Overzeetop

See Also: Apple Vision users after playing Fruit Ninja for the first time.

Oh yeah, my state has one boob on the flag and one in the Governor’s mansion. Livin’ the dream.

It’s magic and we don’t know how it works*.

* as of my latest coursework in Biology; IDK if anything has been discovered since the 80s.

Not only that, but SP500 pays dividends practically every year, whereas gold costs money to store securely. $15M in SP500 would have netting something around $300k last year in dividends alone.

In some industries, absolutely. In others, there are benefits to staying or there really is 10 years of growth potential.

can’t fuck off from our responsibilities when we can’t be arsed with minimal consequences

This might be the most (long term) depressing thing about adult life. Having a class for a semester or a year means that the mental overhead of a class builds up but, when you’re done, that demand is gone and you start over without baggage next term. Jobs build up that overhead, but it just never lets off, ever, unless you quit to take a new job. Switching (professional) jobs is similar to a semester/year end and - esp if you can swing a couple weeks in between - gives you that re-zeroing and that little honeymoon period at the beginning like the start of a class when you don’t have homework yet. The difference is that the switch often occurs on a scale of a decade, not a year.

Solid fuel for rockets burns relatively slowly at 1 atm and in solid form, much like a flare, though still faster than I would expect you’d want for a hot pot unless these were a hybrid (so no oxidizer in the pellets, just a solid fuel source like modified PVC, with a separate oxidizer like nitrous oxide). The water was replacing the jet fuel, which - assuming it was similar to Jet A - is basically kerosene. Though I’d be worried what modifiers or stabilizers were used for a green flame if I were cooking over it. I’ve made green flames with boric acid and methanol for Halloween decorations (outdoor, of course), but who knows what is causing it in their fuel.

Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It’s hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn’t live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn’t quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.

Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That’s a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don’t get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just “doesn’t understand” that “closing school for three days because the flu is so bad” is not a pandemic, and that they just don’t understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)

A Bell, Book, and Chicken in a Hatbox

I mean, that’s a weird-ass AI prompt. But if fascism wins and you voted third party, yes - it’s partly* your fault unless you’re too stupid to understand how first past the post voting works.

*conditionals against massive fascist party majority states notwithstanding.

My only reason to believe that is not what is happening is that China, and the Chinese, are too smart to using coal as a peaking or emergency source of power. The only thing worse than coal for peaking is nuclear. Oil, Gas, and hydro are all much better for short-to-mid term peaking and batteries - something they’re very good at and have vast resources for - are perfect for short term emergency/failover loads. I believe (without documentation) that they are building extra capacity for the possibility of another expansion - the incubation of so many “third world” economies and partnerships across Asia and Africa to spur demand for their domestic production. If they don’t use it, it was a jobs program; if they find they need it, they will accept short term cash and economic power for a worsening of the world environment. In a way, the largest communist country on earth is also the largest capitalist power. Ironic.

his past year, China couldn’t run their hydro at peak capacity because of a drought.

Well, yes. The simple facts we have are that fossil fuel use is up. What happens next year will be speculation, but what we know is that they are using more coal this year, and they are hedging their future bets by building out their coal generation capacity. So if climate change means a further drop in hydro output, or more cloud cover where they install solar, or they need to make more power than they’re installing because the world wants more steel (I’m in the building industry and steel supply is still a bit tight) - they can start belching out a massive amount of CO2.

Only time will tell - and I hope you turn out to be the one who is right :-)

China has increased their coal generation in terms of absolute GW, and increase the coal usage per GW this year. I’m not sure where your data is from. Here’s mine:

“China’s CO2 emissions have seen explosive growth over recent decades, pausing only for brief periods due to cyclical shocks.” and “…CO2 is rebounding in 2023 from zero-Covid lows (see: Why emissions grew in Q3 of 2023)…”

both from a link in the original posted article, https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2024-after-record-growth-in-clean-energy/

“Domestic coal output tonnage has continued to grow in 2023, following the steep increase in 2022 resulting from government efforts to boost output. However, coal quality has declined, resulting in a much smaller increase in energy supply from domestic coal. Poor quality of coal supplied has also pushed users to shift to imported coal for blending, the result being a record surge in imports.”

https://energyandcleanair.org/china-energy-and-emissions-trends-june-snapshot

The analysis points to a reduction in 2024, but that is speculation. What is clear is that 2023 is higher. And if the Chinese economy should pick back up and steel and concrete production come back up to recent historic levels, the CO2 is definitely going go continue to go up for a while. They’re bringing renewables online, yes, but if we look at what is actually happening the CO2 is currently increasing. Both of us would be speculating beyond that.

