sonori
@sonori@beehaw.org
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Firstly, I would generally roll the rise during the pandemic into the effects, as that’s when a lot of the inflation that would later be messured actually got going, and in this scenario you would likely see a similar effect to the whole, but I will consede that you likely much in the way in gains, especially given the effects such a recession would have across the board.
That does not have an effect on my main point, which is that a sustained very high inflation/hyperinflation during a loss of confidence crisis is going to do far, far more damage to people who’s source of income is earning a return on their assets and investments. In that earlier fifty percent inflation example you would need working class real wages to nearly half to have a similar effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Except we did see the working classes wages keep pace with and even outpace inflation in the last few years? Inflation has always been primarily a threat to the rich, who by the common definition make their money off of their savings, and so are directly affected by those savings diminishing in real value.
Similarly depts are nearly always denominated in the local currency and so are directly 1 to 1 diminished by the inflation of that currency. For example if you owe two hundred thousand on your mortgage and you see fifty percent inflation then you have effectively just been handed a hundred thousand in real value directly out of the pocket of the person who lent you that money.
None of this is to say that very high inflation is good in an economy where people need to save money for retirement, but it does have some silver linings for the poorest who already have depts rather than savings and who are generally paid in real value.
In a very high inflation scenario where the US was intentionally trying to devalue its currency I expect China would abandon its peg against the dollar, and everyone would likely try and reduce their dependency on the dollar, which would in turn probably lead to a feedback loop that would exacerbate the issue.
I would not expect anyone to come out of the almost certain gobal ressecion better off, except maybe Russia given how little they are tied to the gobal economy and how they’ve run down their forex reserves, but I imagine that unless every economist in China and the Eurozone takes the decade off they will come out of it a lot better off than the US would.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Yep, it would be fascinating if it happens because not only would the US be comiting compete economic suicide and almost certainly take most of the gobal economy down with it to a decent degree thanks to the US dollar’s heavy use as a foreign reserve, but hyperinflation would hit his donors the hardest while wiping nearly all debts out of the US system.
Given the economic chaos the US stock market, realstate market, and retirement savings would all go down with it. The only possible winners to such a move are Russia, and to a lesser extent China and the EU.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Generally the definitions i’ve seen economists use is that the middle class is defined as people who earn the majority of their money from an actual salary instead of stocks, either as bonuses or from investments, and as such are working class and not part of the ownership class, but who can also lose their job and have six months of savings to comfortably find a new one and as such are not poor either.
- Comment on Schools Were Just Supposed To Block Porn. Instead They Sabotaged Homework and Censored Suicide Prevention Sites 4 weeks ago:
Coming from someone who has done sysadmin work for schools, in practice the problem with filtering tends to come from the federal government requiring you to filter porn or else loose your funding, but doesn’t really provide any more guidance or resources beyond that.
Given most schools tend to be tight on money, this in practice means generally ticking the box’s in the firewalls config or outsourcing the whole system and the people who control the defaults control the vast majority of schools. No one person is going to try and keep track of and sort the entire internet, so often no one has any idea of what the ever updating list of blocked sites is until someone actually brings it up.
Personally I think the government should just set up a small board that maintains a repo with a list of sites they want blocked to comply with funding instead of leaving it up to the school, who will tend to be overzealous because there’s minimal to no cost one way and a massive one if it makes the news that you’re not strict enough.
This list of not safe for work sites could then even be used as the base of the filter for other government buildings too when combined with a data exfill list, and would save everyone a lot of time and effort. Of course it would likely hurt sales for a handful of companies with lobbyists and will never get done, but it would solve this issue.
All that being said, in the case of many of the schools listed in the article I have no trouble believing it’s malicious. The problem shouldn’t have taken more than a ticket or first talk with a sysadmin to resolve, much less escalated to legal action, and is undoubtly an active choice on the part of the school administrations in question.
- Comment on somewhere a postdoc is crying 5 weeks ago:
Depends on how far out it is from the nearest star. Inside the orbit of jupiter exposed ice will sublimate into steam thanks to heating from sunlight, outside it remains ice. This is actually what a comet is, namely a ball of ice from the outer solar system orbiting in close to the sun and sublimating off. The steam is so loosely bound thanks to the tiny gravity of the comet that the solar wind blows it away, creating the visable tail.
- Comment on Robots that know if we’re sad or happy are coming | Biometric Update 1 month ago:
Yay, more ways to target ads. Now your website can require users to have an active microphone in order to browse the site because it can help tailor the “experience.” Better yet, just use it to analyze the live feed coming from an Echo or other smart device and sell the analytics to a different company. What could possibly go wrong?
