Thank you for the really excellent summation. I echo your thought 1 to 1. I have found it more difficult to learn new languages or coding skills, because I am no longer forced to go through the painful slow grind of learning.
I'll agree certain locations are getting "instagram famous" and really ruining it for the locals, but I don't think they are worse off because of it. Just let people flock to the one picture spot, they did it before social media, and now there are just more of them, nothing new here.
Nice article explaining solar energy policy. I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms. Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
1) Gas peakers - where every kilowatt hour delivered by solar or wind is just a kilowatt hour of gas that would otherwise have been burned. We are generally still here - still burning gas while it's sunny and windy.
(98%/5 hours is for australia and will vary for different countries but probably not wildly).
3) Syngas fills in that last 2-5% with ~50% roundtrip efficiency. Every kilowatt hour used in those 5% times - those dark, windless nights will be quite expensive although, counterintuitively still cheaper than an every kilowatt hour generated by a nuclear power plant - https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
3 and to some extent 2 will require natural gas to be prohibited or taxed heavily.
My google-fu is failing to resurface the links, but IIRC:
One study determined the cheapest energy grids for many countries. IOW, if you had to rebuild the energy grid from scratch today, what would be the cheapest way to meet your needs?
And the answer was 90 - 95% renewables, depending on country. Solar + wind + batteries for 90 - 95% of the power, with natgas peakers for the rest. And that 90-95% number increases every year.
Another survey noted that while Australia and many other equatorial countries are optimal for solar, Finland is pessimal. Most countries have already passed the point where solar is best in pure financial terms. Finland hasn't, but it's very close. Which is insane, given that Finland is a poor place for solar, but a great place for wind, nuclear & geothermal.
Finland does not have any geothermal. The country lies on two billion years old basement rock with approximately zero geothermal activity.
Wind is the dominanting renewable source, with enough of it for Finland to enjoy the second cheapest electricity in Europe last year. And indeed, even solar is profitable, hindered by the winters but helped by the long days during summer.
There is a fair amount of industry, but the buildup of wind power is relatively new. Lots of new datacenters are being built as cheap renewables, abundance of water, and a cool climate create a great environment for them.
Finland has lofty goals for becoming a hub for new green energy intensive industries, but these require large amounts of capital and it'll remain to be seen if that realizes.
One of the reasons I dont expect the australia storage model I cited to be wildly different to, say, Finland is that areas of the world which dont get a lot of sunlight tend to have a lot more wind and hydro potential per capita.
I doubt there are any places in the world where some carbon free combination of solar, wind, hydro, pumped storage, batteries and syngas isnt economic.
Unfortunately, natgas has a large sunk cost advantage. If we were building from scratch in 2025, syngas for the last 2-10% would be competitive. But we have a lot of natgas infrastructure. Syngas's advantage is that it can be locally produced and stored. Natgas has to be shipped large distances, but we already have the infrastructure to do that.
Just one note, I believe what you mean is some form of gas made from renewables, most likely hydrogen.
"Syngas" is a term that has a relatively specific meaning in the chemical industry, notably it is a gas mixture of mostly Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen. I do not think that this is what you mean.
What "critical look" is there to take? How about the way that the US gov't subsidizes the oil and gas industry, and is about to restart the coal industry? For some reason gov't investment in industry is only bad when China does it.
China bad when it's the only country that actually does something meaningful.
Cheap batteries are fueling energy transition and the demand is only met by huge overproduction by china.
Its not laziness, its corruption. The USA has a government that's tainted by moneyed interests who don't want their established gravy train derailed no matter how much it's fucking the entire planets environment. Now add to that, the current administration is too stupid and short sighted to ever incentivize change.
A "critical look" from a US magazine would explore how, with solar power clearly being the future, the US has abdicated its energy dominance to another country. It would discuss the potential ramifications of us not owning our energy infrastructure supply chain the way we do with oil/gas, and what might be done about that.
The New Yorker is a US magazine. From the US perspective, yes, it is "good" when we do it and "bad" when China does it in a way that could negatively impact us.
Nobody complains about China investing in its private industry, all wealthy nations do that. Everybody complains that China is a dictatorship that a) treats its people like shit, b) exploits these shitty conditions to gain global market advantage with state-owned companies, and c) keeps foreign companies from exploiting it, too.
Obviously it is more complex than that, but in a nutshell it's part butt-hurt and part amalgamation of state and private enterprise that does not mesh well with classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity.
The Government and actions of the United States also does not mesh well classic liberal ideas of freedom and human dignity, so this seems to be a hypocritical complaint.
Sorry, I'm not in the USA. And while the current US government is pretty bad, it is not a dictatorship. Protests like the "No Kings" are unimaginable in China, just consider the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Any disagreement in how much they should be taxed (e.g. 10,20,30,50,90%) can be considered a subsidy.
