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When I think back to when I was 10 and every boy I knew idolized Norris and I instinctively hated his guts I feel better about myself.

You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.

Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.

I think 1600 watts of solar panels produces enough energy to drive an EV 12000 miles a year. Your car though would have to be always plugged in during the day. But probably 3200 watts would be enough for a car used for commuting to be charged mornings, evenings, and weekends.

> Your car though would have to be always plugged in during the day

Or just have a second stationary battery to store up the energy while you're away during the day.


Two cars, much cheaper than a second battery pack. And you have a supply of rolling spare parts.

This is probably the case right now, but I have faith the market will mature and fix that absurdity.

i was thinking used where you can get a Nissan Leaf which is a 75 kW, 20 kWh rolling battery pack.

That's no longer the case. You can buy Chinese rack batteries for prices approaching $100/kWh.

Are they UL certified? If so do you have a brand you can point me at by any chance?

> UL certified?

Not generally, although some are. The UL certification will put you at the top end of the $100 - $200 / kWh range I mentioned. Eco-worthy and UZ are two brands with such certification.

Will Prowse reviews a bunch of these.


Thanks :)

Not to be picky, but 1600w is a really small solar system. These days a panel is around 500w.

Where I stay 8 panels is a "small" system. I have 20. In summer that generates 85% of my household needs. (It would be 100% but I deliberately only got a very small 5kw battery.)

In winter it's less (mostly because of heating requirements). But I have space for some more panels, so I'm running the numbers. (I'm currently getting 16% return on capital spent, and there's a point of diminishing returns.)

Obviously ymmv. There are roof, and land, constraints. There are financial constraints etc. But being off-grid, or partially off grid, is very possible for a lot of folk.


Just making the point that the cost of solar panels to power a car is a fraction of the purchase price of the car.

If the world can afford to manufacture 100 million light vehicles a year it can afford to manufacture the solar panels to power them.


I just remember buying 16MB from a wholesaler operating out of a nondescript warehouse. I'm pretty sure they had a runner delivering your order from elsewhere in the building.

The PCB layout program wasn't cutting it with Win 3.1 and 8MB. The bloat has me always circling back to that.

Apple when faced with the issue of C++ obsolescence started working on Swift. Google developed go. In theory Microsoft has C# but can't seem to settle on GUI toolkit. So now they've decided to use webshitten for applications. I think it's possible that is going to sink Microsoft.


> webshitten

Thanks for this term, I vote for it to be the technical term of the last decade.


Not even microsoft can sink microsoft.

Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.

Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.

Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.


In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.

The best thing an individual can do against, say, the advertising industry, is to become an important person in an advertising marketplace and then destroy it. You spend 30 years to become CTO at Google and then you set the billing system to charge every customer $1,000,000, right before you drop an EMP in the biggest DC.

Limiting your family size has concrete outcomes, having a big family and hoping you can impart the right values so they go onto have an positive impact is no guaranteed. You can hope your child goes onto develop a fusion reactor that fits in a storage container but the likelyhood is they won't be.

In my opinion it's a way to justify your own (perfectly fine) selfish desire to have a child.


Large family sizes dilute family wealth and leave children at a disadvantage to their better capitalized peers.

The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.

Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.

Only if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.

There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.

For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.

London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.

Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:

Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.

Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.

Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.

Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.


> in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride

That's much more than taxis cost in the UK, and pretty expensive even for the Netherlands. You have great cycling infrastructure, and public transport though.

Renting a car is an affordable alternative to ownership, if you need to go to occasional concerts or birthday parties, and public transport happens to be inconvenient for your specific destination. I did that for years - the rental company would deliver and collect from my workplace, so it's super-easy.

> If your children play football you really need a car.

A friend of mine used to ferry his son 1000s of km per year to ice-hockey matches around the country, so I know what you mean. I don't understand it though - if the whole team is travelling, why don't they just rent a bus? Personally, I don't think it's healthy for a child's hobby to consume so much of the parents' time - of course, your choice.


You can forget about going to a concert [..] or catching an early flight without one

Those are really bad examples. Quite a lot of venues are easier to reach by public transport than by car, e.g. Carré, Luxor, Tivoli, Diligentia, Vera; even Pinkpop provides a dedicated shuttle service. And Schiphol has 24h train service, nobody cycles to the airport unless they work there.


Schiphol has 24 hours train service that reaches maybe 10-15 percent of the Dutch population. If your flight lands past 23:00 chances are slim you are going home by train.

Same goes for concerts that end after 22:00. You need private transport to get you home if you are in the 80% of the population that doesn’t have public transit late in the evening and night (or Sundays)


Doesn't everyone bike everywhere in the Netherlands?

No. Only short trips to the supermarket and such. Most of the trips are done by car.

