China is running circles around the rest of the world in the push for electrification. Sure, it's not a free market, but their government policies are making it an economic powerhouse. The world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up / if the rest of the world doesn't keep up.
The US is installing roughly 3 times as much solar at the utility level, each quarter[1]. We aren't building quite as many of these megafarms as China, but the US's solar numbers are actually pretty dramatic[2].
(Or by another metric: China has about twice as much solar production capacity as the US, but a much smaller fraction per-capita[3].)
The point wasn't that the US is winning in terms of net solar capacity, but that the US's own growth is independently admirable. China has and will continue to win in terms of absolute capacity, in a large part because they're still urbanizing, industrializing, and increasing their overall demand for power.
(By contrast, US electricity use has been almost stagnant for 2 decades[1]. This informs the country's relationship with newer generation techniques.)
I'm not sure what the value of a per-capita measure is, or why it's worth making a distinction at "utility" (I'm assuming this means consumer) level.
Wouldn't the most relevant measure, at least as far as emissions go, be the ratio of energy coming from renewables / solar vs. total energy consumption? Or something similar?
Yeah there are lots of ways to normalize that might be better, but per capita isn’t uninteresting per se:
US uses roughly 2.5-3x the energy per capita compared to china fwiw [1]. The energy use per capita can be influenced by all sorts of things, including climate - for instance, SGP will always be in the top few spots on this sort of list due to the space conditioning needs. Could also be due to lots of heavy industry. Could also be due to lots of inefficient homes or high consumer demand. So it can also be interesting to look at energy use per person plotted against GDP per capita, where as expected higher energy use per capita typically also means higher GDP per capita [2]. US has significantly higher GDP per capita.
Anyways, at the end of the day, in this kind of head-to-head energy technology race, the only thing I care about really at the end of the day is decarbonization. The US has been falling each year (not fast enough though, and much of it does not actually come from renewable adoption but instead other changes like natural gas replacing coal over the last decade and changes in mfg capacity etc) while China is still rapidly increasing. Both countries need to be doing more, way more (well really the whole world).
Quite right. This mistake also seems to occur when comparing California and Texas. Texas has a ton of renewable sources, but its extremely energy intensive economy consumes disproportionately more. So it seems to make more sense to normalize by load than by person.
> world will look very different in 50, 100 years if that keeps up
It can’t. Besides demography, Xi has wiped out his political competition. The history of what comes after a long-serving dictator who purged his generation’s political braintrust is unidirectional.
> USSR didn't terminally stagnate until 20, 25 years after Stalin died, though. They still looked pretty capable under Kruschev
True, and Kruschev is 20 years Stalin’s junior. I’m inclined to regard him as a fluke; the wheels of power replaced him with the far-less competent Brezhnev after ten years, at which point the Soviets’ fate was sealed.
It’s an open question: if the ISSR could have both beaten the U.S. and remained intact following Stalin’s death. I don’t think they could have. Insisting on not just parity, but supremacy, may have doomed them.
The ability for Beijing is Taiwan. They really shouldn’t obsess over it. But Xi has done so, and likely can’t retreat. Which means his successor is similarly damned, and with him, his nation.
Biden's chips sanctions are also hurting them. They only just figured out how to make 7nm chips. They'll struggle to assemble the compute to keep up in AI. Now, if only we didn't insist on publishing all our trade secrets in the geopolitically naive pursuit of open source, which spits on the reality of the security competition we are currently engaged in, we'd be even more ahead.
Trump is anti green energy. What good is a damn dictator if they can’t do infrastructure and energy well, atleast modi is killing that part of his mandate.
And if you have a "free market" the big utility companies are going to eat each other over time until you end up with de-facto regional monopolies which are then systematically run into the ground, extracting all inherent value, until it's no longer functional and has to be taken over by the government to ensure people can still take hot showers and use their computers. You can't make this shit up.
Given how high frequent this thing is, I'd say it's worth exploring moving away from Node; I don't associate Node with high performance / throughput myself.
A standalone archive packaged with all dependencies.
Installing yet another language package manager (not to mention having to navigate all the anti-features like telemetry they seem to come with these days) is a major pain in the ass. Not everyone is a javascript developer.
Then there is also the online requirement that comes with those package managers. Not all system have or should have an internet connection.
There could be an option to set it to 'standard mode' for disabled customers.
Basically all attempts at increasing security will make it more difficult for somebody. For example, 4+ pin digits (bad memory), fingerprints (no fingers), etc, etc.
The question is, is it worth having reduced security for the very few edge cases?
It's a good distinction to make. In the example given, while the code itself looks and does the same - comparing a date to the current date - they represent two different business logic processes, which can change over time.