- Comment on Why crypto could be green power's unlikely new best friend 1 month ago:
Especially because in practice the massive cost of compute means that while low cost power is nice, it is always more economically sound from the miners prospective to run 24/7 to get the best return on investment. Indeed if you only ran your expensive data center for the few hours a day where solar production can even meet demand than you would never break even.
All of this means that miners have in practice demand all that power 24/7, and thusly demand either more storage or more fossil production than would otherwise be necessary.
If nothing else hydrogen is pitifully easy to produce from power, and current non-fossil hydrogen production is nowhere near enough to fulfill current demand, let alone what we’ll need in the next decades. Better yet, because the machinery needed to make hydrogen is so cheap compared to the electricity necessary, it actually makes financial sense to only run them when there is spare renewable capacity as compared to constantly.
- Comment on LinkedIn targets users caught between TikTok and what used to be Twitter | TechCrunch 1 month ago:
Twitter I can see because Linkin’s whole thing is based around formal communication so adding celebrities and business might work if you really squint, but TikTok? TikTok? A platform built on algorithmic content slurry of low effort with no lasting connection or ties between viewer and creator?
The fuck are they on and where can I get some.
- Comment on CATL, the little-known Chinese battery maker that has the US worried 1 month ago:
I can almost see it since it’s a non consumer company, but why title it little known and then highligh that it is the largest battery manufacturer in the world?
- Comment on Battery prices collapsing, grid-tied energy storage expanding 2 months ago:
That’s how it works in manufacturing. The more of something you make, the more economies of scale kick in and the lower the cost per item.
Of course, a depressing number of economists seem to think this doesn’t exist, because obviously the market will be allowed to collude to raise prices on in demand items, even if the price per item is falling.
You could also note that supply and demand are just two of several thousand factors, and any analysis that pretends they are the only two factors is going to be woefully disconnected from reality.
- Comment on Florida teens arrested for creating “deepfake” AI nude images of classmates 2 months ago:
Boy creates fake photorealistic porn of a girl and passes it all around school to bully, harass, and encourage them to kill themselves: it’s just like drawing a picture of your date.
- Comment on Solar Panels Spread Across America's Heartland as Farmers Chase Stable Returns 2 months ago:
And of course, my county is trying to ban it outright because ‘we must preserve our rural character’.
- Comment on Denmark orders schools to stop sending student data to Google 2 months ago:
Having worked with schools that use chromebooks before, generally the entire point of using them is that Google is your IT department. You don’t need any on site servers beyond a router from your isp, and can just return anything that breaks to Google for a replacement, all very cheaply. The records can all be administered by whatever teacher is least scared of computers and can use the nice gui. Especially for smaller schools with say a dozen or so total staff, not needing to pay a employee or MSP to fix the computers is a big deal.
Nextcloud however, as much as I like using it, requires a server. It requires the ability to understand hardware requirements enogh to get a good nas, an ok understanding of dns, and when the gui updater breaks, an ability to ssh in and run the updater manually. You need ssl certs, and if your using letsencrypt port forwarding, and public dns entery, and keeping on top of updates. Jan, fourth grade teacher who plays Stardew Valley and so isn’t too terrified when asked to go into the brightly colored menu, is not going even know it exists, much less install it.
Also, the problem with Fedora is that it also requires an domain, which means installing and configuring dedicated domain controllers, which is not an simple task. You need a deficated IT person, or you go with an MSP, and the MSP will just set up a windows environment in a few hours and be done with it.
- Comment on European Electricity Review 2024 - Wind produced more electricity in the EU than gas for the first time in 2023 2 months ago:
Now imagine if that Nuclear line was flat and all that solar had instead been taken from coal. The last coal plants would be going offline today, and gas gas over the next few years.
- Comment on European Electricity Review 2024 - Wind produced more electricity in the EU than gas for the first time in 2023 2 months ago:
Solar has almost managed to catch up to the decline in nuclear too.
- Comment on Oxford claims the world record for solar panel efficiency 3 months ago:
I’ll be honest, this article has me really confused on what the actual achievement was. They say they got a 25 % peroveskite/si cell, but that they already manufacture 28% efficient peroveskite/si cells at scale.
The current world record for peroveskite/ si cells is HZB’s 32.5% record, and the world record record for any cell material is FhG-ISE’s 47.6% four+ junction cells, so i’m not sure what this record was in.