Most cities in The Netherlands aren’t high density and the Dutch are king of urban sprawl hence the high amount of bicycles. In other European cities with better planning people walk instead.


He obviously was talking about long distance trips, not just daily grocery shopping to the nearest supermarket.

You don't need a car for football matches. You need a car for convenience because [fill lazy reason]. And if one person rents a van you can take half the team...

Depends on the public transport network where you live. I used to work with someone who commuted from London to Cambridge (yes, that way around). And in Berlin, someone else who commuted from half way to Poland.

Won't work everywhere, e.g. from what I saw when visiting I don't foresee US cities rapidly integrating enough good public transport to properly replace cars within themselves, and from what I've heard about how municipal organisation works in the US even less so for a convenient and well integrated intercity network, but it can be done.


halfway from Berlin to Poland is like a 30 minute ride on regional train. It's quite close to the border.

It's also 100 km to the border. The point is, we actually have trains (and busses) that can do this here. It's actually possible.

I visited Davis CA few times around a decade ago for comparison; Go to google maps, choose public transit, and use Davis as an origin or destination while dragging the other end around and see how many routes it can even find.

The rate of successes I get in the Sacramento conurbation are about the same as the rate of success I get for rural Brandenburg, but for most of the rest central Valley (with a handful of exceptions), Google mostly couldn't find a route at all.

By this measure, California's central valley is worse-connected for long-distance public transport even than rural Wales (measured by "can I route-find to Aberystwyth?").


You can use public transportation, bikes, car pooling, taxis and rentals for your rare-use needs, and its usually cheaper than owning and operating a vehicle.

I'd say that the vast majority of people who live in a city both work, and socialise almost exclusively there.

Unfortunately not. Average distance to work is 19,9 kilometers. That is well outside the city they live in. Most people can’t afford to live in the city they work in. In Amsterdam my entire team lived outside the city.

Unless they lived in another big city, this is completely off-topic. Suburbs tend to have hit-or-miss public transit access, and the vast majority of people who live in a big city work in that big city (20 kilometers away would usually be just another district within the same city).

I don't. Long distance trains exist too, and I can watch a movie or eat at a restaurant car there rather than focus on the road.

My favorite is having beer with friends in a restaurant car. It's like going to a pub but with awesome view!

There are things that could hurt them a lot more than ignoring them.

You're being coy.

Perhaps someone should clarify though that most of us are looking for legal means to rattle the shackles of our (Tr/B)illionaire overlords.


Legally, you can do a lot more than ignoring. If you have any talent for it, becoming an activist (say a youtuber) rallying people against whatever you believe is bad, can be pretty powerful. A single person (again, with some talent for public speaking etc.) has a real chance of making meaningful change this way.

Rallying people to do what? Boycotts? They have some effect, but never enough. The most influential YouTuber I can think of is Louis Rossmann, and you know, he's not a YouTuber, he's a MacBook repair guy who took up YouTube.

No, not boycotts.

The influencial youtubers I think of actually can shape political debate and thus policy - what they say, if it gains enough popularity, sometimes seeps into the political agenda of the ruling party (which is always looking to "score points" with the voters and has its ears to the ground listening which issues and points people are currently responding to). It's basically like being a columnist of an influential newspaper, except you don't need to have the right connections to become one.


The political establishment is savvy enough to score points on things they don't care about and ignore voters on things they do care about. That's why one party supports LGBTQ pride and the other opposes it, but they both support the genocide. LGBTQ pride doesn't really affect politicians' power, genocide does.

Depends on which powers for each specific choice.

Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.


The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.

I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.

The real eco hippies were fueling a 40 year old mercedes on fry oil. Powers that be want you to replace all sources of oil dependent product with another oil dependent product (after all, EVs depend on oil making plastic and grease a cheap commodity). They don’t want you to buy something they already sold to the unwashed masses decades ago. They want you to buy new thing. Never mind old thing still works.

Buy a used EV, best of both worlds.

Problems with unaligned pointers are basically a hardware defect. Signed overflow is an issue because academics are unhappy computers only can do finite math.

Issue with types and C is while the compiler knows about them the standards committees don't want you to be able to. If C had first class types more people would abandon C++ and that can't be allowed to happen.


The concept of alignment isn't a hardware defect, maybe limitation, but the reason why alignment is a thing has to do with the fact that in chip interconnects transfer blocks. You cannot perform misaligned memory accesses against RAM.

A similar limitation exists when peforming accesses against the cache, but at a much finer granularity.

For bytes, the alignment restriction obviously exists in the 8 bit level. You have one output byte and 64 multiplexer inputs.

If you scale this up to 8 bytes, you will need a lot of 64 Input multiplexers.

But even if you can take the silicon area hit, there is the problem of crossing cache lines and pages.

