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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I came here to point out exactly this: If you only shrink the ball, without reducing its size, well… you’re gonna have problems carrying the ammo.

    As a DM, I think I would let them both shrink and reduce the mass, and wait till they fired the weapon before invoking “conservation of momentum” and declaring that the cannon ball drops to the ground after about a meter.


  • To be fair: A lot of people don’t hate their jobs. Of course, if someone asked me the question in the panel, I’d think they were over-doing it, but it’s a completely fair question to ask someone why they think this job could be something they enjoy.

    Specifically, employees that enjoy their work are less likely to leave the company at the first opportunity. Hiring people costs money, so it makes sense to choose a candidate that is at least to some degree passionate about what they’ll be doing.



  • There do of course exist (far too many) people out there that objectify women, but that’s not what this post is about (at least the way I’m reading it). I can definitely relate to the situation where some random woman will do some mundane everyday thing, like put on a purse or let down her hair, and my body just decides to react to that.

    It has nothing to do with objectifying women, and of course I don’t make a point out of it, but just push it out of my head and move on with my day. The point of the post is that it’s funny and relatable how the body can just decide to send a puff of hormones around your system as a response to the most mundane things, even though you know that it’s wildly inappropriate. I’m sure you’ve experienced the same thing at some point?





  • Which is a comparison that makes complete sense. When you say that someone is leading the way, you are clearly referring to them being at the forefront at the time when they were leading the way. Any system that was a trail blazer 100+ years ago should be outdated by now, unless progress stopped or went backwards in the meantime.




  • This is definitely a simplification, which is why I pointed out the possibility of distributing costs among the consumers based on how much of the total consumption each consumer is responsible for.

    I think the major point still stands though: In order to take advantage of production at scale, you need to build some minimal size production facility. For stuff like hydropower, that minimum can be quite high, depending on available geography.

    If marginal cost is zero, it makes most sense to charge some form of flat rate to have access to power, rather than a consumption-based price, because it’s not necessarily feasible to downscale the facility, even if there’s low demand (in that sense, hydro or nuclear would be better examples than solar).

    The details of how this more or less flat rate should be distributed among consumers is a discussion in itself (should those living further away pay more since they require more power lines? etc.)


  • You’re making the argument yourself here:

    A 1000 A transformer costs more than a 10 A transformer

    Yes. And that is true regardless of how heavily it is used, which means you should pay a flat rate for maintenance of the infrastructure you use, and another rate for the power you draw.

    Residential buildings use standardised infrastructure, which then leads to the same standard fee for everyone. Industry that needs heavier equipment pays a different fee, because they require different infrastructure.


  • No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:

    • A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
    • A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)

    This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.

    Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.


  • I’m all for eating the rich, but I’m still going to point out why exactly this can make sense.

    Let’s say you have an energy company that owns a solar farm, you’re not looking to turn a profit, just provide clean energy to the world: You produce electricity at effectively zero cost.

    However, your solar farm needs to be paid down within its lifetime of ≈30 years, which is independent of energy consumption. So you decide to charge a rate that ensures 1/30th of your production costs are paid back each year, so that you can replace the solar farm after 30 years.

    This effectively means you are charging a constant rate for access to energy supply, independent of consumption. This again means that the rate per kWh goes up if average consumption goes down.

    Individual customers can still save money by reducing consumption relative to the other customers, but nobody saves money if everyone reduces consumption. This makes complete sense when your “marginal cost” (i.e. the cost of producing energy) is negligible compared to the initial investment of building the power plant, and also applies more or less to nuclear, hydropower, and wind power as well.

    Given that this is not an ideal organisation though, I wouldn’t put it past them to increase the rate such that it more than offsets the decrease in consumption, thereby increasing their profit. In that case: Fuck them.

    I just think we should be aware that our current understanding of energy prices as linked to day-to-day consumption (because the primary expense for a thermal power plant is the cost of fuel), will become outdated as we move to clean energy sources. At some point, we should be paying a near-flat rate for “access to power”, rather than a rate for each unit of power consumed.



  • Not running any LLMs, but I do a lot of mathematical modelling, and my 32 GB RAM, M1 Pro MacBook is compiling code and crunching numbers like an absolute champ! After about a year, most of my colleagues ditched their old laptops for a MacBook themselves after just noticing that my machine out-performed theirs every day, and that it saved me a bunch of time day-to-day.

    Of course, be a bit careful when buying one: Apple cranks up the price like hell if you start specing out the machine a lot. Especially for RAM.