partial_accumen

the USA will import nothing in the next few years.

I don’t think its going to take very long for tariffs to bite American consumers. A month ago I bought a $1000 technology item that is manufactured in China. I see that same item’s price has raised to $1200 in the last week or so. This was an item ordered from online, so its possible they didn’t have a large inventory onshore in the USA.

There are bricks and mortar retailers that have weeks or months of inventory warehoused in the USA just as part of their normal supply chain. However without replenishment, popular items will sell out and simply not be stocked again because the tariff affected margins will price out consumers for many of those goods. I’d say if these tariffs stay as they are (or get worse) our retailers are going to have lots of empty shelves in 3 months.

I can see that you were very angry when you wrote this

I’m not angry. I’m shocked at your position though. I see your position as dismissive of someone who is actually doing something about the crisis she will inherit with the tiny fractional power she had before adulthood. She, and her generation, have no time for a timid approach. We’re going to be long dead and she’ll still be here trying to live through the mess we, and our parents, have cause her and everyone else her age.

so I think it’s better that we stop here.

Thats fine. I don’t see a path to anything that would yield productive conversation from here.

Wait, you think Putin has credibility when speaking on climate change? To quote the late Sen. John McCain describing Russia as “a gas station masquerading as a country”. Putin’s life and livelihood depend on continued world’s unchecked consumption of fossil fuels. Putin has zero credibility on the subject. Why would anyone consider him an objective source?

While the public saw Greta behaving like a petulant child during the speech

You and I must have seen different speeches. Part of Thunberg’s appeal was her eloquence in speech especially speaking truth to power. Here’s part of 16 year old Greta Thunberg’s speech in the UN:

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

“So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.”

source

I can’t imagine a world where you’re calling that “petulant”. At 16 years old she had more poise and gravitas than many of the world leaders she was speaking to. You say she hasn’t done anything. I beg to differ. Further, if what she has done is nothing, it raises the obvious question: what have you done to avert climate catastrophe?

George W. Bush and Barak Obama’s secret love child:

George Takei and Megamind’s secret love child:

(George, keep being your awesome self!)

Tony Sirico’s secret love child:

Anthony Bourdain’s secret brother:

Solutions?

Carbon tax.

In this micro example, imagine if you could access all of your data for free when there as abundant sunshine (carbon free), or had to pay for carbon based energy at night. You’d start to sort your data for what you really wanted so that you’d only be paying a small amount for a small amount of data.

He’s in the same bucket as Greta Thunberg. They just like to scream and blame people instead of providing practical solutions.

Greta Thunberg is 22 years old right now, and was “screaming” and “blaming people” when she was 11 years old.

She saw the world she was going to inherit and forced conversation to work toward solutions. Expecting an 11 year old to provide answers that none of the established world has is silly.

I’ve given you my opinion. I don’t have to back anything up.

Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got apathy, malice or ignorance.

I don’t think things are getting worse. You do.

So you refuse to defend your spoken position with anything concrete, even though I’ve asked you about multiple specific examples that contradict your position.

And I don’t think any of this should add to the “hate” problem that some see on Lemmy. Which is the point of OP’s post.

Well why would you? You seem to be just fine with the destruction of lives around you, even making supporting statements that you think its good these things are happening to these people. Why do you think that your positions don’t deserve hateful responses? Lemmy doesn’t have a “hate” problem. Today’s leadership in the USA, and as a consequence, our society now does.

Hate isn’t the answer

I agree with that statement. However, your chosen positions are steeped in hate yet you defer or ignore it. That wreaks of hypocrisy on your part, and points back to the intellectual dishonesty I accused you of earlier.

You’re being intellectually dishonest if you are claiming your statement is true.

Just because I said something that you didn’t agree with doesn’t mean I was being “intellectually dishonest,” and it’s rude of you to imply that.

You can keep your false righteous indignation. How can you claim to tell person in an El Salvador prison right now its “no worse off”? Please, explain that to me. How about a fired federal worker? Is it “no worse off” for them now they’re unemployed?

I lived through the 80’s. Try living then and telling me that life is worse now. lol

I already told you I’m an older, well off, white man. Yes, I lived through the 80s too. How is that relevant at all? You’re we should be happy now because we don’t have 12% interest rates yet and stagflation is how we should be okay with trump destroying the world economy for likely the better part of the upcoming decade? Why stop your measure over 40 years ago, long before most of the people here were even born?

Why not tell interracial married couples “Try living in 1966 and not being able to get legally married to your spouse of a different race. lol”

Why not tell women and “Try living in 1918 and not being able to vote. lol”

I don’t think any of that is any worse off than it was a few years ago though.

