Why hasn’t Poland entered the war on the side of the Ukrainians, yet?

The question is how far Poland can intervene before Russians up their intervention in Poland.

There’s a stark split in Polish politics over whether they should be involved in this fight at all (and some significant pro-Russian sentiment in Poland disputing which side they should even be on). Escalating means increasing tensions at home and potentially inviting a political backlash for the Duda administration.

Throwing up some canvas shades is a hell of a lot cheaper than adding big integrated solar panels overhead.

I’ve got an electric plug-in hybrid. Even with a relatively small batter (50 mile range) and an eight hour overnight charge time, I can’t bring it up to full. An hour of trickle charging is going to get you a few miles of driving, tops. Idk if the infrastructure investment for all the little charging terminals is going to be worth the return, relative to - say - powering the business itself.

As if a law could prevent anything of that.

Generating legal liability goes a long way towards curbing how businesses behave, particularly when they can be picked on by rival mega-firms.

But because we’ve made class action lawsuits increasingly difficult, particularly after Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, the idea that individual claimants can effectively prosecute a case against an interstate or international entity is increasingly farcical. You’re either going to need big state agencies (the EU seems increasingly invested in cracking down on American tech companies for anti-competitive practices) or rivalrous business interests (MPAA/RIAA going after Big Tech backed AI firms) to leverage this kind of liability. It’s still going to be open season on everyone using DeviantArt or Pinterest or whatever.

It’s not so much that they’re rare as there is a known limited supply of them and the means of harvesting them currently creates a lot of pollution.

And this is where we get into the real economic problem of any industrial scale energy project. FFS, its not like labor abuses and property mismanagement were foreign to the coal or O&G industries. But when people talk about a Green New Deal, a bit part of the project is about building social infrastructure alongside energy infrastructure, such that you’re not ending up with a bunch of strip mines and company towns doing what Standard Oil/Exxon and Peabody Energy were doing 50 years ago.

The fact that these rare earth metals are in countries with large native populations that westerners are dismissive of / openly hostile to doesn’t help things either. How many American petrochemical CEOs would love to revisit King Leopold II’s run through the Congo, if it meant profits on par with what Saudi ARAMCO generate?

Renewable energy should be operated in the manner that best protects the environment, and we should be trying to waste as little possible in operating it.

That would require a degree of political economy afforded to the folks living in and around the areas of resource extraction and labor exploitation. And that’s where I think we run into real problems.

Even as we speak, the state of Georgia is gearing up for some serious labor conflicts around their EV battery plants. Labor groups are attempting to unionize the battery giga-factories being built there, while Atlanta’s Cop City is being constructed to crack down on it. And that’s in the relatively peaceful and post-industrial Atlantic Seaboard. Bolivia’s on its second failed coup attempt in less than four years.

I could very easily see us doing an Iraq-style intervention into one of these big cobalt/lithium exporting countries, on the grounds that they’re being oppressed by an evil government state nationalization program. Ask Gamal Abdel Nasser or Salvadore Allende what happens after that.

So like any ceiling with HVAC, etc?

Yes, but HVAC systems rarely have to cover an entire parking lot. There’s a lot of attendant infrastructure that comes with it. Compare that to dedicated rural solar fields, where you don’t have to worry about people wandering in and around the panels. Its not a deal-breaker, but it does raise the unit price.

I’m not sure photovoltaics would generate enough juice to recharge a vehicle during 30-60 minute shopping trip. Certainly not on the current iteration of electric vehicle charging capacity.

This is a good use of space and a potentially beneficial way to generate power for the storefront (AC and refrigeration during peak hours are real electricity hogs and would tie out with available sunlight), but idk how effective it would be at recharging vehicles. Not unless the space also has large reserve batteries that can discharge rapidly, and the solar cells were exceptionally efficient at generating wattage.

This is, incidentally, why wind plants get you more bang for your buck than solar plants. The supermassive turbines out along the Corpus Christi coastline can generate north of 3 MW/h. Meanwhile, you’d need 75,000 sqft of 200-watt 5’ panels to generate an equivalent. Electric car batteries hold somewhere between 40-100 kWh of power. So getting the math to work is a bit tricky.

