Another ‘consume’ message from the Gruaniad. I can provide more why you probably don't need one. The main being cost, waste and the fact that with a little care, a modern laptop (say up to 10 years) can provide a good service for years to come. AI - not necessary for most, WiFi - can be boosted with a USB stick, batteries - replaced.
(from a 2009 MacBookPro)
Speakers from 23 parliaments have appealed to the #Speaker of the #UnitedStates#House of Representatives, #MikeJohnson, urging him to consider the bill passed by the #Senate, which provides for the allocation of $60 billion to #Ukraine, the Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament Stefanchuk said.
23 parliaments have appealed to the #Speaker of the #UnitedStates#House of Representatives, #MikeJohnson, urging him to consider the bill passed by the #Senate, which provides for the allocation of $60 billion to #Ukraine
@Faelyn it’s a fight for democracy & if you think #Putin will stop at Ukraine you do not understand him & aren’t listening to him. If he succeeds in #Ukraine he will move on to other nations including our #NATO#allies, most likely #Poland will be his next target. He has said as much. It will #cost us far less to fund Ukrainians who are willing to fight without our #troops than to wait for the moment when we will be drawn into a war in which our troops will be fighting.
I love my solar panels. But the solar panels don't love the British midwinter. Most of the year, my panels produce more electricity than I can use. But in winter we're lucky if they produce 3kWh per day - and most of the time it is considerably less.
So our winter electricity bills must be massive, right?
The Octopus smart tariff charges us a variable amount throughout the day. Every 30 minutes the prices change to reflect the demands on the grid. During peak times, it can go as high as £1/kWh. That's a good incentive not to run the tumble-dryer at the same time as the rest of the country is cooking dinner!
During quieter times, the price of electricity drops - there isn't much demand at 3AM so prices fall. Sometimes they fall to zero. Other times, they fall into negative territory and we get paid to use electricity.
Now, that's all well and good, but most people don't want to shift their consumption habits. The dishwasher goes on when it is full and dinner is cooked before Coronation Street starts. That's where the battery comes in.
We have a 4.8kWh battery. It is hooked up to the Internet and knows what our energy prices are minute-to-minute. When electricity is cheap, it charges up from the grid. When electricity is expensive, it discharges into our home. If we boil the kettle at 7pm, the sensors on the battery detect that we're using expensive electricity and starts outputting stored electricity.
Essentially, we don't have to alter our lifestyle at all. Here's a typical December day. The graph is quite complicated, so let me step you through it.
The bottom graph shows how expensive it is to buy electricity throughout the day. As you can see, there is a peak in the early evening when electricity becomes expensive.
The top graph has two interesting lines on it. The purple line shows how much electricity we're drawing from the grid, the blue line shows what the battery is doing. Early in the morning electricity is cheap - you can see the purple line rising as the blue line falls. That shows the battery is charging. You will notice that it only charges at the cheapest possible times.
In the evening, you can see the purple line dip to zero and the blue line rise. That shows the battery is discharging into our home and there in no electricity being purchased from the grid. There's a similar dip at about 0830 when there's a little spike in price. Clever battery!
I want to stress that is is all automated. I don't have to do a single thing. The battery speaks directly to my electricity provider to get the half-hourly costs. The battery can predict what our usage will be, but keeps most of the electricity for the expensive times of day. Our smart meter sends our usage back to the energy company automatically.
Against a normal tariff of 28.5p/kWh, I'm paying 12.4p/kWh. That's a saving of 16.1p/kWh.
The bill above shows 320kWh per month, which means a saving of £51 from the electricity I buy. That's approximately a 55% discount.
We've had that battery since August, so about 5 months. In that time it has saved us approximately 500kWh. We only moved onto the smart tariff a few months ago, so work out the savings there is complex - but I estimate it's about £130.
December is a high use month (lots of lights on and oven cooking). During summer, the battery mostly fills up with free solar power. It is hard to predict exactly what we'll save in a year, but it should easily for 50% off our electricity bills.
But, of course, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Our 4.8kWh battery cost about £2,700 to supply and install. That's a large chunk of change. Based on our current projections, its payback period should be about 7 years. Of course, if electricity prices rise significantly, the payback period will shorten.
Solar panels are also expensive to install - between £4,000 and £12,000 depending on your property and how complex your roof is. They mean we pay virtually nothing for electricity in spring and summer. Again, the payback period is under a decade.
We can also sell our excess solar back to the grid. In theory we could also buy cheap electricity in the morning, store it in the battery, and then sell it back at peak times. In practice it isn't worth it; the cost of buying electricity at peak is higher than the price we could sell it for. So it makes sense to use the power rather than selling it.
