• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Chicago recently built a bunch of solar to directly power all city government buildings, so researching that and politely taking your town or city into doing that plus battery storage might be worth a try just from a cost point of view.

    Similar initiatives have worked at a municipal level for things like fleet electrification and heat pumps, though this is all stuff that was a much easier sell if you got the program moving last year.

    Other people mentioned congress, but while important to keep the pressure up for 2026 in the near term focus especially on talking with your state legislature and especially city council members.

    Look up YIMBYism, show up to your public meetings, be polite and ideally bring some friends, remember that even in large cities major projects are routinely rewritten or expanded at the behest of the one or two people who showed up to every meeting with a clear, this is what I want out of the project and this is the easy way to do it.

    Join your local left leaning orgs like DSA and mutual aid groups, even local progressive dem orgs. Even if they have some shit takes, which they inevitably will, remember that in the end doing good in the next few weeks and months is worth infinitely more than everyone agreeing on theory for what happens in the hypothetical world beyond late stage capitalism or how a few dozen people from Pittsburg are going to bring about an end to imperialism.

    Talk about the importance of growning your towns bike lanes into a cohesive and safe network people would trust their twelve year old kid to get from home to school to visiting you at your workplace on, strike up conversations and network with the people who also raise good questions and requests at public meetings, and most importantly listen to what the people that have been working on advocating for these these things for decades, they have more experience, political capital in town, and may be convinced to help with your thing like municipal electrification.







  • Nuclear was the correct answer, when climate change entered the scientific community in the 50s, it was the correct answer when it allowed France to nearly hit net zero for energy in the 70s, and it was the correct answer when the UN agreed we were all going to die unless we stopped burning all fossil fuels in the 90s.

    The problem is that ever since the 2010s it’s been outpaced by improvements in wind and especially solar. Not coincidentally this is about the time that oil and gas companies stoped campaigning against Nuclear and suddenly started insisting that it was the only possible alternative.

    It makes sense to keep what we have running and do some refurbishments, but in a world where the primary limit on the amount of solar and wind we can build is funding its high cost alone means going nuclear means far less clean energy, to say nothing of the decades more CO2 output from the coal and gas plants running in the years it would take to build such plants compared to the months it takes for a new solar or wind farm.







  • +1 for FS multi mode fiber, it’s worked well enough for me.

    I know FS’s SFP-10GMSR-85 (Intel) (formerly SFP-10GSR-85) works in my Mikrotik CRS317-1G-16S+, but don’t know either way about the Ubiquiti transceivers.

    I’m afraid I dont have any real experience with fiber keystones one way or the other.

    I will say that if you have the space in the run or are opening up walls, help out you’re future self and run it in some smurf tube, though obviously that’s not always possible without massively expanding the amount of drywall work.




  • 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.


  • It’s worth noting that this state of affairs is highly localized. Like my power company (Public Utility District) is run by the county government distributing power generated by a federal government organization(Bonneville Power Administration). Electricity is at sub 9c per kwh plus 52 dollars a month for a line. The BVA also somehow manages to keep its transmission lines trimmed despite a bunch of heavy forest.

    Not only is a better system possible, it has provided power to millions for nearly a century right here in America a few hours drive away. Cali could absolutely copy Washington’s homework, but that would involve actually undoing something Ragen did to benefit private industry at taxpayers expense and so Newsom isn’t exactly rushing to make it happen.



  • 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.


  • Yes, the article was generally pretty clear that energy is synonymous with electricity, which is why it’s core thesis that renewables fundamentally cannot replace fossil fuel energy is such a wild assertion.

    Yes we need to provide a decent quality of life, and that can be done with far less than north amarican standards of energy consumption, but the massive increase in energy consumption we’re seeing in India and China arn’t due to western levels of decadence, but rather the proliferation of things like air conditioning in places with fatal heat waves and the like.

    Indeed illustratively these places are known for their abundant, frequent, and highly used mass transit systems and walkable cities. Their energy demand is still growing at an significant pace, not shrinking. As given their sheer size these are the nations which have a far larger impact on climate change, these are the places where degrowth needs to have the largest impact.

    It’s also worth noting that even if you just want to apply degrowth to US cities in the method you suggested, well we know from examples like the Netherlands that it can be done and car centric cities converted into a place with just half of all residents own a car. We also know from that example that it took fifty years of dedicated government support and heavy local support to get that far. Meanwhile even L.A can take a decade and millions of dollars to not build a bus lane.

    To note the obvious, we don’t have 50 years to get the US to moderately decrease emissions, and when accounting for things like construction emissions the gains are pretty small when compared to say electrifying Amaricas railroads or steel foundries.

    This is not to say that things like walkable cities and such arn’t really nice things we should be doing, just that like many degrowth ideas they are both too slow to implement, to marginal an impact, and two specific to certain areas to really move the needle on weather we hit 2C, 2.5C, or 3C.

    This is all of course tangential to the topic we’re actually talking about, which is wether or not electrification and building renewables is pointless when it comes to fighting climate change because they are apparently incapable of ever replacing fossil fuels.