What people are mostly concerned with is whether a subsidy is distorting via over production. E.g. when China entered the market in solar, most western solar companies following stricter environmental protection requirements went out of business.
> Also would have been nice to have a critical look at how the Chinese were able to corner the Solar market via state sponsored means.
What would be a critical look though? They thought it would be good to invest in it and so they did, other countries also had that choice if they so wished to sponsor it for strategic purposes but they are ruled by a different ideology which made them decide to not do it.
I don't think there's anything to be critical about, they invested a lot in it and are reaping the benefits.
Should we also be critical about how the Internet started as a state-sponsored project? Many things that aren't commercially viable in its initial state of development need state-sponsorship to get off the ground to be exploited by private companies, the Chinese saw an opportunity for that in solar PV, kudos to them.
I think they meant critical as in a critique rather than a criticism. They are requesting discussion and exploration of the history and ramifications of China's policy, what the meaningful ROI and costs have been, and what the other (4-ish) countries that had the capacity for that sort of investment got out of non-investment (investment in other things).
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms.
Or just some old gas plants. No one is demanding a 100% solution. Let's get to 85% or whatever first. Arguments like this (which always appear in these threads) are mostly just noise. Pick the low hanging fruit, then argue about how to cross the finish line.
And the bit about China is an interesting article about trade policy but entirely unrelated to the technology being discussed. "Because it's Chinese" is a dumb reason to reject tech.
One of the good things about solar is the lack of a mismatch between solar production curve and human needs.
People use more energy during the day.
People, globally, use more energy in the summer.
This might not be intuitive if you live nearer the poles, but that's not representative of where the global population live.
And in some of those places, like California people obsesses about the "peak" that is left after you subtract all the solar energy, even if it's lower than the previous real peak.
Luckily that fake peak is immediately after sunset and so easily beaten with a small amount of battery, leaving a much cheaper and easier problem to solve as the peaks are really what drives electricity costs, dictating transmission size and standby capacity.
Peak electrical demand does not coincide with solar generation. Generally, peak demand is either early in the morning or the late afternoon, when solar production tapers. In order to make up the difference, you'd need a couple thousand megawatt-hours of battery capacity for most regions. You'd also need this to happen twice a day - either side of typical working hours.
Your link shows that yesterday had the highest peak demand of the month and it was between 1-2pm.
Spot checking July 2019 the oldest year it had, it's peak day also had the peak at the same time.
Do we have different definitions of "late afternoon"?
I also don't understand the link's differentiation between "demand" and "usage", but "demand" is higher and nearer noon it seems.
It's also not clear if home solar is accounted for and is a factor. You'll see a "demand dip" when behind the meter solar is generating if you're only seeing the grid side of things. Some grids estimate and include it or call it out separately.
my claim is generally true. Grid demand is highest when commercial, industrial and residential demand is highest and this is generally possible when the work day is ending or starting as the three overlap.
I'm fully off grid (even had utility power but had them remove it). Cook on electric, have electric water heater, using AC and have enough panels and batteries to not even need a backup generator.
That is about the numbers that we get in Sweden. Those months were solar production is lowest is also the months that consumption is highest for the average household, around 400% compared to the warmest summer months. As a result, energy prices are also significant higher during winter compared to summer.
My home's PV produces more energy than we use in a year, including heating. But the ~1:10 swing in generation from my roof in London UK between mid-winter and mid-summer is tough, and the storage to cover that interseasonally would currently cost about the same as the house and/or use ~50% of its volume. However, we import minimally in summer and export like crazy with the help of relatively modest storage.
Luckily there is this thing called a grid, and the UK has a lot of anti-correlated wind generation on it, which helps a lot.
> I think the article still doesn't address the mismatch between solar energy production and consumption, which needs to be filled by storage mechanisms
There's going to be a beautiful synergy here between electric vehicles and solar. Because an EV battery is already easily enough to power most houses through 14-16 hours of darkness, so if it can be a sink for solar during the day it can then be a source during the night. The future will have a combo of residential battery storage and V2H/V2G which has an attractive property that it scales naturally with population (every new person that moves to a location brings their EV battery with them).
Nobody said that you have to use your home or work solar. If you fill up part of your car using some fast charger network (which would still be solar powered), it would still work.
Moreover, even if we take the top 25% percent of commute distances (which is >40km per day), that still leaves you with 10 days until you have to recharge. If you recharge every weekend, you still have plenty of battery capacity for your needs outside of sun hours (you likely will need only 1-2 kWh per day anyway).
I can't see how this could be true. Many people will need to drive the ev to work during the day, and if you discharge it at night then when are you really charging?
It may be true for some who WFH often or in some cases, but not enough EVs will be able to discharge overnight for a v2g battery revolution.
