I believe that's more along the lines of being alienated from the work itself.
IE a potter sees the results of his work in the pots he creates.
A worker in an assembly line sees a small aspect of the pot creation and is separated from the end result.
Many of us will understand the joy of a personal project and the lack of joy in completing an issue ticket. It's generally good for one's mental health to have some kind of purpose behind their work.
They built an oceanic fiber termination down in South Carolina. Data centers are starting to move in. Now they'll charge you $12/KWh during your peak usage.
You really said 12 USD/KWh? Time to put solar panels/batteries over there. Even if you resell to the grid at 1/10th of that you recoup the investment in O(months) and not O(years)
Yeah, it's a bit of a convoluted system. They'll take your peak day during a period, and charge you 12/kwh for your usage during the peak period of the day.
So you can easily add 1-200 dollars to your bill for one day of higher usage.
I'm an occasional Mac user, whenever their hardware and software align to be useful.
Right now the m4 airs are a delight in regards to form factor, battery life, performance, and generally they look nice.
I have a powerful processor, enough ram, and a battery to drive it and damnit I want to do work on it.
Right now the world of laptops is dark. Any non-mac laptop running linux will have terrible standby battery life because OEMs have removed classic sleep modes for always-on mac-like sleeps, but without the polish and no way to re-enable the legacy sleep modes.
In a couple years, maybe the AI boom will die down and people will be able to afford RAM again, and maybe non-mac laptops will be nice to use again.
In the 2019 book "Sandworm", which discusses cyber warfare against infrastructure like this, but between Russia and Ukraine, the author begs the question in an interview with a US military/intelligence official,
"why doesn't the US go after these hackers and designate targeting civilian infrastructure as a crime?"
To which the response was essentially "The US would like to reserve those types of cyber attacks for their own uses"
These quotes are very loose, I read it last year, but essentially, the US didn't make a stink about older grid attacks in order to save face when the US does it.
Additionally, much of VZ's difficulty was due to the massive sanctions against the nation. Sanctions are effectively attacks on a nation's citizens to pressure the government. Disabling power infrastructure is absolutely in-line with the motives of sanctions and embargos.
I think perhaps nationalizing your oil companies, looting their assets for political reasons, and driving out the only people with the competencies to operate your only valuable industry might have a tiny bit to do with the state of the country.
I feel like Mother Goose had a cautionary tale about killing your golden goose that perhaps Venezuela’s leadership ought to read up on.
If the two wires are the same gauge, yes. If you size up the aluminum, at the same resistance/current would mean the same amount of power over the length of the conductor and same heat.
Old aluminum wiring in your walls with cloth insulators, designed for a time where electricity consumption was a small fraction of today's electrified usage is dangerous because you're overloading an old, unprepared system.
Aluminum bus bars(solid, often exposed) would be designed for the required power levels and installation criteria.
Aluminum home wiring was from the 60s and 70s. It’s not the same as cloth covered knob and tube from earlier years. It has its own problems, but I’d take a house with knob and tube over a house with aluminum wiring.
Only true for lighting circuits though, and most household circuits are mixed.
The quantity and (edit: aggregate) power draw of modern appliances is far greater now than 60 years ago, so the overall load on the old wires is much higher.
I'd bet that modern TVs are more efficient that CRT televisions. Do most people even have desktop computers anymore, or have they mostly been replaced by laptops, tables, and phones? I'd be interested to see the efficiency numbers for electric clothes dryers over time. I wouldn't be surprised if they are also slightly more efficient than older models, even if they are still using resistance heating. Due to smarter electronics that automatically turn the unit off after the clothes are dry (air humidity sensor). I think electric ranges, dish washers, toasters and coffee machines have been ubiquitous since the 1960s (but are probably about the same energy-consumption wise). Air conditioning units are one thing that I'd believe are much more common today than in the 1970s and 1980s. Household sizes are also smaller, so less electricity used for electric water heaters, and the oven, etc.. Electric vehicles are an up and coming user of electricity. What other appliances are likely to be using more now than before?
These are good points, but having worked on a few older houses, I usually see overextended and overloaded circuits, not the opposite.
Standard small-house service used to be 60A, sometimes as few as 4 circuits! It's now 100A minimum by code, with 200A common.
