I feel like most roads where you’d ride a scooter the cars would be less of a problem if they followed the speed limit. Scooters should be able to go down 45mph roads just fine but there’s always some massive truck going 60.
I’ve heart NotJustBikes say similar things. I normally don’t favor control over everything but at this point I would be ok with cars having electronically controlled speed limiters to not exceed the speed limit of whatever road they’re on.
It’s really just created such an entitled, careless, and demanding mindset where bikes need to have speed limiters on them for safety but Fred can buy a 1200hp 3 ton weapon with no limiter.
I’m perfectly fine with there being interstates that go 85mph I just don’t want people driving so fast in dense areas with mixed traffic. If I could have people just not be assholes that would be great but I feel like driving the speed limit now is just reason for someone to get angry with you and want to drive you off the road.
I’d love to ride a bike everywhere I can but every road I would be riding would have traffic going over 45mph with massive vehicles who have drivers so impatient they’d rather run you off the road than share the road.
If it make you feel better, they could do it all with one closed loop and just use the ground as the sink.
They could then power it entirely off solar panels and Iron air or sodium batteries.
But these decisions aren’t being made by people looking for sustainability but capitalists looking for profits. They’d cool their servers with the blood of children if it saved them money.
I don’t how that should make me feel any better 😀 . But I don’t know if ground is a good enough sink for that.
The ground temp in Utah for instance is like 50 degrees F roughly all year long. Coiling tubing under the parking lots of these facilities should be enough to remove all the heat and potentially melt all the snow during the winter.
I don’t think they’re going to consider renewables for cooling alone when the entire operation needs enormous amounts of power that cannot be satisfied by renewables.
I’m not talking for cooling but powering the servers. Something renewables could do if they don’t have to power air conditioning for the servers.
In the US they keep getting bigger and bigger to. I was less scared of cars while riding my bike decades ago than I am now and we had less bike infrastructure then.
Well yeah. If it was separate paths from traffic then the size of the vehicles wouldn’t really be as big of a problem. It’s just how we have to “share” with people who have no ability so share.
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently....
Much of this can be solved or mitigated with pumped hydro, green hydrogen, thermal batteries, or maybe compressed air. The problem is that all of this requires infrastructure spending.
California’s duck curve specifically can be flattened with desalination. Any excess power that California makes with solar beyond the grid’s demand should just go into making more fresh water. Having too much solar energy is really just a problem of not having systems you can turn on when you do. Even if you only get 30% of the power back with green hydrogen it is power you had too much of in the first place.
One gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.7kWh of electricity and your average American home uses 29kWh of electricity a day. We’ve been perfectly fine wasting energy for over a century, I don’t see why we should pearl clutch now.
As for Cali’s duck curve issue, desalination is a great idea, but expansion of renewables and storage should really come first. Keep in mind that the current Cali grid generates much less dirty power during the day, where solar covers a majority of demand. Should we divert that solar power to desalination, we would need to ramp up dirty power generation during the day, and we would continue to generate dirty power at night.
I’m not talking about using solar to make fresh water. I’m talking about using the excess power to make fresh water as to not put more power into the grid than it can use. The duck curve is often used as a sticking point for why nuclear doesn’t work, because nuclear needs a base load and the duck curve is a base load nuclear can’t accommodate.
Obviously more storage to use more renewables but also, just use the excess for something. Nuclear can boil water to desalinate, use excess electricity to desalinate via RO. Given the infrastructure you could even use this to water California’s immense farms. (But power companies like making profit so… no times of free power, climate change instead please)
While I agree with you, we also have to consider what this would do at scale. The 70% of excess power that you lose here translates to wear on the solar panel systems that is never realized into power. That is, the systems will wear at the same rate, but the amount of power you can utilize over the lifespan of the systems is decreased. It’s still a better solution than not implementing these at all, but I’d be wary as to how reluctant our society would be to the spending, especially if the ratio of cost to utilization(?) becomes skewed.
With how cheap PV panels are per mW it is not really an issue about how efficiently the power is stored. We’d obviously want to recycle them but generally the fact that you don’t pay for fuel means eventually the power is free. There was a study done in LA where if you covered just the parking lots with solar you could provide power for the entire city (if storage was available obviously)
A chemical battery will be somewhere like 80% or more efficient but they can’t hold that for weeks, months, or years.
Pumped Hydro is ideal, the Hoover Dam produces 4.5 billion kWh of electricity a year. With pumped hydro you can effectively do the same thing in places rain doesn’t do it for you. Bath county for instance has 24,000mWh of capacity. They’re obviously really dangerous if they break and also damage ecosystems.
But green hydrogen can be done mostly anywhere, stored more easily (obviously not as easy as fossil fuels or well most things) and can be transported.
I agree but I feel that is even more aspirational than renewable energy.
