• 5 Posts
  • 244 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 16th, 2023

help-circle










  • In California we have a project called Flood-MAR, which stands for Managed Aquifer Recharge. Farmers who have land that wont be damaged by floods volunteer to pump lots of water onto their lands during floods. This reduces the downstream flooding slightly, and the water soaks deep into the ground for safe keeping until it needs to be pumped up during a drought.






  • Here is the full transcript of Hancock’s (@DaveHan06) post on X/Twitter:

    Is anyone surprised that Kyle’s far-right political handlers ensured this particular detail didn’t make it into his book? (Referring to photo of email detailing how Rittenhouse was banned from ever applying to the Marine Corp again due to failing the entrance exam so terribly)

    Regarding his online high school diploma, we had to force him to complete the four years of credits in just ten months, which he did using the “Google machine.”

    We invested significant effort to craft the image you witnessed during the trial. We outfitted him in new suits, arranged for his haircut every weekend during the trial, and dedicated over 200 hours to prepare him for direct and cross-examination. We employed the world’s leading jury consultant and conducted extensive research through three mock trials to identify the ideal jurors and the most effective approach for his testimony.

    Transforming a middle school dropout who was “angry at the world” with a history of violence and an unhealthy obsession with guns and killing into a respectable young man with a desire for higher education and a promising future was no easy feat.

    It was a meticulously crafted facade, which we sincerely hoped he would grow into. Instead, he squandered a full scholarship to study any subject at any university in the country to become a divisive douchebag and antagonize black Americans on college campuses. Kyle failed to learn a single thing. He remains the same uneducated, arrogant, and antagonistic individual, incapable of telling the truth.

    Now, he genuinely believes he is the show pony we created and has surrounded himself with sycophants who fuel his inflated ego because they prioritize their political agenda and Christian Nationalist worldview over his well-being.

    Despite my efforts to guide him toward a better path in life, the allure of notoriety triumphed over the prospect of putting in the hard work of pursuing an education. Kyle is ill-equipped to offer advice to young people. I regret my role in shaping him into whatever he has become. If I had known what I know now about Kyle’s history, I wouldn’t have been involved.



  • Most home energy use is heating and cooling. Heating air, water, and clothes drying. Cooling for refrigeration and air.

    But home energy is a small portion of per capita energy. Transportation of goods (buy local), manufacturing of goods (bricks, steel, ceramics, concrete, aluminum, and glass are all kiln fired), etc. Consumers do not have information about energy of goods other than price. And many price-based decisions are worse for the environment - like buying plastic containers every few years vs. glass ones that last decades.

    As energy becomes less expensive, its usage will naturally increase. A huge portion of the world doesn’t have indoor climate control or hot water on tap. Anyway energy usage is determined by demand, and demand is currently limited by price. Lower price will bring higher demand for the foreseeable future.




  • Negative pricing from solar occurs mid-day. It doesn’t mean all other power plants are turned off. Some power like nuclear or coal have thermal inertia, and so they aren’t worth trying to shut off for a few hours - it would cost them more to shut down and heat back up than to just pay the negative price to stay on. So this negative pricing just indicates that more solar is online than ever before, and the market is ripe for diversification of energy sources (or storage) to take advantage of price differentials. If other sources phase out, solar may meet the full summer demand for a few hours each day. Then eventually with batteries solar can meet the full demand for a few months straight. But it will never meet winter demands, especially with electrified heating.