In the end, you cannot divide memory into blocks and allow primitives to cross those blocks without requesting both blocks at the same time. That's an inefficient waste of resources so why support the wasteful usecase in the first place?


With modern CPU's unaligned accesses only matter when it straddles a cache line address not a register address.

Unaligned pointers are undefined behavior even when the hardware fully supports unaligned access, because you're violating the type's rules.

To be honest, I've never seen much indication that the C and C++ committees are particularly fond of each other. They sometimes coordinate, but they're mostly content letting each other evolve in different directions. C is the way it is only after a long process of evolution away from the bits and bytes of BCPL into the strictly typed language we got from ASNI.


Undefined behavior according to WG14 but perfectly fine on most architectures. Even on architectures that don't support it (what the fuck ARM cortex) the compilers do support it.

Yes, that's exactly the point I've been making. It's undefined today because C has a type system and that type system has this arbitrary rule, not because there are implementation constraints necessitating it (where it could just be implementation defined instead).

I think housing isn't an ordinary durable good the way economists think. If there was a shortage of toasters you couldn't make money by churning toasters like you can if there is a shortage of housing. But you could make money importing toasters. With housing when there is a shortage the effective way to make money is by using access to cheap credit to bid prices higher.

So a housing price spiral is a result of a properly functioning market.


There is a tenancy to believe Israel is a vassal state that does the US's bidding. The actual record says not really.

And also Israel is only able to resist being conquered by it's Arab neighbors because of the US. Record says also no.


If the latter is no, I do hope the US finally ends military aid to Israel. I really doubt it will happen, but if the record says it should be ok, then that would be really great.

Israel itself is in favor of this, to reduce US influence on its arms exports. Everybody wins.

Its just sleight of hand.

Congress quietly moves to integrate US and Israeli militaries

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-us-military/

Netanyahu Pushes Congress to Adopt a New Structure for US Military Aid to Israel

https://truthout.org/articles/netanyahu-pushes-congress-to-a...


The "fuse the militaries / more susceptible to Israeli whims" framing seems to be the hand-wavy part of those articles. If you read the referred Section 224 you'd see details of the expanded scope of cooperation in tech domains and info sharing, and also in transparency and oversight.

Yeah the goal isn't to actually end military aid to Israel, it's to move the military aid under the vague DoD accounting process so nobody outside the DoD knows what's actually being sent.

The Obelisk at the Vatican weighs in at 360 tons. And was moved from Egypt to Rome by the Romans around 40AD. And then moved to it's present location in the 1586. The Romans moved at least 8 Egyptian Obelisks to Rome and also commissioned a couple.

The only thing really amazing about the pyramids is how many couple of ton blocks they carved out and transported. It's around 250 blocks a day for 25 years.


A thing of note, the Nile banks have been one the most fertile arable land around the whole mediterranean, that's why it was invaluable to the roman empire. Why it matters is that only in a place where you have very fertile land can you afford to have sooooo many people not working in agriculture and feed them to work for your tyrannical pet project

There’s one in London too.

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

I do see how France and Sweden have lowest GHG emissions in EU by building both nuclear and renewables. I see other countries like Denmark/Germany who decided to go with ren alone. Germany spent on EEG double than entire french nuclear fleet. We can see the results. There's no race here. There's no imagine if. We already have historical data. We already have results on hand

I don't see that?

France: 4.12 tons CO2 per capita Denmark: 4.34 tons CO2 per capita

and the electricity price for industrial costumers is also close to identical:

France: 0.153 EUR/kWh (0.130 EUR/kWh without taxes) Denmark 0.122 EUR/kWh (0.121 EUR/kWh without taxes)

CO2 data from EUs EDGAR: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2025?vis=co2pop#emissi...

Price data from: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...


Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

Maybe have a look at that by now old old image. Notice the red square. It is a bit larger today, but the principle stays the same

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DESERTEC-Map_large.jpg

There are enough roofs and waste lands for solar.

But out of curiosity, would you like to live next to a nuclear plant/uran mining/radioactive waste deposit?


Sorry is the idea here that we’d cover the Sahara in PVs? The Sahara desert, in Africa, the most dysfunctional continent on the planet. And, what, we’d lay a billion miles of transmission lines? You can’t keep reliable electricity running in those countries today because of how frequent copper theft is. You think building a solar farm is going to work?

This is the problem with PV boosters. It’s just fantasy about a supranational government doing mega projects, when in reality you can just build reactors today for an order of magnitude less in complexity and real estate. “Would I live next to a reactor” of course I would, because if I had that option my electricity would be free. Asking me if I’d want to live next to a uranium mine, well would you live next to a lithium mine? Disingenuous environmental activists have been using this bullshit argument for 30 years now, it doesn’t work on me.


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