thebestaquaman @ thebestaquaman @lemmy.world

Posts

11

Comments

596

Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm impressed by how many good forklift-stories there are here, I never would have guessed how much crazy shit you guys go through! But this one wins the prize- that sounds sketchy as fuuuck..

Which is a comparison that makes complete sense. When you say that someone is leading the way, you are clearly referring to them being at the forefront at the time when they were leading the way. Any system that was a trail blazer 100+ years ago should be outdated by now, unless progress stopped or went backwards in the meantime.

Sir, this is a shitposting community.

The transformer is dimensioned based on the max capacity of the houses in the neighbourhood, which are standardised.

100 houses with 200 A main fuse each? Supplied by a 20 000 A transformer (plus safety margin obviously).

If cryptoboy wants a non-standard main fuse size that requires an upgrade of the transformer, he has to pay for that.

This is definitely a simplification, which is why I pointed out the possibility of distributing costs among the consumers based on how much of the total consumption each consumer is responsible for.

I think the major point still stands though: In order to take advantage of production at scale, you need to build some minimal size production facility. For stuff like hydropower, that minimum can be quite high, depending on available geography.

If marginal cost is zero, it makes most sense to charge some form of flat rate to have access to power, rather than a consumption-based price, because it's not necessarily feasible to downscale the facility, even if there's low demand (in that sense, hydro or nuclear would be better examples than solar).

The details of how this more or less flat rate should be distributed among consumers is a discussion in itself (should those living further away pay more since they require more power lines? etc.)

You're making the argument yourself here:

A 1000 A transformer costs more than a 10 A transformer

Yes. And that is true regardless of how heavily it is used, which means you should pay a flat rate for maintenance of the infrastructure you use, and another rate for the power you draw.

Residential buildings use standardised infrastructure, which then leads to the same standard fee for everyone. Industry that needs heavier equipment pays a different fee, because they require different infrastructure.

No, they're arguing that the price of power should be split:

• A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
• A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)

This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it's not an untested concept.

Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I've never heard of that option being used before.

I'm all for eating the rich, but I'm still going to point out why exactly this can make sense.

Let's say you have an energy company that owns a solar farm, you're not looking to turn a profit, just provide clean energy to the world: You produce electricity at effectively zero cost.

However, your solar farm needs to be paid down within its lifetime of ≈30 years, which is independent of energy consumption. So you decide to charge a rate that ensures 1/30th of your production costs are paid back each year, so that you can replace the solar farm after 30 years.

This effectively means you are charging a constant rate for access to energy supply, independent of consumption. This again means that the rate per kWh goes up if average consumption goes down.

Individual customers can still save money by reducing consumption relative to the other customers, but nobody saves money if everyone reduces consumption. This makes complete sense when your "marginal cost" (i.e. the cost of producing energy) is negligible compared to the initial investment of building the power plant, and also applies more or less to nuclear, hydropower, and wind power as well.

Given that this is not an ideal organisation though, I wouldn't put it past them to increase the rate such that it more than offsets the decrease in consumption, thereby increasing their profit. In that case: Fuck them.

I just think we should be aware that our current understanding of energy prices as linked to day-to-day consumption (because the primary expense for a thermal power plant is the cost of fuel), will become outdated as we move to clean energy sources. At some point, we should be paying a near-flat rate for "access to power", rather than a rate for each unit of power consumed.

I wholeheartedly disagree A long password like "this is the best password for email" is near-impossible to brute-force, while being extremely easy to remember. A short password with special characters / numbers / lowercase + capital letters, like "Emai1_Passw0rd!" is far easier to brute-force, and a lot harder to remember (which letters did I capitalize again? Which ones did I swap with numbers? What symbol did I throw in?)

Optimal password requirements are ... nothing. Because every requirement you put in reduces the parameter space an attacker needs to search. Second best is setting a minimum number of characters, because a bunch of people are stupid and will use single-letter passwords if you let them.

For added effect, read the right-hand side in the voice of a British aristocrat.

Not running any LLMs, but I do a lot of mathematical modelling, and my 32 GB RAM, M1 Pro MacBook is compiling code and crunching numbers like an absolute champ! After about a year, most of my colleagues ditched their old laptops for a MacBook themselves after just noticing that my machine out-performed theirs every day, and that it saved me a bunch of time day-to-day.

Of course, be a bit careful when buying one: Apple cranks up the price like hell if you start specing out the machine a lot. Especially for RAM.

Probably depends on country, but where I'm from, you can't use lethal force unless there's danger to "life or health", that is, you can't use lethal force against a home invader unless it's absolutely necessary.

Besides, the most lethal weapon in most peoples homes are the fire extinguisher and kitchen knives.

To be frank: You would never get away with killing a landlord that locked themselves into your apartment while you were home, unless they tried to harm you in some way. Not a burglar either for that matter.

Disclaimer: Obviously, if you confront a burglar, and it develops to a violent confrontation, lethal force can be justified. However, you will be hard pressed on whether you had the option to remove yourself from the situation before needing to resort to lethal force.

Had a landlord that I discovered had been in my apartment without letting me know. Luckily, tenants have quite good legal protections where I'm from. Among other things, we can have the lock changed by a locksmith and bill the landlord for it if they've done just that. So I sent them an email with the contact info for a local locksmith, along with the legal text saying I could do just that, and let them know they had burned through any goodwill with their first infraction (which I documented). They apologised and didn't do it again.

I'm just waiting for the moment when a country exposed to "accidental" cable cutting, or attacks using water jets from the Chinese coast guard or similar, just responds by shooting first and asking questions later.

Like: You cut our cables/blocked our atoll from getting resupply, etc... put a 50mm in their face and carry on. Let them do the responding.

"Oh no, they were conducting acts of war and were in our way, so we sank them. What are you gonna do about it? Maybe stop doing that?"

To me this feels like you could say "Guys,

<insert sentence directed at a group>

I can get not wanting to pay for a feature you actively dislike

It's fascinating how people, even without knowing anything about the "why", just realised that whoever hangs around a lot in those specific areas gets sick, and then they're able to retain that information for many generations.

One of my favourites from aboriginal oral history I that, apparently, they have a history about how they used to cross to some peninsula over dry land, but that the sea slowly came in and made the area inaccessible. Geologists have found that they're accurately telling the story of sea level rise that happened around 50 000 years ago, and I seem to remember that they've found archaeological evidence that backs the story as it's been told through generations up to this day.

When did "people with vaginas" unironically become a way to refer to anyone, especially as an alternative to "female"?

My wrists though... if I'm using a laptop without peripherals, it's because I currently don't have access to peripherals, and need to use the keyboard and trackpad on my laptop...

Yes, wool is definitely a flame retardant. I seem to remember that while cotton fibres will burn up, woven cotton textiles will burn only poorly and slowly. That is, they are flame retardant, but not flame resistant. Most synthetic clothes will first melt, and if it's hot enough that the melt burns, they'll burn quite well.