frezik

Thanks. There's way too many people who don't see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.

My numbers were wrong:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is "soft costs", and labor is included in it, but it's a pretty small fraction of it. The "other" soft costs are the big thing--stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.

Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn't even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.

IIRC, this sort of thing has been floated before. The issue is that you can't just focus that much light on the solar cell. It'll burn out.

Honestly, we don't need the technology to get any better than it is. It's nice, but not necessary. Labor costs of deployment are the biggest limiting factor.

Like a public sector job in Wisconsin would have a union (and isn't police).

This is what happens when old men don't take up model railroading.

I think that's what they mean, but it's not a well written headline.

Real leaders don't need to be paranoid about what their underlings think about them. Fascism is more fragile than it appears.

It's unsustainable to keep prices lower than costs. The Amazon example didn't have low prices forever.

The flip side of that is entire classes of bugs being removed from modern software.

The differences are primarily languages. A GUI in the 90s was likely programmed with C/C++. Increasingly, it's now done in languages that have complex runtime environments like dotnet, or what is effectively a browser tab written with browser languages.

Those C/C++ programs almost always had buffer overflows. Which were taken off of the OWASP Top 10 back in 2007, meaning the industry no longer considers it a primary threat. This should be considered a huge success. Related issues, like dynamic memory mismanagement, are also almost gone.

There are ways to take care of buffer overflows without languages in complex managed runtimes, such as what Go and Rust do. You can have the compiler produce ASM that does array bounds checking every time while only being a smidge slower than C/C++. With SSDs all but removing the excuse that disk IO is the limiting factor, this is increasingly the way to go.

The industry had good reasons to use complex runtimes, though some of the reasons are now changing.

Oh, and look at what old games did to optimize things, too. The Minus World glitch in Super Mario Bros--rooted in uninitialized values of a data structure that needed to be a consistent shape--would be unlikely to happen if it were written in Python, and almost certainly wouldn't happen in Rust. Optimizations tend to make bugs all their own.

My question is if we could attach an induction loop to a standard T8 bulb. If a bulb has burned out its electrical contacts, perhaps it could still be reused as it is.

I'd guess that even if it were possible, it needs a lot of special electronics. Not worth the effort compared to getting an LED bulb.

It's not that bad. This is an actual technique in use, and it drastically decreases how much storage you need.

The biggest problem has been convincing capitalism to do it. They've been building solar like nuts because that's the cheapest per MW of anything on simple Excel spreadsheets. More mathematical nuance would show that if everyone does this, it's just going to cause overproduction and wasted potential on very sunny days. You need all three, and toss in some hydro and geothermal, as well.