So you are comparing "any one gas plant", the output of which can be fully controlled, with "whole-grid measurement" for wind? As a whole grid, wind generation capacity is mostly dependent on wind, and not on demand. While gas is used usually for those cases where such power as wind does not cut it. I dont see how you can compare the two. A gasplant CAN produce 100% output if we wish, wind cannot. You can of course compensate somewhat by building out several times the capacity you need in extremely disperse geographic locations (>1000 miles distance between each farm). Could be done, but not sure how its gonna impact the climate change (those farms need to be built and require continuous maintenance).
The reason is that wind generation is optimal during a certain wind speed, and less or no power is generated if winds are too slow or too fast. And wind power blackout occurs not only during calm days, but also during very stormy days. In total there is plenty of occurrences when a specific area has no wind at all. The correlation in weather can be seen in wind farms as far as 800 miles apart.
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/publications/downloads/sinden06-win...
The source I linked has data for a few other countries, and crucially has "whole-grid" wind measurements for the UK. And the UK never went to 0 for a whole 30 minute reporting period! 99th percentile was under 2% of rated output, though.
Another alternative that Im using and very happy with - Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/). Also provides import from Evernote which mostly worked in my case.
yes right. I'm thinking of implementing add-ons for all popular note taking services like google, evernote, onenote etc so that the notes can be imported using gitnoter.
I was pretty disappointed when I set up a Joplin server only to discover there was no web UI. The desktop and mobile clients aren't bad, but if I can't also quickly get to the content via a browser, I'll never use it. It never even dawned on me before installing that there wouldn't be a web UI.
Second that. Used to be in Evernote, but eventually just exported the Evernote, imported to Joplin and set up their web clipper extension in Chrome. Joplin stores notes as basically markup files, so sync is pretty trivial through any file syncing service / app in the universe.
I bet 100 years ago rich people in developed countries thought the same. The answer was technology (more energy extraction and more efficient use of resources and energy) and now a better standard of living is achieved by several orders of magnitude more people even while the whole population has increased dramatically. Everyone in the world can live by same or better standards if technological progress continues. Ofcourse it will never be perfectly distributed, so there will always be "poor" and "rich".
100 years ago the west were in the middle of a very powerful industrial upswing which relied completely and explicitly on the exploitation of less developed countries. They maintained political and economic power through military force, which was ensured by their dominance of fossil fuels.
I dont think the people in power 100-150 years ago were thinking very much about how to ensure the living standard of the countries they were exploiting. Because they knew that their own wealth was directly dependent on the exploitation of these very same people, and spent considerable military and colonial power to ensure that modernity, development and industrialization was something happened in the colonial powers - not in the colonies.
Nowhere was dominance of fossil fuels or the very powerful industrial upswing stronger in 01922 than in the United States. But the US did not then have the huge international network of overseas military deployment and occupied territories it developed later that century. It did have some overseas territories: the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Guam, Alaska, Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Wake Island, the Panama Canal, and arguably Honduras; but these were primarily naval bases and tourist resorts, not pools of cheap labor or troves of resources to exploit.
To be sure, sugar from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii, pineapples from Hawaii, and bananas from Honduras were obtained by exploitation of the residents of those unfortunate lands, enriching the US colonists, and gold was mined by the colonists in Alaska; but these resources were peripheral to the projects of US industrialization and energy supplies. 50 years earlier the US had none of them, just huge tracts of land taken by force from Native Americans.
In Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and Germany, the story was of course quite different. But it is perhaps not coincidental that the industrial power least addicted to plundering resources from colonies abroad became the land most prosperous in the epoch when industry and invention reshaped the world.
Thats... debatable. A core principle of science is to be able to test and verify your theory. Which means it must be empirical and reproducible (if you can test then so can I, and if we have different results - then theory is wrong and needs to change, or the tests were wrong, etc). If its not - it borders belief, which is not science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Verifiability ).