I mean if there's more instances of this (the DRY "rule" usually says that you deduplicate if there's 3 or more instances) you could refactor it into a utility like "isBeforeNow", but that doesn't add that much value.
There's a lot of vagueness in your last statement and I'm not sure what you're trying to imply.
"Most doctors" is an unspecific appeal to authority; which doctors can you cite that do not believe something like fasting can improve health?
"believe" was already mentioned by another commenter. An authority will make an assertion based on facts, not a belief based on ???
"something like" is it fasting or is it something else? Be specific.
"fasting" What kind of fasting do you mean? Between sunup and sundown like ramadan? Intermittent fasting? 30 day juice diet fasting?
"improve health" Improve how? And what aspect of health? "Health" is such a broad term that saying "this is good for your health" or "this food is healthy" are empty statements.
If anything, newer refrigerators and dishwashers are worse than they used to be, because they have to conform to increasingly strict energy usage laws. The new dishwasher we have now is shit, reuses water between cycles, uses some weird system for drying, etc. Basically we use more energy to pre-wash or post-wash stuff now.
At least with dishwashers, part of the reason is actually that home dishwasher detergents are no longer allowed to have phosphates.
And for a lot of people the no-phosphates thing happened around the same time they got an energy-efficient dishwasher.
And then they blamed the bad dishwasher performance on the energy efficiency, when it's actually that home dishwasher detergent is far less effective now.
Except restaurants still get to use dishwasher detergent with phosphates, which is why their dishes continue to be sparkling clean.
(And I don't know about your dishwasher, but the last two I've had default to energy-efficient, but it's a single button press to put them on hi-temp mode.)
It won't work -- putting aside the phosphates, it's a totally different formulation, because restaurant dishwashing machines run for 2-4 minutes, rather than 30-60.
On the other hand, if you searched online, I'm sure you would be able to find the exact type of phosphate that was removed from dishwasher detergent, where to order it independently, and in what proportion it could be mixed together with modern dishwasher detergent powder, to restore the sparkly clean dishes you might have grown up with. You would also want to research the legality of such, as well as whether it would actually have any environmental impact or not where you live.
Counter point: my basic old crank and go Frigidaire is still a workhorse with modern soap. I use barely any of the powdered stuff probably a lot less than is in a pod, and it still works. I’m wondering now just how little soap I can get away with to be honest.
In the Netherlands, when you buy a new appliance you pay a few euros extra "recycling fee"; the company delivering the new appliance will take the old one back for recycling, and / or the money goes into a fund for recycling the product you just bought. (I just read up on it, it used to be a separate charge, it's now baked into the price, probably because people were balking about it)
This isn't the reason why. Spotify has been a major player in the U.S. music streaming market for a long time. They have their own offices here, and these kinds of decisions are surely made domestically.
The reason for this is simply incompetence. They were given the order from leadership to discontinue Car Thing to cut costs, and they are given a short deadline with no options for extending or unlocking the hardware. Spotify's Lawyers don't see any way out of that issue, and also see liability for having discontinued a product so quickly and with such short notice, so they recommend to the Accounts team that Car Thing customers can opt-in to a refund, and that should indemnify Spotify from any disputes.
So the Accounts team gets this new recommendation from Legal, with an even tighter deadline than sunsetting Car Thing, where customers are entitled to refunds on-demand if they bought one. Requests come in immediately, and there is absolutely zero process in place for actually issuing refunds for this, so the Accounts team works directly with the Finance team and figures they can just wire refunds directly to customers, which the Finance team is happy to do if they are provided a spreadsheet of account/routing numbers.
Nobody in the process of making these decision has any understanding of the risks, they just move to actualize what leadership asked them to, doing as little work as possible to meet the deadline. The result is refund requests arriving before any refund process has been established, and so the process is invented on-the-fly without any regard to best practice.
Tl;Dr: Discontinuing Car Thing was a hastily made decision that was announced before the company had done due-diligence, and now they are dealing with a disorganized response.
SEPA Direct Debit is a thing here in Europe as well, this is why we could live just fine without credit cards for so long. We instead had our local variants of what y'all call ACH and a few cooperation networks, that got unified as part of the EU-wide SEPA rollout (must have been something like 10 years ago). Now you can do money transfers to and from the entirety of the EU between all banks, if you pay a bit extra most banks can actually do real-time nowadays. If someone does direct debit fraud with your account number, you can claw back the money just as easy as you can do with a credit card.
The only problem remains card-based POS transactions... unfortunately, MasterCard and VISA spent shit tons of money into lobbying to make sure people would finally all converge on their standard instead of an established domestic one, their closed network where these fuckers could finally get a chance at getting their cut from the 448 million EU citizens.
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