thelastgallon

Drivers used to spend $155 - $186/month on fuel. Now $25 - $31 on electricity. Total income of $480/month, savings of $150/month.

> Imagine I was running a non-profit that teaches middle and high school kids about the human body and the first thing I have them do is to look up their legislator and ask them to pass anti-abortion legislation.

You are just making up ridiculous things that I never said. I said nothing about protests. Its your thing. The kind of teaching you'd encourage is teach the kids vaccines cause autism. Bring autistic kid to protests. Perfectly scientific.

> 240V outlets in garages would increase the cost of new homes by $1,000 they may have a different opinion on the matter,

A home has ~300 outlets. If each outlet costs $1,000, it would cost 300K just on outlets for the builder. The cost of an outlets is in cents or fractions of cents, these are manufactured in bulk and shipped from China, not artisanal hand-crafted NFT outlets from etsy as collectible items for speculation.

Homes ALREADY have multiple 240V, for HVAC, electric stove, dryer. Dryer is in the garage or in a laundry room right next to the garage. An electrician does all the wiring and outlets, which costs nothing at build time. However, if you have to add it later, it will cost $3,000 - $,5000 to retrofit.

> What is the environmental cost of mining and producing literal tons of copper wire and installing it in new homes for outlets that never get used? What is the cost of using skilled electrician labor to install useless outlets instead of having those same electricians working on building a new solar plant?

Most of the outlets (70 - 90%) in the house are unused. There are 10+ outlets just in the master bath and closet. If you are so concerned about utilization, why not start a campaign to cut the total number of outlets to a total of 10 per house? You would have saved $290K/house going by your math and hailed as the savior of american dream, making homes affordable for everyone.

> Years ago I owned a home built in the 1980's that had a central vacuum system. It was a cool concept but utterly useless. No new homes that I know of have these systems anymore. And you could have also bought a home with a stable. Means nothing. You could have also bought a home without plumbing or indoor toilets.

> The future is uncertain. Ten years from now people may not even want to own cars if autonomous taxis take off. The whole concept of a garage may morph into something unrecognizable to us today. But if you get your way, we'll waste tons of money putting 240V outlets that never get used as intended.

Or there could be a manhattan project to build coal based cars and all homes need coal storage. Everyone could have converted to Amish and no need for any modern technology. Or people may stop using bathrooms and go back to nature, so we can remove them as well. Or Elon Musk would've shipped everyone to Mars, Earth is destroyed, our work here is finished, I promise we'll build something better on Mars, Lets go. Or there could be genocide or people sent to concentration camps. The future is unknowable to most people who can't think where the world is headed. ICE cars are over everywhere, the world is at 50% EVs now. The only exception is US.

> Home builders aren't stupid: they know what their customers want. Lots of builders are already building with it. Some states have mandated it. It is not uniform. Just think about bathrooms being introduced and not everyone knows about it. But if you make a building code, builders will build to code and no more defecating outside. Information about good ideas does not spread immediately and all at once. After the invention of bathrooms and indoor plumbing, it took 100+ years for all countries to expect it.

Interesting idea! There are many behaviors explained by parasites, worms, bacteria and viruses. AI is now smart enough to change personality, make people invest trillions of dollars with zero ROI.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322594

I wonder if millions of people take it to small claims court… would it work?

1) EVs are 4 - 5X efficient

2) Heatpumps are 4 - 5X efficient

3) Induction stoves are 4 - 5X efficient (vs gas stoves)

Transportation, heating and cooling, cooking are all 4 - 5X efficient.

Centralized power generation with fossil fuels loses ~75% (67% wasted up front, remaining in transmission and distribution).

There are many many other losses and costs: defense budget to protect oil infra, fossil fuel subsidies, ethanol subsidies, trillions of gallons of water, externalized health costs (10M deaths from air pollution/year -- nytimes). Fossil Fuels Are Half the fossil fuels of shipping: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48619394

To extend this line of thought ..

Whats better if all the RAM, CPU and storage of phones went to DCs. People are more productive without phones. They work instead of consuming content. The tens of thousands of hours lost (opportunity cost), even at a minimum wage is >$1 million over a lifetime.

He nailed it. At 3:20:

> Here's another claim. Okay, we have too many CPUs and GPUs. We have so much computing power that some people want to create fake currencies by having our computers solve mathematical puzzles all day. Do you understand why that's so insane?

There is a significantly bigger ethnic cartel manufacturing jobs in US: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019237

Almost all of these jobs (onshore/offshore) are bullshit jobs. I've been asking people for ~25 years: what do people offshore do? Nobody knows. Jobs are created, people are hired, after that ...

Now, the new craze is GCCs (Global Capability Centers).

US has ~250 million cars. If they are all EVs (100KWh), it is 25TWh capacity.

Reserving 20% of that capacity to supply power back to the grid is 5TWh.