You are downvoted, but I think you make an important point - just because results cant be replicated, doesnt mean its not science. As long as someone keeps investigating the results, showing that they dont work and why, its still science - we learn from mistakes (which is the essence of the scientific method). It stops being science when we just accept any results that are being published and turn them into dogma.
I changed my mind a bit on this issue. of course I still think its better with as little surveillance as possible, but I don't think what you are describing is actually "terror". If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history. I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you? Your porn history? or random wiki page about explosives? If there is a stasi-like state and they really want to get you, they don't need your history from 2021, its enough to just beat a concession from you about anything. Just see what the current stasi-like states are doing. Otherwise "Enemy of the state" is a pretty good movie.
I want to agree with you... the problem arises because you're applying your values to those items... e.g. "yeah they're embarrassing/bad, but not really that bad"...
However, it becomes scary when the people with access are much less level-headed. There are people who think gay people or watching porn should require treatment. There have been power changes where people with drastically different views have an agenda to push, and your innocuous "not really that bad" is all of a sudden an imprisonable offense because you "think differently" and you might encourage others.
This sounds like the nothing to hide, nothing to fear argument.
The history allows such a state to construct a narrative where everybody else thinks you're guilty, based on your messages and porn history and so on. Cherry-picking, quoting out of context, etc. This allows the state to legitimise their actions, where torture would fail to do so.
> If you are really an innocent person, there will be nothing in your history.
It's only not about things that are incriminating. Suppose you were a witness to something nobody was supposed to know about and now you're to be disposed of.
If they have your message history, they have your full contact list, your relationships with them, who you trust the most, where you like to hang out, who owes you money or favors you could call in. You're completely isolated. For sure you can't use any kind of ATM or credit card or find work anywhere they'd expect you to provide a social security number.
How far can you get if you can't buy gas or travel tickets? What do you do for food?
> I mean can you give me some examples of things this stati-state will find about you?
I think it’s a bit unfair to ask someone to throw away their (assuming American) 5th Amendment rights to make a point.
To paint with a broad and nonspecific brush, the UK government has regular surveys asking about drug use[0] which show that in the year ending March 2020, 7.4% of young adults used a class A drug. Possession of that class carries a maximum penalty of 7 years and an unlimited fine, supply and production up to life and unlimited fine.
Even for more mundane things like road traffic laws, if they were fully enforced then the only people with licenses would be those who didn’t drive.
(And are your memes fully licensed from the original copyright holder?)
Let's see, drone research, bomb research, gunmaking and ammunition possibilities, research on fires, explosions and incendiary devices, quick suicide methods, drugs, legality and punishment for a lot of shit, etc.
You’re missing survivorship bias - nature didn’t just create these balanced ecosystems, it creates anything that goes, and things that don’t work out just die. Humans ruining earth for themselves is just as natural, just that we might die as result. But life won’t - it’s much more resilient than just one species. Or several.
Following this line of logic you can justify anything. If I kill your entire family, that’s natural. Would you be ok with that?
I think if you accept at all that there is suffering and there is beauty, then you shouldn’t hide behind “everything’s natural” and instead try and have a backbone and stick up for something more.
That's the point: naturalism can justify anything, and that makes it a poor guiding principle. As do many other things.
There are many natural things that are good. Clean air, unique little ecosystems like GP describes, endless variety -- and we should strive to respect and preserve those, but not because they are natural. Poor animals teeming with parasites, population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?), predators feasting on the organs of their prey while the prey is still alive. All these things are natural but not good and we should not seek to replicate them.
> population "balance" maintained through periodic overpopulation and starvation (How do people think it happens? Forest fairies tell the deer how many babies to have?)
Thinking about this, I just realized a simple thing: balance in animal population via starvation might not be as grim as we expect (i.e. it happens completely because the weakest/least fit individuals cannot compete for food and literally starve).
The sexual reproductive system is apparently one of the things that stops working earliest when you're affected by disease or malnutrition. This means that malnourished deers will just start having fewer/no babies while they're being famished.