Yeah, that’s just a shitty (or out of spec) time base. My Seiko watch gains 1-2 minutes a day, but it’s completely mechanical so it depends on temperature and winding/mechanism tension for accuracy. There are electronic timing circuits which are resistance and capacity based, and as the resistance and capacitance of the system drift (time/age and temperature) they also drift. A crystal, made to vibrate at high frequency (piezoelectrically, iirc), will provide a much more stable time base and be accurate to seconds over many days’ time.

Interesting aside - time keeping is how ships at sea used to determine where they were in the ocean. Latitude can be found from the stars, but longitude can’t so it needs a time reference standard. The book, Longitude tells the story of the search and the competing methods for determining location prior to the invention of crystal/electronic time bases and modern GPS. I won’t say that the storytelling is particularly gripping, but the actual path to discovery is fascinating.

That says nothing about reducing total energy output, though. They’re only talking about paying back installation costs for additional capacity. Adding 50% more capacity and then running everything at 80%, for example, still means burning more coal and making more power. And, often, running a plant at below optimal will decrease it’s efficiency, leading to a higher CO2 load for every kWh. It’s an incentive for growth and surplus capacity, not an incentive to lower carbon emissions.

That’s probably just fluctuations in the line frequency and the method for keeping time varying between the two (one might use a crystal that drifts). Being on the “wrong” frequency will have it shift by hours every day. I had a (US/60Hz origin) microwave in my apartment in Bonaire (50Hz) last year that never seemed to have the right time, and when I did the math I realized it was the frequency - it was behind by ~4 extra hours every day (50/60 x 24 hours).

Funny effect, though - many cheap electronics (think coffee makers and microwave ovens) use the line frequency as a time base. Taking a 60Hz or 50Hz appliance and plugging it into the other causes the clock to be off.

I presume “decline” is used in the percentage sense and not the absolute sense. If the total power amount of carbon-based fuel generation plants is increasing, and the fuel is coal ©, then the carbon emissions must go up in an absolute sense. But the rapid deployment of non-carbon fuel power sources are increasing faster than the the carbon based, so percentage will go down. Am I reading this wrong?

Also, in a linked article: "And, as Myllyvirta highlights, numbers in the communique stating that coal consumption rose 4.3% in 2022 and total energy use rising 2.9% “appear to contradict weak or falling industrial output”

So consumption of coal - the most carbon-producing fuel - rose in 2022, and according to this article their energy consumption jumped again after Covid restrictions were lifted this year. Renewable installation is rising faster than carbon installation (280GW installed this year vs 136GW of coal “under construction”). The data given in these articles seems intentionally inconsistent, from annual installation (only given for renewable) to total capacity (only given for future Coal). One has to wonder if The Guardian is running their articles through some kind of Donald Trump AI filter to ensure that no verifiable content gets printed.

I’m not rich enough to hate Google. I have a couple of domains and several people who use them for email. I have calendars with people across device ecosystems. I don’t have the hours and hours to keep up with fighting spammers or an infinite budget to hire someone else who will guarantee my privacy to do it. What are my options? Is Microsoft or Yahoo any better?

I’ve been with Google since they were a Do No Evil company. Now that they Do Evil, they already have terabytes of my old data in storage to mine. Adding a few more GB isn’t going to make a hill of beans difference.

Also, I recognize nuance - Google, well Alphabet, isn’t one company. It’s a huge conglomerate of, sometimes competing, interests. That’s a distinction that often gets lost in online discussions. Whether I hate Youtube’s profit arc or not doesn’t really affect my impression of the Gsuite services I rely on.

Its a joke - yes.

Though, realistically, an empathy test would probably filter out a large portion of the haters. It’s harder to hate when you internalize the condition of others.