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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

Posts
3
Comments
361
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • World’s highways could host 52.3 billion solar panels, say researchers

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  • To be fair, at least in this case it’s looking into putting the panels on a structure above the road instead of the more commonly suggested drive on panel variation. Still pretty unnecessary for most of the world as spare land is something that’s more abundant, but it might be relevant for more space constrained nations and islands where open fields are more expensive than already government owned roadway.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • That every currency is not accepted everywhere in the world, though every one you listed is pretty commonly accepted by business and as such you absolutely could by things with them in the Eurozone, is not an argument that they are the same as an casino token.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • Yes lightning, the network of centralized trusted third party banks that are needed to make bitcoin useable so long as you deposit all the bitcoin you want to use into one of these centralized banks first, at which point they can make bank to bank transfers without having any involvement with the actual bitcoin network at all.

    Or you could do basically the same process with an actual Debit card, which does the same thing but can be used in actual stores.

    You also need to note that for something posturing itself as a currency, the fact that you either have to wait hours or days for the price per transaction to come down or spend an even more absurd transaction fee on you’re cup of coffee before you can check out is actually a rather fundamental problem.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • I’ve rarely heard it suggested as an investment, but it can actually be realisticly used to goods and services outside of itself and as such does have an actual purpose, which is more than can be said for any crypto currency.

  • How to scale household energy projects

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  • The problem is that it almost always is a bespoke solution, because ever building is built differently, everyone wants different things out of their system, and your energy useage is also going to be different to your neighbors.

    This is going to be a lot of research, but not an insurmountable amount, though keep in mind that you don’t know what you don’t know, so looking around and asking specific questions in places like diysolarforum will help. We all started somewhere, and when your looking at spending this sort of money the research time is worth spending.

    From someone who is also on this journey, here are some things to keep in mind with this sort of thing.

    If you’re sizing an solar system, look at your power company’s website for the last year or so of useage data to get a rough estimate, but you’ll need to keep in mind that adding an heat pump or ev will noticeably shift the neddle up. Personally, i can recommend an iotawatt for loving both how much energy your actually using, and tracking down what’s drawing power, though I have it set up to feed into home assistant.

    Wind turbines are cool, but almost always not worth it on a personal scale unless you’re going entirely off grid or get really, really consistent wind. The laws of mathematics and PiR^2 means they just don’t scale down cost wise, and are thusly far more expensive per kwh of output compared to more solar.

    While there are a lot of solar calculators out there, at least in the US PVwatts is pretty detailed, once you have a rough idea of the system you’ll need I recommend going finding a weather site that gives you your average monthly illumination in watts/m^2 and calculating out what the system will actually produce month to month, using the number, size, and efficiency of the specific panels your going to get to get a better estimate.

    For your solar system, it sounds like you want an inverter with an SBU(solar, battery, utility) priority configuration. These exist but you’ll have to make sure that the inverter your solar provider gives you can be set to work this way, as most tend to save the battery in case there is a black out.

    For estimating a heat pump, see if your thermostat logs how many hours it has run in the 12 months, and make get one that does if it doesn’t. Multiply that by the energy consumption of the heat pump to get an estimate of how much power it will consume.

    You’ll also want to do or have someone do a hearing block load calculation, as well as bids from insulation contractors who do thermal camera surveys.

    I also recommend watching this classic video by Technology Connections if you haven’t seen it already.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • I don’t think it’s obvious that a tool for loaning money to businesses would be primarily used for loaning money to businesses trying to solve problems with the tool itself.

    I don’t think the internet has really changed all that much when it comes to due diligence. Maybe it’s a little easier to do background checks or find a person’s previous projects, but you still need an trusted third party to audit a company, you still need to be sure who is legally liable for if things go wrong, etc…

    Neglecting that a lot of companies don’t actually want every person’s pay, every dime they spend for a luncheon, and every thing R&D buys to be publicly available to their competitors, it’s still not actually much help for verifying and auditing their financials because nearly all fraud already relies on people entering false information to the computer about what the transaction was for or why it was made, not anything that could be verified by the chain.