- Comment on The lithium revolution has arrived at California's Salton Sea | Controlled Thermal Resources is ready to start building a lithium extraction and geothermal power plant at the Salton Sea 3 months ago:
Ohh no, the ecology of our poor artificial lake we made by accident must be preserved at all costs./s
The Salton Sea is only at 4.4g per hundred gallons, meanwhile the north arm of the Great Salt Lake is over seven times saltier at 31.7, and Ethiopia is up to 43.3. Personally, i’m in favor of putting a desal plant on the canal and dumping the brine into the Salton Sea, let’s pump up that number and see how high we can get it before it’s economical to dry it for salt and take some of the load off of the Great Salt Lake. Like, are we really going to let Ethiopia beat us at the record for saltiest sea?
- Comment on Chart: The world is building renewable energy faster than ever before 3 months ago:
With proper midigations it’s fast more eco friendly than the natural gas power plants were still building more of to make up for the fact that solar only ouputs in the day and we can only spin up new lithium mines and battery factories so fast.
- Comment on Chart: The world is building renewable energy faster than ever before 3 months ago:
Well, I believe about half of all species of salmon will be extinct inside the next thirty years owing to temperature increases, so, as someone who likes fishing in my local river, I’ll happily take some dead salmon now for better solar power storage if it helps the odds of keeping about half of them alive. We lose vast amounts of salmon either way, but this way we only lose salmon and a few other types of fish and not, you know, a good chunk of all marine life like we do if we keep on our current rate of transition.
- Comment on Renewables cover more than half of Germany’s electricity demand for first time this year 4 months ago:
It makes some sense to use electric or biofuel trucks to move goods for short distances as well as the distance between a facility and an distribution yard, but for long distance I fully agree that we called them multi modal containers for a reason. You can move a container from truck to electric train in seconds, and indeed we already do that for anything that has to travel by ship anyway.
Moving goods vast distances over land extremely cheaply and with zero carbon emissions is a problem that was solved long ago with overhead electrified rail, and it’s amazing to see the lengths we here in North America will go to avoid investing in it.
- Comment on Renewables cover more than half of Germany’s electricity demand for first time this year 4 months ago:
Yep, road where goes with the square of vehicle weight. A singe semi truck is far more damaging than a hundred cars, and bikes don’t do damage period.
As for EVs, while they are often heavier than ICE’s, it’s only by a few percent, and less impactful than the vehicle obesity epidemic we’ve seen here in the US in the last decade.
- Comment on Coalition tells Cop28 it will back tripling of nuclear energy if Peter Dutton becomes prime minister 5 months ago:
There are limits to battery production, especially on short time frames. If your expecting every nation to try and deal with storing days of electricity production to cover for a rainy week your going to run out of easily accessed raw materials such as lithium.
You need either reliable generation, absurd quantities of undersea cables, or scalable storage. The only practical storage tech we’ve seen is hydro, and there are limited places to flood in order to construct built massive resivors, and it has far worse timelines and costs than nuclear, so that means on demand generation.
In this category we have nuclear, and location dependent options like hydro and geothermal. All of these are about as expensive, but output constant or at will power.
If you let the market decide, it’s going to do what its already decided to do, which is cheap solar plus cheap gas and coal. If you ban gas and coal, then it will be cheap solar and batteries for nations that can afford them and all gas and coal for the poorer nations that can’t afford the batteries.
Leave the batteries for applications like transport and smaller grids that need them instead of brute forcing them into places where they don’t fit like long term grid storage.
Finally, though this is the most minor, nuclear is by far the winner in local environmental impact, as it lacks the land use and habitat distruction requirements of solar, wind, and hydro. It’s also location agnostic, and unlike batteries gets cheaper and faster as it scales.
- Comment on Coalition tells Cop28 it will back tripling of nuclear energy if Peter Dutton becomes prime minister 5 months ago:
Counterpoint, wind and especially solar are now so cheap that the average grid scale solar plant turns a profit in 10 years and continues that profit for the next twenty plus. It’s cheaper per watt than gas and especially coal.
Perhaps govement subsidies should instead go to the less profitable 24 hour sources of power needed to fill the gaps, like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, instead of just making already profitable investments a bit sweeter. There is a reason why well managed grids use a diverse set of sources, so unexpected shortages in one tech don’t limit the whole system.
- Comment on [TECHCRUNCH] Electric Hydrogen is the green hydrogen industry’s first unicorn 7 months ago:
It’s a startup so standered rules apply. The companies only product at the moment is hype that they pull of something not done before to huge profits. I’ll believe they can actually do it when they have product made outside of a lab.