EVs can be charged for free during the day, ~20% of solar is lost due to curtailment. Even if a significant percentage (10 - 20%) of the people decide they are going on long drives from Florida to Vancouver and turn off supply-power-to-grid-for-money in the app, its fine, there are plenty of cars. It is the cheapest, most resilient, distributed and self-healing energy ecosystem. Only one problem, it won't make the super billionaires money. Unless it can be packaged in a way to make the super billionaires money, its a no go in US.

This infrastructure buildout costs nothing, people buy new cars all the time (~20M/year), just buy EVs instead. Because people are providing the capital and the storage infrastructure, they should be paid for it.

This isn't [pro|anti] [biden|trump|abortion|guns|vaccines|facemasks|etc].

Its kids deciding for themselves about the world they want to live in and what features they want in it. Buildings last ~100 years and most likely they are going to live in a home that was built in the past. If they want modern features or amenities without spending a fortune rebuilding the house, its best to future proof.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Can we connect? Email on my profile. I run a non-profit, I teach middle/high-school and college kids about building codes and the first thing I have them do is find out the county building code engineers[1] and ask them to update the code: require 240V outlets in the garage for EV charging. After they know how to do this, the next steps are to require 240V outlet for heat pump water heater, induction stove (solves indoor air pollution), heat pump HVAC. Everything can be electric. Finally, build the house with solar panels on the roof.

Home circuitry, load center need to be redesigned for V2X (vehicle to grid, home, load, etc), plug-in solar and batteries, solar/batteries replacing generators, etc. You seem to have thoughtful ideas about these and it would help to have someone knowledgable articulate how it should be done.

[1]The idea is that they can change the world right now by understanding what they want in their world (clean and free energy) and that they need to ask for those changes because buildings last ~100 years. The lowest hanging fruit is future-proof all construction and have it be ready for incremental changes without needing any labor or permitting work.

For off grid residential (which will be ~1 billion people), I wonder if it can be a lot cheaper to go all DC, avoid inverters, losses converting DC<->AC<->DC.

Looks like it is possible: https://solarpoweredge.com/2026/05/10/pure-dc-off-grid-solar...

The cost of solar is 1X - 20X depending on location. US has the highest costs, followed by maybe Western Europe.

The panels are dirt-cheap[1] straight from China, but your friendly govt adds tariffs.

The balance of the system is super costly in some locations, ridiculously cheap in other locations.

In Pakistan, they are laying out the panels on the roof without any structure.

In most of the third world, homes are concrete built, they already have structural elements and it isn't a big deal to add panels. It is a massive project in US, because of shingled roof. Labor is also available, available immediately, and permitting is either easy or not necessary.

I'd assume the cheapest total install cost would be (cheapest to costliest): China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, middle-east,, Africa, South East Asia, Central America, Mexico, India, South America, Australia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Canada, and finally US.

I'm ignoring the cost of land which varies a lot in each country. We also don't need land, just add vertical solar on every structure, fence and wall.

[1]or as cheap as plywood which a HN comment pointed out

Yes, 92% production warranty at the end 25 years. Which is the longest product warranty of anything sold. At 92%, they could last a few more decades.

Newer panels are offering 40 year warranty.

40-year warranty covers the panel and its performance. And in the unlikely case you’ll ever need it, we make the return process simple and easy. With a historical return rate of only 1 in 20,000 panels under warranty: https://www.maxeon.com/maxeon-solar-panels

What if antimatter is load-bearing?

They are opening it wrong.

It is not about hiring people, it is culture and inertia. You can hire the most brilliant people, yet they can't accomplish much if the culture isn't right. Google probably has better talent density than Anthropic and OpenAI, yet it can't compete[1]. Companies can do amazing things when the founder is around and sets a vision and culture. After that, its downhill. Has happened to all companies. They all go down. Apple is going down, but it is hard to see because it still has momentum from the founders charisma. Steve Jobs wouldn't have approved most of the products that Apple is selling now and allowed ads and enshittification.

[1] https://pravse.medium.com/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd...: The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

I'm surprised that Anthropic and OpenAI aren't going for the obvious win. Apple is the only company which is vulnerable to AI, it has never done AI (everyone hates Siri) and can never do AI.

Hardware or software exists to let people do things. Apple sells hardware so it can sell apps and content, and a slightly easier UI than Google. Google search was also famously just a UI, a search box that lets you get in and out very quickly (it is all garbage content now).

Anthropic/OpenAI don't need Apple's hardware, their stack (hardware+software) is all in DCs, just need a dumb fashionable device in phone form factor (and other form factors). Just need a very simple device which delivers what Google search box originally delivered (let you do things) and let their AI handle stuff.

At some point, people have to stop looking at Govts, COP summits for solutions.

1) The purpose of a system is what it does

2) For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.

Govt exists to steal from us (top 10% who pay the most taxes), figure out how to best transfer this money (taxes + money printing) to the top 1000 - 10,000 people.

And people are distracted and entertained. And engaged in active debate, not realizing that all of this is Kayfabe.