Still grim, because lots of animals would starve, and still very uncomfortable for the deers which, even if they might survive to "old age", will fail to breed due to starvation... but still better than the alternative in which every baby deer gets born in the world as usual, only to then starve to death while they're still very young.
It's still very grim if you recognize that animals - particularly advanced animals like deer - feel and suffer. Also makes you wonder if the fragility of reproductive system wrt. malnutrition isn't an evolutionary adaptation that smooths out the population crash a little bit after hitting the carrying capacity of a niche.
(Also: many (most?) living things have things that eat them, which is another population maintenance mechanism, and no less grim.)
Why should I be "ok" with natural? Screw natural. Nature does a lot of terrible things. People dying in hurricanes or at the hands of murderers isn't OK because its "natural" - its just not OK. We have the intelligence to influence our environment (and that intelligence is also a result of nature). Trying to categorize natural vs unnatural (whatever that means) is a fools errand and not a productive one in my view, since my ethics aren't based on "it's ok because the volcano was natural"
The problem with this line of thinking is that it might be a little short-sighted. Since we are intelligent, we should be careful. With great powers come great responsibility.
If someone doesn't like hurricanes, they can move where there is none.
When Earth will be 99% inhabitable (because of air pollution, soil degradation, lack of water), is the solution just to say "oh well", let's go to Mars?
For the individual the answer is almost certainly yes. If we have the ability to survive elsewhere than earth and we have brought earth to the point that it is 99% uninhabitable then going someone else is probably the best choice.
One could easily argue that our ability to consider our environment and make changes to our behavior accordingly is unnatural. Avoiding the above scenario is something we should be using our unnatural gifts to avoid.
Arguments based on how natural something is is highly subjective and not really worthwhile imo. Replace natural with what we're actually trying to discuss: As a species we want a stable environment that requires the least effort to survive in. Individuals have additional traits they want from the environment but that's all subjective. Things that most people consider natural are usually things that have a large data set to demonstrate their stability.
Hence the root cause of all human-caused problems: what is locally, short-term beneficial for an individual is often long-term detrimental to the group, and long-term success of an individual depends on long-term success of the group.
I.e. we're too competitive, not cooperative enough, and can hardly coordinate at scale. Our best coordination mechanism we've ever came up with is the market economy, which is essentially taking the survival instinct of individuals and building a distributed coercion system with it. Sure, it works, but wouldn't it be nicer if we could just talk our way into working together on shared goals, instead of using money and threats of starvation?
Well, from nature’s perspective, yes it is OK. Nature won’t put you in jail. However, do it on a wide scale (you start murdering billions to prove a point) then yes Nature cares and the survival of the species is thrown into jeopardy. As a person, no it’s not OK - acts that do more harm than good are agreed to (by choice) by most as illegal.
Comparing to aborting a human-monkey fetus, the question of is there more good than harm is new. In a scientific setting where few cases are performed and a lot of Nature’s rules are revealed to us, I think that is mostly good. Genetic editing expanded to a large scale can also, I think, be done in a good way (by editing genes to increase intelligence or removing genes to reduce disease). It can also be done in a harmful way - say, raising an army of clones or some nightmare scenario where the rich and wealthy raise super intelligent human children that rules and obsoletes the rest of humanity.
I argue though that those nightmare situations will happen anyway and that human society has always had huge swings in well-being and suffering, with the average standard of living growing.
I think trying to contain the research is useful only up to some point - tracking the research and labeling successes and failures (science) and opening these studies and results to all of humanity is I think ultimately helpful. Keeping some competitive advantage over competing nations or corporations is also helpful. The more we learn, the more we can identify and prevent misuse.
Last thing to point out is humanity, and nature, share in common that we grow by making a ton of mistakes. Whereas Nature learns by not dying entirely, humanity adds a method by learning by thinking - this seems to be faster.
If we apply sentience to Nature, perhaps we were allowed to live in the hopes that we’d help Nature survive the next astroid attack.
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