You’re being intellectually dishonest if you are claiming your statement is true.

Can I ask if you are a white, well off, man?

I don’t think the world is getting “worse,” it’s just the doomscrollers on Lemmy wanting it to be worse to fit their own twisted narratives.

For many MANY groups it is getting objectively worse.

For those in the USA:

• if they are trans they are at risk for violence or legal consequences for simply going in a public bathroom.
• if they work for the federal government they have lost or are at risk for losing their livelihood.
• if the weren’t a natural born citizen of the USA they are at risk for deportation to a prison in El Salvador irrespective of their circumstances of student visa, asylum visa, green card holder, even naturalized citizens.
• if they are a women, their lives are now at risk from preventable disorders if they get pregnant
• if they are old or disabled they are now at risk of being declared dead and having their retirement Social Security income cut off
• if they are a child they are at risk of dying from preventable diseases (like measles or whooping cough) even with decades old effective vaccines available, but not used.
• if they are poor they are at risk for possible hunger and starvation as basic food assistance has been cut around the country deemed as “waste”
• if they are a veteran needing medical care they are now at risk from cuts to staff that facilitate care for the people that stood in defense of our nation.

For our great historical allies of Canada and Mexico:

• they are getting their economies destroyed because they trusted the USA to honor its own written treaties.

For the rest of the world:

• they just today the world got an unjustified kick in the shins with nearly global trade tariffs from the USA.

The only group that aren’t generally hurt yet are: well off older white men

As a member of that group I find it fucking disgusting what is being done to everyone that isn’t in this group at the hands of this group.

It would be cool if it could somehow integrate to a VPN and only do that while the VPN is active. I don’t think it’s possible, though

Potentially possible, but I agree, likely not worth the effort.

When was the last time you checked the length of your DHCP lease?

I’m past caring about giving my IP to a website that I want to use, but what this is doing is handing out your information to every single advertiser that is published on any page you visit. In some cases this plugin would match the definition of “leaking personal data”.

You do you though. I won’t stop you.

If you care about your information and privacy, why are you giving them your information for nothing?

That HTTP request would also show up in the advertisers web logs with your origin IP address.

WOW, thank you for this write up! I am able to follow most if not all of this thankfully.

I’m still learning things like this for myself, so I’m happy to share knowledge.

I recently had the tug of war analogy used in an explanation given to me regarding some engineering work to sync a new generator to the grid and it is effectively eye opening.

The tug-of-war was my third attempt at an analogy when I was writing this, so I’m glad the concepts made it through. I was thinking I should have put made Squid Games reference for more clarity about the stakes, like this:

I also assumed that the ERCOT situation was largely or entirely due to gross negligence and Texas things, so it’s nice to learn otherwise. I’d done some reading on the matter awhile back but I mostly just recall the discussion revolving around winter weather without highlighting concerns such as these.

Oh, don’t worry, as I understand it there is still plenty of ERCOT negligence. Apparently Texas’s ability to deal with over-production or under-production is seriously compromised because of its very small connection to the other grids around Texas (by intentional Texas design). From memory, there’s a small link west of Texas through New Mexico, but it can only pull or push a tiny fraction of the electricity riding on the Texas grid so its effectively useless to handle big gridscale swings.

Texas has finally figured out this is a bad idea, and got a check written by Biden’s DoE for $360M to make big boy connections to the national power grids. source.

I’m fine with some of my non-Texas tax money going to help the people of Texas step into to the grid the rest of us use. We’re all citizens of the USA after all. That is unless Musk and trump decide that $360M is waste that Texas doesn’t deserve and cancels the grant through DOGE. Then Texas is back where it started or will have to foot the entire bill themselves.

Not the dude you’ve been responding to, but I’m curious about the infrastructure and tech limitations just in attempt to be more educated.

Warning: GIANT WALL of text incoming. Buckle up.

We all know what happens when there isn’t enough power on the grid at a given moment: a blackout.

However, do you know what the extreme result of too much power on the grid is at a given moment? Also a blackout.

Curtailment

The term to start reading up on is “curtailment”. Its used in demand (consumption of electricity) but also supply (generating electricity). Meaning grid operators are always on a knife’s edge of generating just enough electricity on the grid without being too much. For a small amount of waste, they have ways to burn it off. Think giant space heaters running outside. The loss of money from that “burned off” electricity is there, but its not that big and its considered a cost of doing business. However, there isn’t much “burn off” capacity infrastructure. Historically there hasn’t needed to be.

Grid operators usually have systems of communication they use to contact their generation partners and ask for more juice to be produced, or more frequently these days telling them to hold off generation. At the grid level though, this isn’t like a light switch of “on and off” it can take many minutes or even hours for a grid scale generator to spin up or spin down generation. Also these systems aren’t meant to be rapidly spun up and down so it gets expensive to operate like that.