You're not left with a flat battery at the end of the night. Many vehicles are combined in intelligent systems which work together to ensure that the vehicles have the energy they need (which is easy to set in all the systems I've seen) but provide enough grid support to make this work.
Remember that even my little town car (Renault Zoe) has a 52kWh battery.... which would run my house for five days. So the energy stored in these systems can be considerable.
The people doing these things have thought a lot about it. Take a look at this video - it's a bit 'puff piece' but shows what one way of doing it looks like:
There are several scenarios where it would contribute:
1. You have access to a charger at work
2. You’re retired
3. You take public transportation or bike to work (fairly common scenario in Europe)
4. Work-from-home (got more common after covid, I know many people who do it at least once a week now, and that’s generally enough to charge what you need to drive for a week)
5. You charge only during the day on weekends (should be enough to cover the week for most people, even if you feed say 20% of it back to the grid through the week)
6. Rental fleet operators (booking data can inform charge/discharge policy)
7. Residential batteries, where you charge the EV at night with what you got during the day, every day, but set up a policy where you allow both the home battery and the EV battery to discharge if the electricity is expensive enough. I could see myself making decisions about WFH or biking to work based on electricity pricing.
Yes, it does rely on charging infra rolling out - either at work or with fast DC charging. But that is happening too. Well, in markets where EV adoption is encouraged - for the US, I guess we'll see.
The correct solution is to make China pay tariffs in proportion to their explicit and implicit state support for their "private" industries. It is not too late to push back.
You can't make China pay tariffs because it's not the exporter that pays them, it's the importer.
Tariffs in the USA are basically a tax on Americans. The aim being to make imported goods more expensive for Americans so they're more likely to buy local goods which would otherwise be more expensive than the imported version.
Whatever the number is in the west, China has on average ~ 10x the amount of subsidies than the west when it comes to manufacturing.
Policy makers are trying to decide whether it’s too risky to shut down all manufacturing of heavy machine capable industries and hand it over to China.
West simply decided to de-industrialize itself (at least some countries, not all of them) and asked the other countries to do the dirty work for them so they can focus on finance and such, so of course the West has less subsidies -- and no one is forcing the West's hand NOT to give subsidies. Now it takes triple hard to pick it back, if the West really wants.
Agreed, this article is a love letter to congestion charges. My guess is that nearly nothing has changed and will change. The fact is that the public transit systems are simply unable to modernise and Union Labor makes it next to impossible to make changes.
When I bought a NJTransit when I started working a monthly ride card for a 1hr commute cost $500/month approximately. The same commute with a car was 45 minutes and fuel/maintenance was $250/month + I needed the car anyway.
A 1hr commute in Switzerland costs me like $1.5k per year.
The congestion charge changes the math, but I’m not sure it changes the service.
The tech industry and business in general has an enormous challenge in how management is hired and selected. Currently it is either.
1. Selected by MBA or some management certification
2. Engineers who perform well/are more visible.
Both are really poor choices for technology related management roles and inevitably lead to unethical/poor management practices regardless of the firm in many cases.
The best manager traits are usually soft skills which are nearly impossible to measure and more impossible for HR to find (HR departments are largely lost in tech hiring). I think if you want to see examples of excellent run large companies you need to look in the places where there is an internal culture of up-skilling employees whether its rotational leadership programs or learning credits. Often my experience is they are much better run and invested in the people and it is reflected in the managers/management.
One of the interesting things about the tech industry (to me) is the presence and massive success of open source movements. OS does some things well, and others not as well, but it does it with 1/100th of the familiar management institutions we’re used to in the workplace. I don’t know what the answer is, but it makes me wonder if we haven’t somehow mis-arranged the whole thing. I’m old enough that I recall a time when organizations had secretaries, sometimes many. Now days it feels that management is really just the above, getting paid “higher than the rest of you” salaries to do what more equal secretary/clerk functions used to do.
I suppose the difference is money. Open source needn’t be free of its involvement, but it often is. Add money to open source and you get either a functional org, but with the usual overhead, or dysfunction and corruption.
Often, nobody would be doing the closed source stuff they're doing without the cold incentive of money, unlike free software which is inherently decoupled from a profit motive. Maybe there's an externality to pay in herding and keeping the cats committed to the profit motive.
I want neither. But I recognize the need. Why can’t we have “secragers” or “manataries”, who fill this need in a more co-equal fashion (and no, that is demonstrably not what product managers usually end up being)
It’s possible to develop those soft skills. Management concepts can be taught. It’s possible to teach a good engineer how to use existing management frameworks.
Trouble is, often the learning materials are written in a way that does not “land” for people with an analytical technical background.
Translating management tools and concepts into tech speak for engineers on the management has been my job for a good part of the past decade. It can be done.
