drusenko

Highly dependent on where you are, what your electricity costs, and what your backfeeding compensation scheme is (eg net metering). In California solar alone is no longer economically viable with NEM 3.0 but solar+batteries to maximize self consumption is still in that sticky ~7 year layback range - and those calculations tend to assume today’s power prices, that are in reality going up quite quickly.

Tesla just brought this functionality to new Model 3 and Model Y cars as of Oct 1. It requires at least one Powerwall 3 to enable bidirectional V2H - what they call Powershare. But those cars can now power the home and charge from solar while the grid is offline.

Batteries alone are not suitable for long duration outages, but solar+batteries, designed correctly, can not only supply enough power during long outages, it can get you to be off-grid entirely in the first place at a dramatically more cost effective number than your $500k quoted - perhaps 1/5 or less for a system suitable for your needs of 115kWh per day. So while the system might be more expensive than a generator alone, it can still beat on value because it provides power all year round.

You also do an unfair comparison here - you are OK with portable batteries providing only fridge & WiFi for a couple hours, but expect whole-hole batteries to last a week. Many people use whole-home batteries to bridge typical outages that last <24 hours, and do so without ever having to notice any change of use of their home - powering their full heating/cooling etc.

Batteries and generators are also not mutually exclusive. You can install a solar+battery system because it makes economic sense and pays for itself while providing zero-downtime backup for most outages, while also backing that up with a generator for longer term edge case outages eg long extended outages during the winter or where there is an unusually long “solar drought” - it really depends on how much resilience you are designing for.

If you are fluent in a second language, you understand that the only way to become truly fluent is not just to learn the tangible aspects - the vocabulary, grammar, references, expressions, etc - you have to learn to think like the language/culture.

It’s a combination of cultural assumptions, facial expressions and affectations, thinking patterns, and a whole cultural upbringing that can lead you to very different mental processes and natural conclusions starting from the same words and phrases.

Language absolutely encodes a certain form of intelligence. A lot of those things are reflected not just in the totality of the culture but the language itself. Being fluent leads you to different thinking patterns and different conclusions when processing in that language.

Ask your favorite AI to give you a crash course, but to start the main models you need to know are the GFS and the ECMWF. In the US where available in high res, the HRRR is excellent, but doesn’t forecast very far out. The PWG/PWE 1km PredictWind models are also very good at picking up land based features and other more precise patterns. If you are in the US everything else is probably not super relevant.

That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.

Your idea of there being competition for human relationships is super fascinating. In my own life, there are fun/easy relationships, and there are those which push me to think deeply and differently, for any number of reasons.

In that vein, doesn’t “competition for relationships” necessarily breed egocentrism above all else? The winning relationship will give you what you want, but not what is necessarily true…

In that vein, you might also consider that the commenters you’re replying to may be worth engaging intellectually with more deeply purely based on the fact that they’re presenting divergent views that are uncomfortable.

Based on how we’ve designed AI to date and how you describe it in terms of optimizing for self enjoyment for each individual (and difficult to argue most will choose that for themselves), it’s hard to see a world where AI can push productive conflict the way humans can.

Then again, I might just be a flawed human who doesn’t fully understand the point you are trying to make and is extrapolating from my own biases, flaws, experiences, and the limited sample size I have of your point of view.

But how can you ever have the confidence that your other options will continue to be worse over a longer time frame?

Almost by definition, if you are in the state of mind to consider suicide, you are probably not accurately and impartially weighing the question proposed — and that means it’s likely mostly independent of individual circumstances and values.

(This is different to how I felt when I was younger, and coming from someone who has had several people close to me feel that way at one point in their lives, and now living incredibly positive lives a few years after the fact)

I can see some limited circumstances where it is carefully and openly considered over a longer period of time — like a terminal illness, or unbearable and unsolvable chronic pain — but those cases are the minority by far.

In a two party system, wouldn't any party, no matter how good, always be the second-worst party? Ranking parties in a two party system doesn't really give you much insight into their absolute "goodness level".

That’s interesting! When you are referring to density, are you referring to average density within the event horizon? Isn’t most (effectively all) matter concentrated in the singularity? Would love to hear you elaborate on this thought further.

You’re not wrong, but also, please stop spreading cowardly messages. Take appropriate precautions but don’t be preemptively compliant.

You’re missing my point entirely. VOCs and PM2.5 are bad for you no doubt, which means this study is showing that these non combustible scented candles are producing measurable levels of dangerous indoor air pollution — we’re all in agreement there. That’s not at all what I meant by common sense and my comment was in no way intended to be a defense of scented products.

But the headline says “Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust”. This is not supported by the study. PM2.5 and VOCs are not the only forms of indoor air pollution. Combustion produces other deleterious byproducts that negatively impact human health.

Run a car in your garage for a day and run scented candle and tell me which is worse for you. That is what I mean by common sense.

I am having a hard time reconciling the claim in the post headline with common sense.

One frustrating aspect to the study is that it was hard to determine whether they are comparing like for like per unit time. They say the “operation of a gas stove” and “running a generator” — but for how long? It doesn’t seem like they tested each of these things under similar conditions in their lab but rather relied on other studies for that data. Figure 2(b) right does seem to measure this but they haven’t labeled the chart with clear labels and the description is a bit ambiguous.

After reading the study, I think the issue is that the claim it is making is slightly different than the one in the headline. They are measuring VOC and ~PM2.5 pollutants, but gas engines (and gas stoves presumably as well) produce other pollutants like CO, which is what kills you of you run a gas generator indoors.

As someone who has started a company that I grew to over 350 people, I’d like to understand how you’d propose solving a problem we faced without ever discussing race, gender or diversity in the context of hiring.

