@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... Water has consistent flow, the home made stuff you lift out before floods wreck it.

Air is 800x less dense than water, so your assembly has to be very much larger to capture the same power, but then it's very much heavier and uses more of that power to operate, which produces more wear for the power you get.

On top, wind is, well, irregular, and large wind-catching objects can't be moved out of the path of wind storms ahead of time, so they have to be extra robust and able to furl or turn aside, which is more complexity, more cost, more engineering.

One classic use for wind was pumping water from wells into a tank, because average wind was enough to match average tank use for home use. That's all solar now, because it's vastly cheaper and lower maintenance and so on.

@nprofile1q... The US literally sells it's weapons as being "war tested" after sending them for free to Israel to drop on Palestinian civilians.

Yes, the genocide's primary purpose is to help sell weapons. War is a racket, one that just happens to kill a whole lot of people.

Plus, all the other weapons they fired at Iran, with tens of thousands killed, so Trump could scam the US stock market. Why the fuck not, eh.

But remember, kids, China firing one missile into a clear patch of ocean is super bad and dangerous, because, I don't fucking know either.

Like, China's anti-ship missiles have been ahead of the game for decades now, it's not a surprise that they still work, or that they continue to develop them, and yes, NZ just fired a fucking test missile into the ocean ourselves, like last week, an orbital one.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... Republicans stole the presidency in 1876, and again in 2000.

Of course, they were the good guys in 1876, but, they still gave up on reconstruction to get the Democrats to stand aside, so not that good.

Florida in 2000 was just a set of court cases by Republican officials that stopped the vote being counted entirely in majority black districts, very carefully counting votes that let them win while not counting ones that said they lost. Planned for years ahead by constantly shifting fouled voting machines into black districts, so they could complain and appeal about marginal nonsense endlessly in those places and just have tens of thousands of democratic votes thrown out by timing out the count in the courts.

Why concede when you can cheat? Trump's main problem is he's no good at it.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... We are fortunate in not having a political system where paid party folks can bring court cases to stop the vote count.

Our judges already oversee the counting, so if you have a complaint, they are there and pass a ruling on the spot. Which is then reviewed for nationwide consistency at the full count later, along with all the other calls, regardless of the first night's count.

It's insane how much worse the US is at doing that, but of course, disenfranchising folks to steal elections is the point of the system over there. If they notice they've lost, it's important to stop counting the winner's votes early.

@nprofile1q... Just a few more tonnes, mate. You know I'm good for it. Yes, I said that last time, it would be last few tonnes, just that, but things change, man, I just need a few more tonnes. Just a few.

This is the last one, honest, just these last few tonnes, then it'll be good, we'll totally start paying our way. Yes, like we said last time, but this time we mean it, mate.

C'mon. It outrageous to deny us a few more tonnes. What's even a few more tonnes between mates? Are we even mates, mate?

@nprofile1q... It's cost.

It's much cheaper to dump the heat in a river and buy power off the grid than to make power out of heat.

If you can use the heat directly, that's fine, but that works better if it's very hot in transit. But the cooling on computer hardware is not very hot, it's just very high volume, which is worse for cost.

You can think of it, a modern coal plant runs a steam piston, and the cooling for that is another steam piston, and the cooling for that is a third steam piston, all nested inside each other, and in really cold countries they sometimes use the cooling on that to heat nearby buildings, because it's too cold by then to do much useful work.

But no one builds giant Rankine engines to work that last bit because it's much cheaper to just burn a little more coal, and you'd still be dumping almost all that heat in a river anyway.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... My experience of builders going wrong, is that architects aren't trained how to talk to builders, they're trained how to pass compliance and inspection requirements.

So most building plans look great on paper and often don't mean much of anything to the people who have to build them.

You'd think the builders and architects and planning inspectors should all be taught the same things, but they really aren't.

It felt like the whole "management not understanding what the work is" problem combined with the "well, if you insist on making me do it poorly you'll just have to pay me to fix it afterword, so okay."

Plus, if your architect plans on making something out of a curve, or a circular thing, just don't. That will cost everyone a lot of money.

@nprofile1q... The whole gondola in Queenstown thing has come up every few years for a long time now. A couple proposals got to the planning stage, but they never had a business case without closing public roads to force people to use them, and then charging a fortune and not running often, because they're extremely expensive to run on the distances needed around Queenstown.

It did not surprise me to see National fast-track it, because the numbers attached if only someone would pay for it, are huge.

@nprofile1q... The US tying their dollar to everyone's oil trading means they can print infinite money without shifting their exchange rates, leaving them arbitrarily wealthy without having to produce anything of value.

Meanwhile, everyone else in the world has to be at least somewhat useful to someone.

So Iran trading oil in yuan is a huge no-no for the US. Long term, they can't survive without the petrodollar, so letting this continue is just something they can't do.

You can see this in the lead up to a lot of recent wars, and coups, national leaders announce trading oil in something other than US dollars, and then they're gone.

@nprofile1q... I doubt he's stable enough to stick to that anyway. They can start things again any time by proxy.

Most likely he quit because they were currently out of munitions of some key type, like the anti-missile missiles (where you spend ten million bucks to shoot down fifty grand over and over), and too many multi-billion dollar planes lost won't be helping with the sale of those planes.

You gotta remember, war's a racket, the war starts because a bunch of very rich people think they're going to make bank on it, and it ends when that proves untrue even for them personally.

@nprofile1q... Everyone had lockdowns.

The option was locking down before the hospitals overflowed, or after.

Doing it early not only saved lives, but resulted in massively less restrictions for everyone. It was the lowest cost, greatest freedom option and it also had the best outcomes.

That's what he doesn't want to repeat, the display of governance doing good. That's what they fear.

@nprofile1q... @nprofile1q... It does seem that the low cost of producing electricity in the future is what's holding back lowering that cost here.

Like, a current investment in generation is valued based on current peak prices. So, if you make future peaks really expensive, by building a CNG import terminal, you secure those current investments.

Or, you build solar panels everywhere and some pumped hydro and have nearly free electricity, and everyone gets to live and work cheaper, but those old investment values collapse.

As it happens, the government here is invested quite heavily in electricity generation, so they want peak prices to stay very high.