If you can afford the large up-front capital costs, solar + battery allows you to make massive savings with a dynamic tariff. In times of solar excess, we pay close to nothing per kWh. In winter, we shift our consumption to pay at the cheap rate.
Effectively, it's like pre-purchasing all your electricity for the next decade.
There's no doubt that the cost makes this prohibitive to many people. Ideally, the state should be mandating that all new homes have solar panels and space for optional batteries. We also need V2G (Vehicle to Grid) to allow electric cars to act as home batteries.
But there's no doubt that these technologies actually work! Yes, solar works in rainy London. And, yes, even fairly small batteries can make a significant difference in winter. We're on the cusp of a domestic energy revolution. When coupled with a smart tariff, it means people don't have to change the way they behave in order to save energy.
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#SpacePolitics
“It got funded as a #rocket to #nowhere, and we at #NASA had to figure out something to do with it,” #Garver says. Legacy contractors like #Boeing continued to receive large bonus payments 💰 for working on the #SLS, despite delays and mushrooming #costs.
Critics of the #SLS argue that the rocket is #unsustainable by #design, relying on an old and potentially quite #expensive way to get to #space. Much of SLS is a holdover from the #spaceshuttle. But while the shuttle #orbiter, #engines, and external #tanks were designed to be #reusable, SLS and its engines were not.
“They’ve designed a rocket that is basically #unsustainable, because it’s completely #throwaway. The only bit that comes back is #Orion”
Ms. Stirone is a space writer. Dr. Chiao is a former NASA #astronaut. Ms. Garver is a former deputy administrator of NASA. Dr. Grinspoon is an #astrobiologist
Back in the day, I remember the only difference was version "1A" used a size 12 font (for example) and version "2B" used a different size font.
The difference in font size meant, even though the text was identical, when the professor told you to turn to page 101 (for example), you may have been seeing a different body of text.
Note how the user’s title says “on gender surgeries”, while the article instead says “gender-affirming ‘enhancements’”, this means that testosterone and estrogen are likely also counted on the statistic.
(4.000.000$ / 157 inmates) / 6 years = 4.246,28$ per inmate per year
I get varying stats on the cost of gender-affirming surgeries, as they seem to vary a lot from country to country and from year to year. This image seems to illustrate the disparities. We should assume that California is on the more expensive end of the spectrum.
With this data in mind, let’s take the most practical approach possible. If we have a prisoner who is socially accepted to have been trying to transition, changed their name, their appearance, their demeanor, and so on, putting them on a prison for their gender assigned at birth is likely to generate situations of abuse with regards to other inmates; while putting them on a prison for the gender they’ve transitioned to while they’re still far away from a relatively stereotypical image of their gender might as well provokes frictions unless you give them medical support to continue or maintain that transition. A trans man in a male prison who stops receiving testosterone is going to become a likely victim of abuse; a trans man in a female prison is going to become a reason of outrage. So just give them the treatment they need.
But someone may still think this is a disproportionate amount of money to spend on a prisoner, making them unreasonably more costly to maintain. Well,
At the federal level, U.S. taxpayers likely spend just north of $40,000 per year to incarcerate someone in a federal prison. Based on data from Vera, Interrogating Justice’s Ronnie K. Stephens estimates that number to range between $14,000 and $70,000 in most states.
4.000$ extra dollars per year might be a noticeable bump, but compare it to other medical needs prisoners may have:
Unfortunately, there is no price tag on cancer. Patients can spend anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 annually on their treatment.
Do we stop treating prisoners for cancer too?
So yeah, this whole article is pointless rage-bait for a logical but relatively unknown consequence of applying the same principles of a Western prison system to everyone equitably and fairly, but now you also have strong data to wipe the floor with it.
All USB-C cables are equal. But some, as the saying goes, are more equal than others.
This little gadget from Plugable is a fantastic bit of kit. Plug your USB-C power supply into one end of the gadget, plug the gadget in to your laptop, phone, or any other USB-C device. Watch the screen to see how much power is flowing.
There's no Bluetooth or WiFi to get the results out. There's no flash storage to record anything. There's no graphs. It shows you volts, amps, watts, and direction of power. That's all I need it for, and that's all it does.
As you can see, the screen reacts quickly. So you can get a good idea of what power load your various apps have.
This is great. My work Windows laptop was complaining that it wasn't receiving enough power from my USB-C docking station and, with this, I was able to see that it was getting about 40W.
I was able to test some USB-C cables to see how much power they could support.
Even better, this doesn't interfere with normal USB-C functions. It happily passed through video, audio, peripherals, etc.
