It's *maybe* a useful short-term skill *from the point of view of the psychopath* but not for the rest of the rest of society which sustains the psychopath and the people the psychopath is parasitical upon...
Rgds
Damon
PS. When an honest-to-goodness co-worker psychopath tried his smarm on me one particularly egregious time, the traits were so obvious that I actually found it entirely repulsive and made it my business to actively undermine him whenever I caught him behaving badly. So not a useful skill in fact for him.
One reason to keep the tariff rise in check is to minimise the value and thus amount of such fraud while having something significant enough to be noticed by most people.
No single policy instrument can be perfect, but people do give at least some attention to things that they pay for, even though the response is massively non-linear.
I more than cover my entire primary energy consumption (heat+light) now with solar PV, so it does make a difference.
We should indeed leave as much as possible of the remaining ffs in the ground.
And there is plenty of renewable energy available, but up in the UK we'd have to tolerate some industrialisation of the landscape and we currently have a timing issue in the absence of sufficient storage.
I'm not against nukes at all; a close relative was the lead lawyer that got the last large UK reactor built, on the planning/enquiry side.
Actually the predominant rising cost in UK domestic energy is wholesale gas prices, as it happens.
And we have easy facilities to switch to other suppliers for free (and getting easier: the aim is a 24h switch time), though yes, people seem reluctant to actually bother to make the 10 minute phone call.
I don't think there's anything exotic of necessity in plain old monocrystalline PV. Basically sand with some common dopants. Other parts of the system as usually constructed, possibly, but I can't think of anything crucial.
Rgds
Damon
PS. And the EROEI for PV is better than tar sands, even if deployed in the UK, I believe.
Actually adding children at just below replacement rate to contribute to a gentle deflation of population is the smart thing to do for me and for society.
So you do the shutting up, please, and learn some manners.
The baseline measurement would be the historical average values for a household in your area, maybe of your size.
And by the way I cut from >2x normal to 0.5x normal for electricity by that metric. While adding two kids to the house.
Halving again would be relatively easy in good housing stock such as PassiveHaus, but I have the house that I have for now.
Actually I *am* aiming to make it possible to reduce heat demand (again) by a factor of two with my FOSS 'smart zoning' project for which I have a small trial running this winter to see if my ideas stack up. The aim is to in fact improve comfort at the same time.
I *am* suggesting that people using (say) 4x the mean per person pay (say) 10x or more per unit, a little like the TEQ (Tradeable Emissions Quotas) concept, and I'd not necessarily have a cap (ie the multiplier continues to rise with total amount used) to ensure that even the top 1% would notice.
There are ways to look after the poor without encouraging profligacy with energy.
We do it already: this really isn't black and white.
One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.
Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.
I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.
The world is not binary: there's a vast range of possibilities between leaving heating on the entire year and opening the windows when you get too hot to never turning it on.
Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...
For example, in the UK average transmission loss over high-voltage lines on the way to consumers is 2% and then another 7% gets lost in the lower-voltage distribution circuits to (eg) houses.
I fully support this, and a side-effect that I'm leaning on for one of my energy-efficiency projects (see @OpenTRV) is a supply of cheap efficient commodity 5V micro-USB supplies.
Rgds
Damon
Re:Only amateurs and idiots
on
The Other Pong
·
· Score: 1
Nasty troll: please go away.
Re:No ping-pong obession here...
on
The Other Pong
·
· Score: 1
Yes, that may indeed fall into the "heroically trying too hard" behaviour that many people in this space exhibit.
Me? I'm just an idle bum... And hate sport... and any other opportunity for bullying and grandstanding...
Rgds
Damon
No ping-pong obession here...
on
The Other Pong
·
· Score: 2
Maybe other things, but the two long-lived small companies that I've been a founder of have had no ping-pong tables or other sporting paraphernalia: many of us simply didn't enjoy 'compulsory' group activities/fun and still don't.
That's why I'm a governor at my kids' school. And always use the NHS not private medicine. And vote in all elections where I'm eligible.
Things can improve with determination. Almost certainly nothing to do with my tenure, but the school's reputation is on the up and we have waiting lists for almost the first time ever.
Gated communities of any sort are likely to be a mistake IMHO, and I work amongst some of the smartest and richest people on the planet in my day job.
The "we must not do anything speculative until all more mundane problems are totally solved" view is broken on many fronts, not least of which is ignoring the potential parallelism in progressing our culture and expertise, and the actual practical intractability of many of the "simple" problems especially if they are even defined in relative terms.
Naturally I *have* to ultimately present the program text in a form that the computer will be happy with, but I am very hot on appropriate human-centric documentation in-line and off-line, and phrases that make me spit include:
"It's self documenting."
"Oh it's hard to keep the comments in sync with the code."
Farg me!