The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.

Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.

Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?

I’m not sure compelling & bountiful AI films and interest in older films are mutually exclusive.

A flood of high quality AI content might devalue it as it becomes too normal, familiar or expected. In a strange way, this might reinvigorate interest in back catalogs.

Also, some content is truly timeless regardless of its production quality. Our kids have the world’s content at their disposal and their favorite is currently Tom & Jerry episodes from the 1960s. Go figure.

I was initially very excited because this data is not nearly as it should be, especially historical forecasts. However, your pricing model seems to seriously limit the potential uses.

I would imagine that most people who have a serious interest in weather forecasting and would be target users of this service don’t think in terms of number of points but rather in lat/lon bounds, resolution, and number of hours & days for the predictions. I imagine they would also like to download a GRIB and not a CSV.

Your pricing for any large enough area to be useful presumably gets somewhat prohibitive, eg covering the North Pacific (useful for West Coast modeling) at 0.25 deg resolution might be ~300k data points per hour if I am doing my math right?

In California specifically, IOUs like PG&E run off of a cost plus model on T&D and make no profit on generation (legacy of Enron) - surprise surprise T&D is growing by a CAGR of ~12% every year. Abhorrent set of incentives and the CPUC generally rubber stamps all of it.

Highly controversial for sure. “The Rickover Effect” also a good choice. Dry, long, but full of great anecdotes. All that said it’s tough to argue with his accomplishments. First to a productive/working nuclear reactor, in the hardest application possible (submarine), in government (not the private sector). And starting significantly behind… It’s hard not to be inspired by what he accomplished.

I haven’t seen any in depth analysis but I suspect that it would increase electrical usage and lower natural gas usage (at the home), which is what I suspect this rate reform partly may be targeting. CA’s astronomically high per kWh rates create an informative disincentive to electrify homes, even when the overall efficiency of the electric machines is much higher.

Agreed. I think the dominant entrepreneurial trait isn’t risk taking, it’s optimism.

I would say it depends on where you live. The grid in CA has (in some parts) not been reliable for 5+ years. To Chris' point below though, it's not really relevant because gas furnaces need electricity to operate, too.

The issue isn't that an open standard for fully variable speed isn't possible, the issue is that nearly all of the manufacturers to date have considered this proprietary (as they want to own the entire ecosystem from controls > equipment) and a purposefully boxing Nest, Ecobee, etc, out of being able to control it in order to sell more thermostats and trying to capture more value.

Only problem, their thermostats and apps really suck.

I've used the PAC-US444CN-1 (at our house) and fully native Mitsubishi thermostat/controls (at our in-laws). The converter is better than a simple 2-stage set up but is still not as good, in my experience, as the fully native one.

It has to translate a 2-stage signal into a fully modulating output, and it still seems to do a lot more on & off with high fan speeds than I would like or would be most efficient (as an aside, yes I have verified that the dip switches are in the correct position on the converters).

On the other hand, the unit at my in-laws tends to blow gently but consistently which is both more comfortable and more efficient.

Did you ever end up finding any other company making any tiles that resembled slate, out of curiosity?

Big fan of your products :) Have bought a dozen of them personally.

From what I understand, excess solar is more common in markets that have asymmetric import/export prices, like Australia, that strongly incentivize self-consumption vs. exporting back to the grid. CA is likely to implement this with NEM 3.0 so we are likely to start seeing this shift in behavior in the US soon as well. Right now there isn't much of an economic incentive to do excess solar in markets with symmetric NEM compensation (I'm sure you know all of this).

Other problem we have in the US vs. AU is our cost of installation is so high that it makes oversizing systems somewhat cost prohibitive, which is what you'd need to do to get enough excess solar to charge an EV.

Third problem is where cars are parked during the day while the sun is shining, which may be tough for people who commute to work. Energy storage can obviously help here somewhat.

Nuclear reactors are expensive mostly because the regulatory requirements make them expensive. There is a lot of room for advanced nuclear (e.g. gen III reactors) that can address a lot of the problems and bring down the costs. Unfortunately, we don't have a clear regulatory pathway here yet, but there is some progress being made recently.

In short, this is probably because climate economic modeling has traditionally focused on estimating more knowable, quantifiable impacts, and acknowledging but not including potential (maybe even probable!) impacts that are too difficult to model based on current knowledge. Tail risk is a big area that has traditionally not been modeled well leading to a very likely underestimate to the social cost of carbon (SCC): https://www.volts.wtf/p/economists-have-quantified-the-econo...

Here’s a historical overview of the situation with some links to the latest research: https://impactlab.org/research-area/social-cost/

It’s not just tail risk, even things like geopolitical instability and crop failure were often not historically included… you can see why the headline statement seems to conflict with intuition, and it’s because of the narrow view taken on the impact of the fossil fuel scenario on GDP.

There is one more important element, and that is the distinction between economic activity (which GDP measures) and economic welfare. Natural disasters often don’t have much of an impact on GDP in part because the rebuilding activity counts in GDP. But it’s obvious to see why a future where we are spending an increasingly larger share of our effort to mitigate and rebuild losses is a much worse one. So GDP may not be the best measure here: https://www.economy.com/economicview/analysis/296804/How-Nat...

If you live in California, even if electricity generation cost nothing at all it would still only lower your bill by ~15%. Transmission & distribution of electricity is the expensive part not generating it. It doesn’t need to be expensive, yet here we are.

Unfortunately hydrogen has really low energy density, electrolyzers are slow, and it is also pretty explosive. I don’t see hydrogen fuel cells being nearly as attractive as EV retrofits or CCS as an interim solution until battery tech cost curves improve to the point of making full electrification a no brainer (probably not that far away…)