• 8 Posts
  • 379 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 28th, 2023

help-circle

  • Not that fossils/natural gas are required per se but their capabilities. Some places like Norway and Quebec are geographically blessed with distributed hydro that can fill a lot of that need. The variable load for a nuclear in that case could be many times larger than the generator itself but I’m not aware of any studies on that. Kinetic storage with massive flywheels is maybe the closest thing to that, or even batteries. You can ramp nukes by venting steam but that heat can cause environmental issues. Similar to hydro how their capabilites are reduced based on environmental factors like handling spring runoff.

    There are some very recent reports out of the Ontario regulator who are dealing with this exact issue right now. Long term demand increasing for the first time vs carbon legislation, and the mandate to have a reliable grid.


  • I think Matt Christman said it best that “Trump is a tumor made out of America.”

    Yeah it was winter 2015 when the bi-partisan media began covering Trump as a frontrunner. It wasn’t even conservative media Trump’s cult was sharing as memes online either, it was compilations of liberal news anchor’s with “shocked” faces at every stupid Trump tweet. Washington Post (I think?) even had the infamous Trump lie tracker. Some people still gaze at his two impeachments, legal troubles, moral failings, health issues, and despite this in relation to his current position keep obsessing about the next big thing right around the corner.


  • Nuclear vs fossil gets in to why you don’t/can’t run all nuclear, else things would be very easy. Nuclear’s capabilities are best suited to supplying the base load/minimum demand but they can’t be ramped or dispatched, reactors basically run most efficiently at their designed output levels, so you can’t use them to balance supply and demand. The use of fossils for base load is more a thing in countries with lower regulations, usually because of things like a growing manufacturing economy (ie “global south”), but also in some extraordinary regulatory circumstances (Germany) or just because of when fossil was brought online/refurbished. Fossil’s capabilities are like the opposite and they are most efficient and economical used for load-following, which is even more important with renewables you can’t dispatch.

    So fossil is still the main control lever for reliability, and that’s the crux of why a suitable replacement technology isn’t available yet. If it was simply a matter of output level then we’d have no problem. Mitigations to reduce use of fossils when demand is high can even be things like a demand response/dr program for transmission-connected facilities, where they are incentivized to reduce their use during times of high demand. Basically instead of having a higher energy price and all this generation online, you take a bit of what that price would be and use it to incentivize consumers to reduce their demand. Smart stuff but fossils are still a thing with that and if storage could replace them we could easily just have nuclear+storage, even smaller nuclear like those SMRs/small modular reactors.

    Another massive consideration with all of this is the logical location of each type of generation at the transmission level. In the event you might have to bring the grid back from 0, or even just handle expected equipment failure, the specific location in the logical grid where types of generation is attached has to consider the capabilities of each type of generation. For example in a blackout situation you can’t just start a nuclear generator when the demand is effectively 0, you have to bring generation and loads online from scratch in very increments initially. During the 2003 northeast blackout there were opinion articles complaining about how the casinos were online before neighborhoods, ignorant to the fact those casinos were instrumental in providing an initial load on the transmission grid.







  • I think it’s the news media exploiting people’s desire for something cathartic in lieu of having any meaningful politics to change anything. US politics right now is like a show/spectacle that people react to from opposite sides. Posting the same fucking articles and memes is like a way to manufacture and participate in a simulation of your individual political views having some significance, outside of any popular politics where they could actually change something. This is clearly the case with Trump too, for all the insane shit he governed like a milquetoast Republican.



  • AtlasOS is great wish I discovered it before doing it all manually. All it really does is apply group policy changes and config management, which is what any enterprise workplace will do by default. I have 15 years experience as a sysadmin in a mixed OS environment in the operation of critical infrastructure. We’re bound by intense regulations and audited often, and Windows is the workstation OS that we can easily manage security-wise. This is in contrast to the notion of Windows as a garbage consumer product, which yeah not wrong there, but people might not be aware of it’s compliance with industry standards and security regs. Which is a shame because that’s ultimately what’s evil about the MS approach to business, they create a problem for businesses and offer the solution.


  • The only thing you can’t disable here are the vulns, technically MS is obligated to patch though so I’d be interested which ones apply, I’m assuming there’s a lot of vulns in certain features. My Windows SSD is 60GB fully loaded with apps and drivers. Search and other stuff are just basic config items and plenty of UI replacements and tweaks to be had.

    My Debian servers and laptop run way lighter as expected, unfortunately I need the custom hardware support of Windows for some software critical to my livelihood. All I do is deploy Windows in the same way I’d deploy and manage an enterprise workstation. No store, no live, no “apps,” no overlay bs or news feeds, just pure Windows. Gotta say I prefer 11 so far to 10, the window snapping and some other changes have been good for productivity, which is really the only thing I care about since I’d switch that machine to Debian in a heartbeat if I didn’t have a use case.





  • It’s a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren’t often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people’s leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.

    If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we’d have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.

    If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.