I'm suffering on a new project from a slight lack of consideration as to what the coder following in your footsteps would need in order to understand what was intended vs what actually happened. As I fix that I can also improve the code behaviour and reliability, which happens to be critical for this application! I put lots of stuff in to make clearer to a human what is going on whether or not the compiler can deduce it, such as "final" practically everywhere possible in Java code so that the human does not have to worry about whether this, that and t'other might get changed in some non-trivial stretch of code. A little incident ~15 years ago where a coder/trader did not take care of such 'trivial' things and assumed instead cost our group $1m, for example, which I spotted when I came to tighten up the documentation and performance some time later. A little more exposition would have saved a lot of bother and cash...
I'd say that with the human-centric view (including thoughtful docs and unit tests) it's actually hard to write performant robust long-living systems, and LP was/is an interesting take on that. Good old Knuth!
I found the tangle and weave experience slightly tiresome from a purely logistical point of view, but all IDEs and so on (and the hardware to run them on) have come on in leaps and bounds, so that might simply not be an issue any more.
I did an entire thesis with Tangle and Weave, and I'm glad that I did, but I'm not convinced that a narrative exposition is any better than the more random-access style that a hierarchical directory layout with some decent (embedded and out-of-line) documentation and viewer IDE does.
My pet app will use any number of cores (it configures itself at runtime) and is running right now on hardware from ARM v5 (single core) though multi-core x64 to 24-thread Niagara CoolThreads.
What counts for my app is latency in responses to user requests, and energy cost per unit of user-perceived work done; multi-core and single-core have pros and cons depending on the user request and history. (One part of the system runs off-grid on battery power, just like a smartphone, on the single-core ARM, but would happily use 8-core if available and efficient.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's *maybe* a useful short-term skill *from the point of view of the psychopath* but not for the rest of the rest of society which sustains the psychopath and the people the psychopath is parasitical upon...
Rgds
Damon
PS. When an honest-to-goodness co-worker psychopath tried his smarm on me one particularly egregious time, the traits were so obvious that I actually found it entirely repulsive and made it my business to actively undermine him whenever I caught him behaving badly. So not a useful skill in fact for him.
Hi,
Have a read of this for an extreme (but not vastly so) case where *one* woodstove is unacceptable:
http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/forum114/comments.php?DiscussionID=9305
Rgds
Damon
Yes, I've heard of fraud.
One reason to keep the tariff rise in check is to minimise the value and thus amount of such fraud while having something significant enough to be noticed by most people.
No single policy instrument can be perfect, but people do give at least some attention to things that they pay for, even though the response is massively non-linear.
Rgds
Damon
EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested) is better for solar PV than for tar sands for example, even in the UK, AFAIK.
Rgds
Damon
Again, the world is not black and white. Regulation can't fix everything, but a complete lack of it doesn't work either.
Rgds
Damon
CIGS/CdTe is thin-film not monocrystalline (silicon): very different technology.
Rgds
Damon
We may be furiously agreeing.
At least compared to those that don't even see that we are taking risks or that it matters in any way to do so.
Rgds
Damon
I more than cover my entire primary energy consumption (heat+light) now with solar PV, so it does make a difference.
We should indeed leave as much as possible of the remaining ffs in the ground.
And there is plenty of renewable energy available, but up in the UK we'd have to tolerate some industrialisation of the landscape and we currently have a timing issue in the absence of sufficient storage.
I'm not against nukes at all; a close relative was the lead lawyer that got the last large UK reactor built, on the planning/enquiry side.
Rgds
Damon
The whole world is not like your local utility.
Actually the predominant rising cost in UK domestic energy is wholesale gas prices, as it happens.
And we have easy facilities to switch to other suppliers for free (and getting easier: the aim is a 24h switch time), though yes, people seem reluctant to actually bother to make the 10 minute phone call.
Rgds
Damon
I don't think there's anything exotic of necessity in plain old monocrystalline PV. Basically sand with some common dopants. Other parts of the system as usually constructed, possibly, but I can't think of anything crucial.
Rgds
Damon
PS. And the EROEI for PV is better than tar sands, even if deployed in the UK, I believe.
Says the cheap troll.
Actually adding children at just below replacement rate to contribute to a gentle deflation of population is the smart thing to do for me and for society.
So you do the shutting up, please, and learn some manners.
Rgds
Damon
The baseline measurement would be the historical average values for a household in your area, maybe of your size.
And by the way I cut from >2x normal to 0.5x normal for electricity by that metric. While adding two kids to the house.
Halving again would be relatively easy in good housing stock such as PassiveHaus, but I have the house that I have for now.
Actually I *am* aiming to make it possible to reduce heat demand (again) by a factor of two with my FOSS 'smart zoning' project for which I have a small trial running this winter to see if my ideas stack up. The aim is to in fact improve comfort at the same time.
I *am* suggesting that people using (say) 4x the mean per person pay (say) 10x or more per unit, a little like the TEQ (Tradeable Emissions Quotas) concept, and I'd not necessarily have a cap (ie the multiplier continues to rise with total amount used) to ensure that even the top 1% would notice.