Personally I want high speed rail, commuter rail, trams, and bike infrastructure but I’ll probably be dead by the time any of that happens if it does at all.
I have high testosterone levels and I am always warm. In the winter I get tired of scraping ice from my car and just use my hands to melt it off the windshield.
When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very...
Large scale electricity storage is very much a solved problem actually. Bath county for instance has solved the problem since the 80’s.
It’s just once you take the cost of storage for solar it is no longer the cheapest power source. Our power isn’t delivered by our government for the sake of sustainability and benefiting the citizens but by private corporations who want to make profit.
The pumped hydro station I linked cost 4.36 billion USD to construct in 2022 dollars back in 1985. It also has a capacity of 24,000 mWh.
Meanwhile the F-35 project cost the US government 1.7 trillion dollars.
So let’s say new pumped hydro plants of a similar size would cost 10 billion dollars just for being excessive. Then let’s say the US government didn’t fund one jet and instead built pumped hydro storage. Then fuck it, let’s say nothing worked out the budget got blown and only a fraction of that were built so only 100 stations were built to make it a nice round number.
That’s 2,400 gWh
Idk about you but that is a lot of buffer to make any renewable much more stable. It’s actually enough buffer to power the entire country for a few hours and ideally bridge most of the night demand. For more than three times over budget and for the price of one jet for the US military.
It’s also worth noting this helps all power generation not just renewables. All power plants prefer to be kept at their most efficient output and not turn off or cool off at night while demand is low. We really just need to have a buffer for when solar isn’t active but people are in the early mornings and late evenings.
You’re not being pedantic, you’re just misunderstanding. Pumped hydro storage is not a dam, it’s not a power source, it is a power storage system. You can use pumped hydro at dams but basically anywhere you can move weight up high and use gravity to recoup that is a form of storage. It is one of the most efficient ways to store electrical energy with electric pumps and turbines. The point of a dam has been to collect water that is deposited there via rain and use that to create power.
So, back to our initial problem: chemical storage (batteries) is expensive, environmentally dubious, problematic in many aspects and inefficient, chemical conversion (e.g. hydrolysis) is wasteful/inefficient, etc. So, no, we have no good answer to that.
80% of this is just flat wrong. Chemical storage are not expensive at scale, enviromentally safe, not really problematic, and so outrageously efficient basically nothing comes close. Hydrolysis is more of a chemical reaction in organics and creating green hydrogen is done through electrolysis. It’s not wasteful or inefficient IF all of the power was surplus you had to get rid of because solar does that a lot. By your own statement solar panels are wasteful and inefficient because they only have efficiencies of what 22%?
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
That and they want as many Steam decks to be working as possible. They don’t make their money on Steam Deck’s as much as they make money on people buying games for them.
iMessage is deliberately used as a “buy an iPhone or else”. Imagine if Google refused to show search results, emails, or DNS traffic for Apple and we just said it’s because people are tribal or some shit.
Apple needs to open up iMessage or adopt RCS for it to be “network effect”
It’s not exclusively an iMessage problem, you’re right but it is for teenagers. This is probably the weakest point of my position but teenagers in my experience don’t peer pressure over tech specs but off obvious shit. iMessage directly shows you who is a green bubble or blue and who is going to send you compressed as hell videos and shit because of it.
Apple deliberately created a distinction of their own making with iMessage by making the bubbles different colors and refusing to support features to improve green bubbles for over a decade now. But the people who are razzing and peer pressuring aren’t exactly going to understand that iMessage wasn’t special tech or anything. RCS was out three years in advance to iMessage and all Apple had to do was allow it on iPhones.
Now outside of teenagers I have never really seen someone pressure people to have an iPhone. It’s a really childish thing to do because they’re really the same damn thing for the most part.
That’s good news. Apple has been dragging ass and forced again to do something to benefit others. USBC, Sideloading, and RCS. If they keep this up in 5 years they might think 8GB of RAM isn’t enough for a $2000 laptop.
That’s what gets me. Since you can’t add more RAM or storage it’s just so insulting to have an $1800 laptop with so little. If I wanted 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage I’d be looking at $2600.
I remember looking at phones in the past and being blown away by 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM because that was way more than I had in way more expensive desktops just a few years prior. It’s so weird seeing a current phone shaft you less on memory/storage than a laptop.
Storage and RAM has always been cheaper for computers than phones because they don’t have the size constraints. Computers also use way more RAM and storage than phones.
I used exclusively Macs and iPhones till the early 2010’s. I had the original iMac and I eventually moved to a G4 and an intel iMac. That last iMac was such a pile of overpriced crap I killed two HDDs, the RAM, and the GPU. I went from knowing nothing but their ecosystem to never touching it in a year and I haven’t gone back.