  • a brief history of self regulation

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  • I’ll be honest, I don’t really see how the Love Canal has much to do with self regulation, as the chemical company involved did go above and beyond the regulations at the time for the containment liner. It only failed when people dug foundations through the middle of it because the local town council forced them to sell the property to the council, and then immediately flagrantly violated the terms of the sale where they agreed to never build on the site by concealing the site’s history and building a school while auctioning off the land to developers for a surrounding neighborhood on the site.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • Um, no. Traditional markets have financial related companies, but you’ll have to show me where you’re getting the idea the finance sector makes up the majority of the traditional market and as such it is no different than the crypto space where finance makes up nearly the entire market.

    I also don’t think that the existence of the internet really changed much when it comes to the need for rules for soliciting investment from the public such as providing investors accounting figures and legal accountability. Nor has it changed the fact that cryptocurrencies haven’t changed the process for gaining the investment necessary to start a new bakery or other small business and never will provide a pathway to do so, and as such hasn’t really changed much at all when it comes to providing customers with more access to investment loans outside of more crypto businesses.

    A lot of the scandals you listed weren’t done under the current market regulation, but rather directly led to the current market regulation at the behest of the little guys who got screwed over and pressured politicians into passing it, and as such I just don’t see how removing the protections for the little guy is ment to benefit them over the rich.

    I mean surely then the rich would be opposed to the crypto and loosening regulations rather than being the ones most heavily pushing and lobbying the government for them?

  • Russia legalizes Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining

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  • They banned it after it kept driving up energy prices.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • It means that despite being fifteen years old, it still takes more electricity for a single bitcoin transaction than to drive an electric SUV from Florida to California, cost per single transaction has still spiked over 50 USD twice in the last six months, and it remains too prone to wild inflation and deflation for any serious business to actually price anything in.

    In other words, it has the same inherent value it always has, none at all.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • You realize that the things listed on the NASDAQ actually represent more than just an entery in a database, right? Like the groups listed on there tend to make physical objects and software that does things beyond move things that can be traded for currency around?

    You also realize that the NASDAQ, without all the protections and basic rules the public forced it to adopt after vast numbers of little guys got screwed out of all their money, isn’t actually that great of a pitch? At least not to anyone but the far right uber rich libertarians that hold majority control of the crypto space.

    We are talking about a technology that is about as old as smartphones, but which has still yet to see any widespread use to solve a problem it did not itself create.

  • Opinion | Don’t Get Fooled Again by Crypto

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  • Most people when starting out are, or at least should be, very uneasy about putting money into things with no underlying value or feasible purpose beyond being bought by a greater fool in the future.

  • Removed

    The least happy computer users: Those running Arch Linux & Firefox

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  • As a Fedora user I can confirm that this seems about right.

  • rule

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  • While true, the this time of the year part of the poster makes me think it’s for people putting up Christmas lights who ran the string backwards and don’t want to switch it around. This is also more dangerous because it ensures that a live male plug is lying around far from the suicide cable itself.

  • What Daniel Radcliffe has said as JK Rowling said she will ‘not forgive’ him and he can ‘save his apology’

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  • Worked well enough in Battlestar Glactica. Saves space and construction cost too compared to having two entirely separate rooms, or alternatively allowed for more toilets in the same space.

  • ‘It affects everything’: why is Hollywood so scared to tackle the climate crisis?

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  • Honestly, the climate crisis seems to be a subtle or explicit theme of a lot of what Hollywood makes, staring in everything from Waterworld and Mad Max to Pacific Rim and Don’t look up, and if anything might be overrepresented in speculative and science fiction.

    I don’t think that’s a bad thing now, but to say that Hollywood doesn’t have anything that talks about the climate crisis seems to say a lot more about the author’s either media literacy or taste in movies than it does about Hollywood itself.

  • If you suddenly found yourself teleported into a Minecraft world, how scared of dying would you be compared to before?

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  • Well you were just suddenly teleported into the world, so I guess the question is, do you want to find out?

  • Wall Street Journal fires Hong Kong reporter allegedly over her role as chair of Hong Kong Journalists Association advocating for press freedom

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  • I’m not exactly sure what someone working for a Murdoch outlet expected would happen.

  • Europe’s battery problems show the governments need to up their game

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  • From my understanding the ban is only on solely combustion powered vehicles, plug in hybrid and methane steam reformation created hydrogen will still be allowed and expected, so it’s not really a ban on fossil fuel cars, but rather just on the inherently carbon producing ones.

  • Europe’s battery problems show the governments need to up their game

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  • Worth noting that utility scale is always going to be cheaper overall than pushing costs onto the household scale, especially as more and more of the cost of a battery system is in the wiring and inverter rather than the cells themselves.