thusly susceptible to being swayed with the right approach and concrete examples of what Trumps doing to fuck them and their friends over specifically.

Left wing ideas and policy are still far more popular among the general public, which is why Republicans have to lie about them constantly.

Look for your local anarchist bookstore, look at what your counties Democrats actually organized, especially things like local pride events, show up, and network/make friends.

As is fun to note, there are more Democrats living in Texas than New York state, so the idea you should just give up on finding any around you because you live in a red state instead of one where the numbers are reversed is honestly rather absurd.

Have human reflex’s been updated since the speed limits were set? The distance a car travels in the time it takes for you to see something like a pedestrian while driving, recognize it as a hazard, press the brake pedal, and then for the car itself to respond to your command and stop is one of the primary determinants of a safe speed.

About the only thing on that front that’s changed since the 70s have been improved breaks, but that’s been largely balanced out by heavier vehicles so stopping distance hasn’t been radically improved.

Higher speed still means longer stopping distances, longer distances between vehicles, wider minimum safe curves, shorter reaction times, more energetic collisions, and a larger gap between the speed limit and the maximum possible speed in rain, snow, and fog, which have remained nearly identical since the vehicles of the 50’s.

Vehicle on vehicle collisions have gotten more survivable when things do go wrong, but surely we should rejoice that people are more likely to survive a trip rather than increasing speeds until just as many die as they did before? I mean personally I would much rather live to see my destination than save a few minutes.

This also all just talking about highways, on all other streets and roads the six year old running out into the middle of the road has not gotten any more crashworthy than they were in the seventies, and slight reductions in speed have been proven to result in massive increases in pedestrian survivability.

I mean the Gospel also says it’s easier to put a camel through the eye of a sowing needle than for any rich person to not be justly suffer eternal torture for what they chose to do to others with their limited time on Earth. So if they think this is a hard left liberal just wait until one of these propagandists actually reads the Bible and all it’s talk about unconditional love, support, and liberation.

The best part is the campaign to rename it to Denali was led by Alaskan Republicans who hated that it was named after a man who never set foot in the state.

As is traditional, the Republicans drafted a law, got bipartisan support to push it through congress, and then after it passed publicly flip flopped their support for the law they just wrote when they realized they could score political points by complaining about it while the Democrats would hold to their agreed support.

This way the Republicans get the law they want, get to claim any benefits of said law by pointing to their voting record, and get to blame anything people don’t like about it on Democrats, all at the same time.

Meanwhile there are no consequences to their bad faith actions because the Democrats will just bend over and take it in the name of bipartisanship and working across the aisle because half of them are Republicans, they just don’t want to call themselves Republicans and leadership is willing to fight tooth and nail to protect said members.

From my youtube understanding the 737-800 doesn’t have a RAT, instead using a battery system to power the DC bus, some controls, and minimal avionics. Also for some reason the FDR and CVR are powered only from the AC buses, and so would not have power in a two engine out scenario until the pilots manually started the APU and it came online. It also predates the requirement for said systems to have an independent backup battery.

This means things are still consistent with a staggered double bird strike or with a single bird strike followed by the pilots shutting down the wrong engine as well as some of the more out there theory’s.

Investigators might still be able to recover enough switch positions to figure out what happened in the air, but it’s going to be a hard investigation.

The major takeaway and factor that turned this from a major incident into a catastrophic one however is still that putting the localizer on a concrete reinforced berm for typhoon resistance is a major safety hazard.

It also helps against what tends to be modeled and seen as the largest cause of injury during a nuclear scale explosion like that seen in Beirut, namely shards of glass, though it definitely helps survive falling beams in timber framed buildings.

Remember, thanks to the wonders of the inverse square law you are statistically far more likely to be in the area that gets light to moderate blast damage from the pressure wave rather than core of the blast.

So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.

So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?

Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.

Personally, I prefer ‘Tradition is the rotting corpse of wisdom’, but that works too.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.

The silver lining is that everyone from Lemmy, to youtube, to Bernie seems to have correctly identified the problem early on this time around, so much of the anger is being directed towards the party establishment for screwing up the easy win as it is towards Trump. The question is whether or not that anger can be turned towards productive action to gain control of the DNC, or will be quashed by the establishment once again.

Time, and agitation, will tell.