It's about £20 - £35 online depending on whether The Algorithm favours you or not. You can find cheaper ones - but they tend not to go up to 240W.
This is an indispensable gadget - especially if you have dozens of cables of uncertain provenance. It'll tell you just how much they're capable of delivering.
Now I just need to find a USB-C plug which can actually deliver 240W via PD!
Since #electronics have been on my mind lately, I've been thinking of this ... story? situation? anecdote might be the best fit.
Doing anything every vaguely #niche, like #hobby electronics, in a small #city in the middle of #nowhere used to be quite difficult in terms of obtaining #supplies and #parts. Before the #internet, if you could plan ahead and order enough stuff at once from a big #distributor to make the #shipping charges worthwhile, #catalogs from DigiKey etc were life savers.
It didn't matter what you needed, they didn't have it in stock. It would take two weeks to order it in.
And it didn't matter how small it was, it was going to #cost ten bucks. I think that may have been a #minimum price for anything not in-stock, but I don't recall for sure.
A replacement reservoir cap for that radio? Two weeks, ten bucks.
A ceramic fuse of a particular value? Two weeks, ten bucks.
A transistor for your project? Two weeks, ten bucks.
Today the research network Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage (GameTable) officially starts. It's a COST action ( https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA22145/) aiming to create an interdisciplinary network concerned with methodologies and applications on how to use game AI to study, reconstruct, and preserve the intangible cultural heritage of games.
So it turns out I may have missed the price tag on becoming a #Taoist#student. $500 per month. That is a steep cost for two meetings a #month. I'm not sure why it's so expensive. Has anyone taken personal training with someone that was anywhere near that high as an ongoing monthly #cost?
What do you think? Should #Israel lift the #blockade on #Gaza? It prevents #food, #medicine, #fuel, and #electricity from being imported into the blockade zone. I see why, strategically, Israel has imposed the blockade, but there's no question it comes with a heavy #humanitarian#cost. I don't know what the right answer is, but I'd love to hear some other opinions on the matter.
The F-16A cockpit, designed in the early 1970s (in the era of slide rules), is still the epitome of an effective, efficient, ergonomic design. Its superiority is evident, when compared to the cockpits of its contemporaries, especially that of the F-15A. Another admirable UI design, albeit on a much smaller scale, is the Control Display Unit (CDU) of a typical Flight Management System (FMS). It, too, was designed in the 1970s. Such "industrial" UIs were designed, through iterative usability testing, by a team of psychologists, industrial engineers, electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, and experienced pilots.
In-cockpit, real-time UIs like these aims to decrease the potential for human error and to increase the pilots' situational awareness. They use the smallest possible set of usage conventions, control types, display components, fonts, and colours. They allow pilots to focus their attention completely on the critical information needed for the task at hand.
The traditional philosophy of human-machine interaction design is "usability without visibility". But today, the #web#UI's primary role is not #usability, but #marketability. And the users falsely equate flashy UIs with superior service.
This expensive trend is profitable to marketeers and attractive to casual users. So, it is justifiable for social media platforms and other non-mission-critical software. But this trend is unsuited to enterprise software, especially those designed for internal use. Such flashy antics diminish business users' #productivity and increases the company's #cost of ownership.
I'm saying compare the #decision as to whether to search this landfill to the history of similar choices made by the same #authorities, rather than to other decisions made by different authorities (cities, provinces).
The #hazards are significant. #Refuse has really poor #structural qualities. People are #killed every year when the hole they're digging in a landfill while looking for #valuables collapses.
"Marginal improvements to #agricultural#soils around the world would store enough #carbon to keep the world within 1.5C of global heating, new research suggests."
“Outside the f#arming sector, people do not understand how important soils are to the #climate,” said McGlade. “Changing farming could make soils carbon negative, making them absorb carbon, and reducing the cost of farming.”
But as usual, you have to ask: WHO is it that stands to gain from doing this, WHO stands to lose? Big Ag, Big Seed, Big Fertiliser, and the industries around that have a lot to lose. And they are still very powerful.
How to get them to the table as partners not adversaries?
#PlanetarySociety : #NASA spent $49.9 billion 💰💰💰💰💰 on #SLS and #Orion between 📆 2006 and their first test launch in 2022. Due to “poorly defined requirements, poor contractor performance, and increased material #cost”...
• SLS cost 42.5% 📈 more 💸 than originally projected
• Orion cost is 37.4% 📈 higher 💸
• The EGS program has cost 40% 📈 more 💸 than originally expected
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California Has Spent Over $4M In Taxpayer Dollars On Gender Surgeries For Prisoners (freebeacon.com)
Why spend thousands of dollars on gender affirming care, when the California tax payers will pay for you to transition?