So up to know its just been the grid operator guessing demand needs and talking to a handful of generators to scale up and down. Now with massive amounts of electricity generated by thousands of smaller operators (residential as well as smaller commercial) there isn’t the same mechanism for the grid operators to halt production.

So what happens when there is a huge excess of electricity and that relatively small “burn off” capacity is quickly consumed? If that excess electricity is allowed through, things literally blow up in the electrical grid, in businesses, and in homes. Those gigawatts of electricity that cannot be allowed to exist on the grid. So grid operators can use another mechanism to try to burn off that excess electricity: negative electricity prices. They can pay people and businesses to use the excess. A note here, in the years and decades ahead, our society will evolve to use this excess more efficiently by timing high consumption at times of excess, but except in a few small examples, we just aren’t there yet. If there aren’t enough people taking money to use the electricity, the grid operator may have to cut off sections of grid to keep from blowing them up. Here’s the blackout from too much electricity. A full blackout also means coming back online later is a much slower process as sections of the grid are brought up slowly to make sure the demand can meet supply.

Even in state sponsored electrical grids (like I assume France is), grid operators are expected to cover their own costs at least when providing the electricity service to the state. So forget that they still have to maintain the grid with all its equipment and employees when electricity prices are at zero, during these peak times they’re having to pay people to use more electricity. So even if they were at break-even before, they’re now at a loss because they’ve had to give out money to use their service. Again, in the future societies and technologies (power storage) can address this, but we’re not in the future. We’re here today with these problems. At its extreme, how many of us will continue to work at if we aren’t receiving a paycheck?

Grid forming/Grid following

One other difference in grid scale generators vs many/most solar generators is the responsibility for forming the grid. This means, keeping the frequency (60Hz in the North America and half of Japan) (50Hz in most of the rest of the world and the other half of Japan). This is done by grid scale generators with GIANT spinning generators and are required by their mandate to make sure the frequency is always stable.

Imagine a game of tug-of-war. The grid scale operator would be the leader closest to the middle and the leader of the team. This is the grid former. All the solar producers are behind the leader all pulling at the leader’s instructions. These are the grid followers. So in the middle of a match it is clear that our team is losing and slowing being pulled toward the line. The grid followers don’t want to be hurt in the fall, so some of them start dropping the rope protecting themselves. As each one drops, the amount of force on the leader and those remaining increases. More team members drop the rope. The forces increase again! The leader cannot drop the rope because they are not allowed to even though they can see what’s coming and is eventually very violently pulled across the line and seriously hurt while all the team members (grid followers) are unharmed because they dropped the rope before anything bad happened to them.

This is what happened in Texas a year or so ago. The result was huge blackouts across the state.

This feels like something that should be celebrated regardless of needing to clean up and awareness to improve the grid and electrification moving forward.

It should be celebrated, but it should also be recognized that it creates its own set of problems. We can’t simply “take the win” and not make any changes. We’ve got systems set up for different circumstances and we haven’t change the system even though the circumstances have changed.

Nah, let’er rip. Just a clueless bystander here. Tell us why capitalism demonizes free energy. We’ll pretend to be shocked, surprised and to have learned something new along the way.

Capitalism demonizes anything free because free is the antithesis of a version of trade that requires differing values of goods.

Do keep in mind that “lost profits” are not a real thing in the space we’re trying to move in.

Keep in mind MOST of the arguments you hear are bad faith fossil fuel operators so I’m not going to defend those. However, there are a number of issues that this abundance of temporary solar energy creates today with the systems and infrastructure we have deployed today. Keep in mind grid operators are measuring and changing the grid an intervals of fractions of a second to keep everything up and running.

Primary difficulties:

• Electrical generation curtailment
• Scaling non-solar generation back up when the temporary energy isn’t there to avoid blackouts

Our grids today aren’t built the way they need to to properly take advantage of large scale solar. We need to change how grids are built, and how we behave with how we use electricity as consumers and businesses.

I appreciate your attempt to engage in good faith, but no, my question was very rhetorical. I am not really interested in discussing any answers to that question that neither you nor I would support.

I understand. I’ve faced some of the same frustrations I’m feeling in your post.

I think most of the opposition to solar panels comes from disingenuous efforts by companies with a financial interest in fossil-fuel,

Most is, I agree. However there are some truthful reasons too because of currently deployed infrastructure or technological limitations, but I agree the majority of anti-solar/ant-wind are bad faith arguments used by fossil fuel invested companies and industries to continue to justify their existence.