Climate change is a lost cause because most people can't think about complex things, only quick soundbites. Metabolic syndrome, cancers, all lifestyle diseases can be prevented by just walking a bit, not eating junk food. Nearly everyone knows that and should be personally interested in their own health, yet, everyone just wants to continue, get obese and rely on GLP-1.

The average person is dumb, once he has been lied to 3 times, they remember it as truth. Fossil fuel companies employ marketing agencies and inject falsehoods about clean energy. It is shocking how many people believe in these things. These are designed to be emotionally manipulative, whatsapps forwards about batteries catching fire (fake) have been circling around for quite some time.

Any discussion about climate change goes into lots of graphs and hard science, which most people can't follow or understand or do anything about it. Also, people have been talking about climate change for a long time, I see movies/shows/articles from decades past. So people tend to think, yeah they are always talking about it, nothing to see/do here.

Also, movies/shows make 'environmentalists' as supervillians (I'm sure someone has a well-researched article about it), for eg: Thanos wants to kill half the Universe to save them and there are a dozen Avengers movies with superheroes saving the planet. There are many many ridiculous movies which make a caricature of people who think about unsustanability. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but a lot of these movies make me wonder why subconsciously program everyone against

Then, there are lots of videos of economists (and other folks) making fun of Greta and her protests. It doesn't help that these protestors/activists change causes and are now protesting some other things happening.

Climate change is guilty by association. By activists, protestors. By fake 'environmentalists', which are fossil fuel fronts. By the biggest, baddest supervillians in movies and shows.

First rule of climate change is to stop talking about climate change (fight club). We should work on things that solve climate as an unintended side effect without talking about it. What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Pett)

We should talk about pollution. Air pollution kills 10M/year. Every city can have breathable air. Thats a goal everyone can get behind.

Everyone can behind cheap/free energy.

We have to rethink all the climate comms, work with everyone to get political consensus. Politicians also have to think about what the people are thinking to get reelected.

It needs to be made simple, as simple as they can be, like during covid - wash your hands with soap.

Paul Tyma is the creator of Mailinator. I remember reading about how he made it scalable with Java.

> The E.V. market share in Russia is now slightly higher than in the United States

> By the end of September, the share of pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids that can run without gas had reached 11.5 percent

> government started subsidizing fast-charging stations and grid connections. In 2023, updated codes required E.V. infrastructure for new buildings.

> Fully electric vehicles have been exempted from the transport tax paid by owners of other vehicles in many Russian regions. In Moscow and other big cities, E.V. drivers do not have to pay parking fees, which can run as high as $9.50 an hour. Russian-made E.V.s are eligible for government subsidies and can use most toll highways free of charge nationwide.

This is an incredibly forward looking government. Russia should completely electrify and sell as much oil as they can. Just like Norway.

Looks like US will be the only country with gas cars.

As unintended side-effects go, Trump and Putin are the GOATs. Nobody did as much as these leaders to accelerate clean energy. Trump is the clear winner. I'd support Trump for Nobel peace prize, economics (tariffs), literature (tweets), Chemistry (bleach), Medicine (curing cancer by banning wind turbines), Physics, and anything else.

Medicine:

Wind turbines: “They say the noise causes cancer.”

Literature:

On The Art of the Deal: “I’m reading my own book again because I think it’s so fantastic.”

Chemistry:

Bleach to cure covid.

Peace: “I settled 8 Wars… In actuality, I should have won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.”

“I saved more lives than anyone in History.”

Physics: “I have a natural instinct for science… Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.”

“We’re going to Mars. We’re stopping at the moon. The moon is actually a launching pad… I said, ‘Hey, we’ve done the moon. That’s not so exciting.’”

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light… And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body… Sounds interesting.”

Economics:

“My favorite word: tariffs.”

“Tariffs are good. Tariffs are great, actually.”

“This is… our declaration of economic independence.”

This is bribery 101. All these kids will feel indebted to Musk forever. And sign his praises to everyone.

Simple trick covered in Influence — The Psychology of Persuasion.

https://medium.com/@mappmechanic/influence-the-psychology-of...

Second Principle in the book is — “Reciprocation”, The Old Give and Take…

This principle means that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us. This is by far, the most universal & widely used method of influence I have seen around the Globe in all communities. Also, this principle has been used since eternity as the archeologist Richard Leakey tells: “We are human because our ancestors learned to share their food & their skills in an honoured network of obligation.”

In order to understand its underpinnings let us see a practice used by the famous Hare Krishna/ISKCON society for fund raising. In the 80’s or 90’s, many people from this society used to be standing in public places & would quickly greet passerby with a small flower like Rose as a gift and in most cases passerby fail to return it as the solicitor says it is a ‘Gift’ from our side. This is a perfect example of rule of reciprocation. Now that the passerby has received a gift so he is indebted to the Krishna’s volunteer. Now the volunteer would quickly ask for a donation and in most of the cases the passerby would not deny and give something.