Rgds
Damon
There are ways to look after the poor without encouraging profligacy with energy.
We do it already: this really isn't black and white.
One way is to keep the first kWh cheap and have a rising block price per kWh against usage: if you're not running a McMansion with the windows wide open in winter you need never hit the punitive tariff bands. Just for example.
Or directly subsidise the energy bills of the poor. Take taxes from the top end (of energy usage or general taxation) to compensate.
I'm a fairly right-wing (at least by EU standards) investment banker "greenie" and I have no desire to mess up anybody else's life, including those further down the line when we've burnt way more fossil fuels than was in any way necessary and (a) certainly squandered the cheap stuff and (b) possibly ruined the climate.
Rgds
Damon
The world is not binary: there's a vast range of possibilities between leaving heating on the entire year and opening the windows when you get too hot to never turning it on.
Raising the price of energy would help push people away from the stupidity of the first of those (yes, some do), to be just as comfortable and healthy on much less. I've easily managed to halve my energy use while adding two children to my household: it is depressing that some will not even try at the risk of damning their successors...
Rgds
Damon
A relatively small chunk, typically.
For example, in the UK average transmission loss over high-voltage lines on the way to consumers is 2% and then another 7% gets lost in the lower-voltage distribution circuits to (eg) houses.
That's 10%.
Rgds
Damon
I fully support this, and a side-effect that I'm leaning on for one of my energy-efficiency projects (see @OpenTRV) is a supply of cheap efficient commodity 5V micro-USB supplies.
Rgds
Damon
Nasty troll: please go away.
Yes, that may indeed fall into the "heroically trying too hard" behaviour that many people in this space exhibit.
Me? I'm just an idle bum... And hate sport... and any other opportunity for bullying and grandstanding...
Rgds
Damon
Maybe other things, but the two long-lived small companies that I've been a founder of have had no ping-pong tables or other sporting paraphernalia: many of us simply didn't enjoy 'compulsory' group activities/fun and still don't.
Rgds
Damon
That's why I'm a governor at my kids' school. And always use the NHS not private medicine. And vote in all elections where I'm eligible.
Things can improve with determination. Almost certainly nothing to do with my tenure, but the school's reputation is on the up and we have waiting lists for almost the first time ever.
Gated communities of any sort are likely to be a mistake IMHO, and I work amongst some of the smartest and richest people on the planet in my day job.
Rgds
Damon
The "we must not do anything speculative until all more mundane problems are totally solved" view is broken on many fronts, not least of which is ignoring the potential parallelism in progressing our culture and expertise, and the actual practical intractability of many of the "simple" problems especially if they are even defined in relative terms.
Life is neither binary nor single-threaded.
Rgds
Damon
Whoops, still asleep when typing: "*I recall a pertinent* little incident..." and "I'd say that with*out* the human centric view...".
Rgds
Damon
Naturally I *have* to ultimately present the program text in a form that the computer will be happy with, but I am very hot on appropriate human-centric documentation in-line and off-line, and phrases that make me spit include:
"It's self documenting."
"Oh it's hard to keep the comments in sync with the code."
Farg me!
I'm suffering on a new project from a slight lack of consideration as to what the coder following in your footsteps would need in order to understand what was intended vs what actually happened. As I fix that I can also improve the code behaviour and reliability, which happens to be critical for this application! I put lots of stuff in to make clearer to a human what is going on whether or not the compiler can deduce it, such as "final" practically everywhere possible in Java code so that the human does not have to worry about whether this, that and t'other might get changed in some non-trivial stretch of code. A little incident ~15 years ago where a coder/trader did not take care of such 'trivial' things and assumed instead cost our group $1m, for example, which I spotted when I came to tighten up the documentation and performance some time later. A little more exposition would have saved a lot of bother and cash...
I'd say that with the human-centric view (including thoughtful docs and unit tests) it's actually hard to write performant robust long-living systems, and LP was/is an interesting take on that. Good old Knuth!
I found the tangle and weave experience slightly tiresome from a purely logistical point of view, but all IDEs and so on (and the hardware to run them on) have come on in leaps and bounds, so that might simply not be an issue any more.
I did an entire thesis with Tangle and Weave, and I'm glad that I did, but I'm not convinced that a narrative exposition is any better than the more random-access style that a hierarchical directory layout with some decent (embedded and out-of-line) documentation and viewer IDE does.
Rgds
Damon
My pet app will use any number of cores (it configures itself at runtime) and is running right now on hardware from ARM v5 (single core) though multi-core x64 to 24-thread Niagara CoolThreads.
What counts for my app is latency in responses to user requests, and energy cost per unit of user-perceived work done; multi-core and single-core have pros and cons depending on the user request and history. (One part of the system runs off-grid on battery power, just like a smartphone, on the single-core ARM, but would happily use 8-core if available and efficient.)
Rgds
Damon