We're talking about different things. I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance. You're not wrong, but that's not what I was talking about.

The point of load shifting is that if I have a task I need to do today that consumes power, I can do it when the sun is shining or when it's not. If the power company lets me do it for free because the sun is shining and there is excess power, that helps them to keep the grid balanced during the day, which is good, and that's what you're talking about.

What I'm talking about is that if you have a task that you were always going to do, and you would have done it at, say, 7pm, when renewables generation is low and load is high, and I incentivize you to do it at 4pm, when demand is high and renewables generation is higher, then you aren't going to do that task at 7pm, which means the total load on the grid at 7pm will be less. If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm. That can bring my cost per mwh down from £500/kwh to £40 per mwh. Load is high at that time, so that can save millions of pounds over the course of an hour.

It's really not nonsensical, actually. Base load can be incredibly expensive. If they can avoid firing up the most expensive plant, they make more money. It's really that simple. Even though it seems "free" to you, what's really going on is that you have become part of the supply side of the equation by using power when it's there, and then _not_ using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on. This is really a case where everybody wins.

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.

The other thing about saving is that if you can depend on UBI, and it's enough to live on, then that takes the pressure off of individuals saving for retirement. Right now the amount of money people have to save for retirement in the U.S. is actually a problem, because there's no safe place to put that much money. And so we wind up with things like private equity and various other forms of securitization a specific group of which led to the 2008 crisis.

All of these securities are just ways of storing value, but you can't actually store value—value is work. "Stored value" is an obligation that someone else will have to work to pay back: I use my wealth to pay you money to do the work that I need done.

So public support for people who need it is actually the same thing as living off savings, except that living off savings is individual, and public support is collective. So public support can take advantage of the law of averages, and private savings can't. Which massively increases the amount you have to save as an individual to be sure you'll be okay in retirement.

And this motivates wealth inequality, which makes things worse and worse for the people who are creating the value you as a person with a decent amount of retirement savings need done. We've already had people saying "no more taxes" because they don't want to work to pay for other peoples' retirements. This is the same thing, and at some point it either turns into runaway inflation, which means your savings loses its value, or else it turns into regime change, which means who knows what? Right now, it means that a bunch of elected people are just raking in money through fraud, which isn't likely to end well for the rest of us.

It's weird how people think of socialism as being somehow expensive in comparison.

Well, and not only that, but the article itself clearly says that it was the tariffs that killed the company, not Lena Khan. So the headline looks a bit like it's just clickbait nonsense, and Lena Khan had nothing to do with this. Sure, if Amazon had acquired them, maybe they would have operated at an apparent loss in order to collect all that hot hot private home use data, but that would not have been a win.

The worry that iRobot would be acquired by Amazon was reason enough for me to disable my device—I hadn't actually heard that the merger was canceled, because I moved shortly after that and we sold the Robot so we wouldn't have to move with it. :/

Contrary to the scaremongering we hear, the world is not full of terrorists. They exist, don't get me wrong, but the reason we're so afraid of them is that our fear of them is incredibly useful for people who want to control us.

And also, the ones who do exist aren't engineers. So a shooting, or a stabbing, that's pretty easy to figure out how to do. Derailing a train? That's physics. Physics is much harder than pointing a gun and pulling the trigger.

Unfortunately Acela sucks. I took Acela from New York to Boston once. Once. It was terrifying—the tracks aren't really suited for running at (haha!) 100mph. The idea that this is high-speed rail and that anybody takes that name seriously just illustrates what a backwater the U.S. is nowadays.

There is already a rail corridor through western Indiana into the Chicago metropolitan area. And there are already passenger trains running on it. The problem isn't getting a train into the city center—it's that we don't have electrified high-speed rail lines between the cities. Which, given that we do have low-speed (only 75mph max) highways, which are insanely expensive to build and maintain, seems like an eminently solvable problem.

The real problem is that there are huge fortunes dependent on keeping those roads full of cars. But really that's not even the problem. You can see the problem right here in this discussion: if you haven't lived in a place where high speed rail is ubiquitous, it seems really really hard. If you haven't lived in a place where cars are not completely and utterly dominant, it seems inconceivable that things could be any different. Even people who are anti-car tend to think with car brain because of this.

Math is hard.

If a substantial percentage of the population is vaccinated, the likelihood of being exposed to measles is very low, so the 3% who might contract it if exposed have a good chance of not being exposed. This also doesn't account for whether the severity of the infection will be different for those 3% if they have been vaccinated.

Like, that's only 20% faster than you're going right now. Big deal. :)

Relative to what?

Watch the video. The guy is going around a banked corner at 400kph, and hits 500kph on a straightaway. Honestly, this thing is fucking terrifying, but based on what I could see from the video handling isn't an issue.

One of my neighbors whoâ(TM)s in his eighties wound up switching to a recumbent tricycle because he had balance issues. Which sucked. But the tricycle is awesome and probably would be comfortable for you to sit on.

Nevertheless, you should ride what works and is enjoyable for you. The point is not to punish 80-year-olds by forcing them to ride bikes they arenâ(TM)t safe on. I have an Azore city bike that I really like. Wouldnâ(TM)t mind still being able to ride it at 80.

I live in Europe. It's definitely not a utopia (nor is it a single country!). However, I don't think that being more like the U.S. would make Europe better. That's my only point here. Yes, Europe could definitely be better (even the European country where I live!), but being more like the U.S. would make it worse. Certainly going in the direction of "growth first" would not make it better, although again I'm sure some percentage of those who emigrated to the U.S. would say this would be better.

The country I live in now is becoming more like the U.S. at the moment in the sense of starting to move toward home ownership as a growth asset. In the U.S., this has caused an insane housing shortage, and we're seeing that here too. We should be moving away from such policies, not toward them.

That's because if you get to 75 years old in the U.S. you are more likley to be reasonably well-off—if you aren't you are more likely die before that of preventable causes. And if you are well-off, that helps once you're past 75 as well. Of course plenty of poor people reach 75 in the U.S., but percentage-wise fewer do.

Also, the EU is a big place with lots of different countries. I live in the Netherlands, where you routinely see 80-year-olds riding bicycles. This is less common in other european countries, but that's changing. Your comparison would be more useful it if were by individual country rather than including the whole continent. I don't actually know if it's any different in the Netherlands—we have income inequality issues here too—but it would make sense if it were because people are so much more physically active here throughout life.