Solar panels are made of a lot of rare metals

Rare Earth Metals aren’t actually that rare, although they do tend to be concentrated in countries outside our traditional western sphere of influence. We’re seeing a lot of political wrangling in South America and Central Africa, precisely because countries like Bolivia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have an outsized stock of these minerals. In fact, a big part of the conflict in Rwanda along their border with the Congo stems from illegal mining and black market export of minerals, and the subsequent criminal cartelization that’s sprung up around this traffic.

there’s a lot of variables that have to be considered on each individual level

If you’re talking about a globally coordinated geo-engineering project to maximize solar electricity production, then yes - building a big band of solar plants inside the Tropics zone would yield the biggest band for buck. But then moving that electricity out again becomes a challenge, particularly if you’re trying to get it to mega-cities like NYC or Tokyo or London or Beijing.

If you’re just trying to generate local green power in Ohio, without running massive HVDC lines all the way down to the Yucatan Peninsula, then covering the Browns Stadium or the JACK Cleveland Casino in solar panels is as good a use of solar infrastructure as anything.

Sort of a lemons-into-lemonade situation. But maybe we shouldn’t have paved over prime agricultural land to make parking lots to begin with.

What happened to letting the voters decide?

“Everyone needs to get out and vote!”

voters start bickering over who to vote for

“NOT LIKE THAT!”

If the man is too old, OK, but we all knew his age a year ago.

Which is why its crazy he didn’t have any kind of primary contender. Hell, its crazy he didn’t just wrap this at one term and pass the torch to any of a number of popular and highly competent governors.

WfH is very similar to being a contractor in that regard. You just have to recognize that employers (who already see staff as disposable) will be extra cavalier about how they hire and fire you.

In my experience, job hunting early in your career is a pure fishing expedition. You’ve got to constantly be out there looking, you take even the small jobs (I started doing software at a tiny health care IT company for $17/hr while friends were making $30/hr at better firms), and try to change jobs every three years until you find your ceiling.

The early shitty jobs give you an opportunity to network and make you more attractive to recruiters. They also tend to be much more friendly to “work from home” because they hate maintaining an office as much as you hate driving to one.

The bigger corporate positions will have departments you can move between if you don’t like where you currently are but don’t want to leave the firm. But then you have to start making trade off between pay/position and work from home.

A big problem is the volume of fake listings.

Trump is a worldender

He’s just blowing the trumpet to signal the end. A symptom of a diseased system.

Come down to Houston where a relatively mild hurricane has knocked out power for half the city going on nearly a week. This isn’t just a Trump thing. The rot goes deep.

Just like Google, the fixation is far more on engagement farming than content quality management.

Trump stuff gets the clicks, so you’re going to see a lot more of it. Also, expect to see an increasing wave of ☯👺 𝐏ᑌＳşƳ ιᑎ вι𝕠 🐤🐧 tier posts.

Just eat more pineapple.

there’s not any bases in Afghanistan anymore

There actually are several NATO installations still in and around Kabul to secure the international airport and the US Embassy.

It’s conducting war games that completely surround Taiwan.

The US also conducts war games across the South China Sea, including between China and Japan and through the Chinese territorial waters in and around the Korean peninsula. These have become tit-for-tat exercises, and would stop if the US was no longer in the region.

It’s claiming a ridiculous area for it’s EEZ

Glances at the US base map Yes. Ridiculous.

It’s sinking fishing vessels in international water

Show your work. When did China conduct a military operation to sink a fishing vessel?

It’s hacking the government systems of it’s neighbors

I’m sure they’ll quit right after the NSA does.

Nobody is stopping you.

Teach her to order something off a foreign-language menu, invite the family out to dinner, and see if she can place her order fluently.

Doing the “Five year old white girl shocks waitress by ordering Orange Chicken in perfect Mandarian” bit IRL would be pretty funny and adorable.

“Um… let me be clear. My former VP pick has always sucked. He’s not old. He’s simply got a head full of busted marbles and wasn’t employable anywhere outside of the US Senate. That’s why I endorsed him to run in 2020. You people disgust me. You deserve what you get.”