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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 1st, 2024

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  • This image (ignoring the fact that it’s not a real photo) seems to be based in the UK/ England from the car number plate designs. (though the background houses and the cloudless sky were plainly photoshopped from somewhere else )

    I think UK has approx 0.1% of agricultural land already given to solar (but I don’t know the land classification breakdown).

    It is just enough to be noticeable traveling around you do see the occasional normal looking fields with panels all over them.

    I’ve not seen them on the hilly low grade sheep pasture either I guess it might be areas prone to flooding , I’m not sure. It looks like this trade association is looking to expand this to c0.6%. https://solarenergyuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/FactSheet-Solar-Farms-and-Agricultural-Land-2024.pdf

    UK is not self sufficient on food, so I think it’s a poor idea to use UK farmland for this stuff before using up rooftops and car parks and stuff like that for solar PV.

    USA is obviously a different situation with way more land - better food security - and in some places more things like deserts to put large scale panels in. But either way brownfield or parking lots seems like a good think to think about - and it can be closer to demand so may reduce transmission and distribution losses and infra costs. I guess most of the farmland in UK ones are probably near existing power lines to keep the grid connection cost down.




  • who are these adult humans who can’t face choices? I don’t really understand how or why they even chose their PC in the first place.

    It sounds like such people will be a lot better off with android or mac, or windows or chromebook. If they want to do games get a console.

    It’s sort of like if a person has no enthusiasm for or interest in cars, they might be better off with a rental.

    if you really want to make another version of something like chromeos for this audience, there is nothing stopping you. But the free/foss open source world is always going to have choices that bamboozle these people who can’t look at the mint website and pick one, or just resolve to test all three.



  • So paying higer profit share or wage to construction wokers won’t encouage more people to spend more time building stuff?

    Did no one tell you about how competetive markets work? supernormal profits get bid down by market entry.

    banks and oligopolistic top tier construction companies, and landowners don’t want more construction, or entry into the market.

    by your logic we should just offer people slave contracts and they’d opt in.



  • Haven’t you identified this casino as an element of the universe, and observed how it works? I can’t predict exactly where the ball will fall, but i don’t think roulette is supernatural. I can understand the non-deterministic process and chacterise the probability density. And test and observe over many trials to confirm the stochastic model is right.

    Uncertainty, randomness, even entaglement and action at a distance can be observed right? with some degree of preision? When you start to pin them down with experiments and describe the probability distribution experimentally, repeatedly, testably then hey presto; I’d call that a “natural” obsrervable random or non-deterministic process.

    Maybe it’s natural with some more uncertainty than usual , but as you said about Heisenberg everything is at least a bit uncertain, so it’s really just a matter of how big is the variance of the probability distribution of your explanation or prediction.

    I know you’re just trolling by trying to use “supernatural” as a term for, unknown / uncertain / not fully explained / non deterministic. For me supernatural might be be predicting that the roulete wheel will come up 6 black next time. A way to determine the exact oucome of a process we believe to be non-deterministic.

    Of course that supernatural thing (like magnetism was back in the day) will become mundane if and when science can pin it down experimentally. Develop a model with a lower variance estimator.

    I’d argue entanglement has beein going through a process from supernatural and spooky when it was only theoretical. To natural now that it’s been proven, but theres still a lot of uncertainty. so you might call it peri-natural?

    I see the whole process of scientific explanation being moving our understanding of phenomena out of the mystical magical and supernatural realm, into the mundane natural world once we understand more about them and have some well understood (even if weak and incomplete) predictive power.


  • The “god” part becomes an unnecessarily complex explanation. I prefer simpler explanations when they fit the data just as well as the complex ones. It also reduces te risk when trying to broaden out to other lines of enquiry.

    As johsny said It makes the god explanation redundant for the large topic of species of life. There’s no need to waste time or energy “disproving” god. The whole concept of god is simply useless to understanding - and so is a waste of time or mental energy.

    But the so called explanations referncing god are typically such bullshit anyway nothing testable, no evidence, just “god did some shit”, “isn’t god cool/powerful”. So they never were actually useful to scientific reasoning. However much they may pretend otherwise religions are so much more aligned with laws and social structures and norms of behaviour than they are about advancing science.



  • Britain left of centre ? . . . these are blairites, “labour” in name only , they literally propped up the second homes buy to let market through the 2000s. and they’d gladly privatise every public service we have left if they can. I’ve already heard shit like “individualised healthcare” being mentioned in their “think tanks”.

    They’re probably not worse than the tories, and they probably will fuck it up less, that’s about all you can hope for them.

    They aren’t going to tackle anything fundamental like bank regulation, promoting domestic investment, industrial strategy or developing public services.

    I hope France gets a lot better.


  • Yes agreed. It also seems to change very often. so as soon as you do figure out how to do something, it changes.

    I also wish it didn’t allow shared documents at all, it’s actually worse than sharepoint at that. The number of people who think it works though, then you have talk them through how to find the shared ducument (as if i can remember) and actually share it effectively. Waste of time because its pretendng to do something that it is quite bad at.

    It was so much more usable when it was just skype/lync and it just did calls, screenshare and chat.