Are you saying that EVs produce the same CO2 as ICEs? Even if an EV is charged 100% off natural gas it will create less CO2 than an ICE. A gallon of gasoline is 33.7kWh of energy. This means a basic Model 3 has a battery with less than two gallons of gasoline worth of energy. They don’t idle, they don’t rev, they don’t make noise… all of these are significantly better for cities.
Then there’s the other shit about how ICE cars don’t just create CO2, they release a lot of other chemicals into the air that we shouldn’t be breathing and unlike a power plant, they do it almost always where people are.
Even if we ignore microplastics, steel wheels on rail are significantly more efficient than tires. Rail is just better unless you are going to places not traveled much.
Even you know you’re wrong with how you use “should” and “good”. It means you know many don’t do these things and you justify the whole by the exceptions.
I know people like to shit on landlords, but owning and properly maintaining a home requires a ton of work and money. You SHOULD be spending 1% of your homes value on maintenance each year, which many people don’t/can’t budget for. A GOOD landlord takes care of that mess for you. I know several people who sold their homes and moved into apartments because they were sick of the hassle of home ownership. Don’t get me wrong, I have no plans of doing that myself, but the ever growing list of maintenance tasks is getting exhausting.
Also your anecdotes are terrible. I know way more than several people who would do mostly anything to own a home and when surveys show “…(88%) would rather own their home than rent, nearly half of those who currently rent fear they’ll never own a home.” lendingtree.com/…/homeownership-renting-survey/
The issue is that the M1 (M2 and M3) chips are way more efficient than X86 chips and they gets really good battery life compared to standard PC hardware. So I can hate on the software, the price, the lack of expand-ability, and so much more but I can’t get that efficiency anywhere else.
System76 doesn’t have some massively efficient ARM chip and system to separate them from any other windows laptop maker I just put linux on. You buy System76 because you like System76. I can live with that and I am very willing to spend more for less in places I feel matter.
This is a question intended solely for the adult audience, both tagged as NSFW and with a NSFW warning in the title. I don’t see a rule prohibiting those, and I hope it’s allowed....
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric cars. E-bikes and scooters displace 4x as much demand for oil as all of the EVs in the world. (arstechnica.com)
'Energy independent' Uruguay runs on 100% renewables for four straight months (theprogressplaybook.com)
Artificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of water (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5792180...
The world's 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars (theconversation.com)
Price of solar dropped 89% in ten years (ourworldindata.org)
Solar now being the cheapest energy source made its rounds on Lemmy some weeks ago, if I remember correctly. I just found this graphic and felt it was worth sharing independently....
For sixth year, Pentagon fails to account for over $3T (new.thecradle.co)
Another source: theintercept.com/2023/…/pentagon-audit-failed/
I have never understood that. (lemmy.world)
Where old people go. (i.imgur.com)
U.S. Pledge To Triple Global Nuclear Energy By 2050 (www.huffpost.com)
When I first read the titile, I thought that the US is going to have to build A LOT to triple global production. Then it occured to me that the author means the US is pledging to make deals and agreements which enable other countries to build their own. Sometimes I think the US thinks too much of itself and that’s also very...
Embracer confirms 900 employees laid off in previous financial quarter (www.eurogamer.net)
Rant: Valve's new Steam Deck screws speak volumes about their ethos.
In case you’re out of the loop, the old Steam Deck had Philips screws that screwed into self-tapping plastic holes. This lead to occasional stripped threads and often stripped screwheads....
Nothing Chats brings iMessage compatibility to Android - GSMArena.com news (www.gsmarena.com)
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At least use Mastodon (lemmy.ml)
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Valve says "technology doesn't exist" yet for full Steam Deck 2.0 (www.eurogamer.net)
Yes, also Teslas (media.mastodon.scot)
The second coming is near (slrpnk.net)
Amazon Building its Own Linux-Based OS to Replace Android (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
Nvidia is likely to have a massive impact on revenue due to export restrictions. Meanwhile, the situation has come up as a big opportunity for Huawei to claim a new business. (www.huaweicentral.com)
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System76’s Lemur Pro Laptop Is Just a Really Nice Linux Laptop (www.wired.com)
The System76 Lemur Pro is light, thin, repairable, and upgradeable. It’s the best Linux laptop we’ve tested.
Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB on a PC (www.theregister.com)
USA: Court rules automakers can record and intercept owner text messages (therecord.media)
Weird 🤔 (jlai.lu)
18+ [NSFW] What are uncommon / unthought fetishes you yourself have or you've encountered?
This is a question intended solely for the adult audience, both tagged as NSFW and with a NSFW warning in the title. I don’t see a rule prohibiting those, and I hope it’s allowed....
What is your exotic pet?
I want to hear from the people with pets like centipedes, prarie dogs, alligators, scorpions, vultures, octupus… What is taking care of your pet like?