HN also underestimates the level of pettiness in the non-people-persons who became managers in tech. I was recently down voted for commenting that the typical tech manager does not want their engineers to have communication skills such that they can push back on unreasonable demands. My experience has been that is absolutely true; sure, they will say they want quality communications, but only as long as those communications are in agreement with whatever that manager and management want. Try telling them the truth that the overall architecture is bad, or there are these fundamental negative issues that were never addressed and are now consuming larger and larger resources to continue to "ignore"...
Actually being a material operator in a company that makes a difference is exactly what many, the majority, of middle managers simply can't handle. It scares them. It is too large, too aggressive, and demands too much upper level communications they can't handle. Not rocking the boat is the only game most managers know how to play, as the management above them appears simply untouchable to them.
Yes, I think part of the problem is we view social skills, charisma, etc. as givens, or even as virtues.
We forget that these things actually take a lot of brain function, it's an ability. It's something we do effortlessly, but there's actually a lot going on.
For example, struggles of people with ADHD and ASD can be hard to understand because many things that we take for granted are harder and more nuanced than people realize.
Things like personal development, organizational design, team maturity, marketing, and selling seem like strange and foreign soft skills and concepts that your either have and understands, or not. There are models, mental frameworks, playbooks, and tools bring structure and rigor to these seemingly soft concepts. Engineers tend to have more analytical minds, and once you connect these things with the analytical “engine,” it becomes easier to understand and apply these concepts to management. In a way, the soft skills become more like hard skills.
Management learning is best done through a combination of theoretical learning, deliberate practice, and hands-on coaching. The theory comes from books and other reading maerials (see below). Deliberate practice comes from using that theory in everyday situations. Coaching comes from an experienced manager via one-on-ones, or an external coach.
If you go with the "external" route, find someone who seems to "speak your language" and understands your business challenges. I offer such coaching for companies who want help developing their engineering managers and would be happy to connect (see my HN profile for contact info).
Here are some resources for new engineering managers that I routinely use:
- A first person account of what you may discover and learn as you grow as a manager.
- Lots of concrete tips intermingled with personal stories.
- Great for discovering what you don't know that you don't know about management
Book: High Output Management, by Andy Grove
For those that got the basic hang of things, and want to go to the source. Don't let the fact that it was written in the last century turn you off. The book is somewhat dry and academic. At the same time it is dense with information and advice that largely stood the test of time. This book is concrete, clear, and to the point.
Look into Cognitive Distortions, the fancy words for "how people play themselves". I've found that poor management and impostor syndrome are both manifestations of self deception. For managers, self deception takes the form of not listening or not taking seriously to developer concerns, trusting their management's every word rather than using critical analysis in all interactions with their management, and generally "playing the Cover-Your-Ass game" rather than actually being their upper management's objective communication channel to developers and the objective voice for developers back such that both are functionally optimally in respect to the other.
The only medium for creating monopolistic power is government. Unless laws or regulation exist to create barriers of entry to market by businesses then the prices are always competitive.
Cartels have been proven 100x over to not be feasible. Even classic examples like standard oil prove the monopolies aren't possible, because Standard Oil was out competing all market competitors on price, quality, and innovation.
Only thing close to a modern day monopolistic behavior is growth before profit capitalism we've seen over the last 20 years. Now that interest rates are going back up it's finally coming to an end.
> The only medium for creating monopolistic power is government.
This is naively incorrect.
Economies of scale exist. Larger companies have lower overheads, which leads to an advantage in pricing, which leads to large companies becoming larger, until there's only one left. This is a natural consequence of markets: absent outside intervention, they trend towards monopoly over time. Competition is not the natural state of a market. If you want competition (which you should, because competition is good for consumers) then you need outside intervention, which, if all else fails, must be the task of the government.
IF competition cant exist because of economies of scale, that means consumers are are better off with the monopoly than with competition.
Let me say that again, if a new competitor cannot undercut a monopoly, the customer would not be better off with more competition.
Nobody wants the government to break up a monopoly because economies of scale allow them to sell goods too cheaply.
If profits are high, there is room for competition.
If profits are low, customers are getting a good deal.
The only things that breaks this are 1) regulation to prevent competition despite high profits, or 2) anti-competitive practices like price dumping, exclusive contracting, ect.
Imagine a world where only one company can make cutting-edge semiconductors. A competitor could easily undercut their prices, but only after years of research and billions of dollars, which nobody is willing to invest.
You can say "not a true monopoly" all you want, but the fact is buyers would be much better off if there was more than one supplier. And there have been many cases of such a dominant supplier in the last few years.
Hot take:
1. Income Inequality is directly related to financial education. If you taught people how to save in schools and make good choices things would be very different.
2. The Fed Reserve has made it impossible for a generation of people to save for the past 2.5 decades. Creating the largest wealth disparity in human history.
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