Ovens/ranges have gone from 30A to 50A (dedicated) circuits by code. Microwaves also require dedicated circuits now. Gaming computers with big GPUs are common. Air fryers and electric pressure cookers are newly-common countertop appliances. People definitely use resistive electric space heaters more now (very cheap, much safer than the older options). And there's a trend away from gas and to electric ranges and water heaters. Heat pumps are also increasingly common. You mentioned air conditioners and EV chargers. Kitchens and bathrooms are now required to have dedicated (and GFCI) circuits. Household sizes are smaller, but houses are larger.
So I guess I'd say that, properly expanded, individual circuits should carry less current than they used to. But very often, appliances (AC, microwave, gaming rig, air fryers), are just "plugged in" to an unexpanded system, with varying results.
If you're lucky, they pop a breaker and you call an electrician. If you're not lucky, they push the power draw into uncomfortable zones, esp for Al wire.
This is absolutely not true in areas where heating the air and water and cooking are done with natural gas. Every single appliance in a house is more efficient today than in 1970 due to advances in motor speed control, without exception. The only thing that didn’t get more efficient is electric resistive heat and it’s impossible to improve on that anyways.
I can’t think of a single appliance from 1970 that consumes less energy than its modern equivalent. Anything with a pump or fan is more efficient and so is lighting. LCD TVs use less energy than CRTs.
I also can’t think of an appliance that has become common in households that draws more than 100 watts of continuous load since the 1970 aside from just ‘computers’. An ancient 500W 80% efficiency PSU at max load only has 5.2A of current at 120V single-phase.
If you convert your natural gas furnace to a heat pump, you will use more electricity but excluding that and NG to electric HPWHs leaves only more efficient equipment.
Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
In a renovated house, you won't have aluminum wire at all, so these concerns are null.
My original statement should be qualified. Since we were talking about aluminum wire it's relevant -- an updated house will have new (copper) circuits that can handle all this stuff. An NON updated house might have Al wire and be overloaded in a more severe way than it was in the 60s.
But FWIW, new >100W appliances:
- microwaves (1200+W)
- air fryers (1500W)
- electric pressure cookers
- rice cookers (mine claims 610W on the plate)
- stand mixers (old: 80W, new: 475W)
- desktop computers (esp gaming rigs)
- resistive space heaters (1500W)
- *bigger* TVs (compare 72" LCD to 19" CRT?)
- air purifiers (mine clocks 175W on high)
- towel warmers? :)
- and the ubiquity of 10-20W small stuff has of course exploded, and it all adds up
> Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.
Perhaps, but none of them are continuous load, which absolutely matters.
Rice cookers, microwave, stand mixers, air fryers, pressure cookers, etc are all short duration usage, not continuous load. If homeowners decide not to add dedicated kitchen circuits and instead use a 120V 12A load on a 120V 15A shared circuit and trip the overcurrent protection, that’s their own fault.
These loads don’t really matter in the way a heat pump, air conditioner, furnace fan, or water heater does, it’s a bunch of random kitchen appliances that you won’t be using simultaneously. Your utility does not even take the full non-continuous load into account when calculating the kVA demand of your electrical service. IIRC a random convenience duplex receptacle for non-continuous loads only adds like 180 VA (this is 1.5A at 120V with a power factor of 1) to the demand calculation.
You are correct in a technical sense that people have more devices they plug into a wall, but most of the power consumed by a home is to devices that are hardwired in, aka continuous loads, not cord and plug connected appliances.
The continuous load of a home should be lower than ever without electrifying heat. Every continuous load (which are almost exclusively motors and lighting) in a home is more efficient now than in the past due to variable frequency drives and electrically commutated motors.
There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
IE Flock being a ycombinator startup, Ring cameras giving free access to police and others[1], AI systems being used for targeting dissent, ad-services and the data they vacuum up being bought by agencies to build up profiles for dissenting citizens[2]. We've watched this type of technology even be used to target the families of people in warzones to explicitly perform war crimes[3].
This is a forum of people who have effectively built the panopticon but don't enjoy hearing about how the panopticon is being used. Politics is now interwoven into our careers whether we like it or not. There is no pure technology, everything we work on effects the world for better or worse. Pulling the wool over our eyes to pretend there's a pure non-political form of talking about these topics is childish and naive.
> There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
Possibly true. Just irrelevant.
I already have far too much exposure to Trump, and I'm not even American. I'd like it not to come up here. You may disagree, and that's fine, but the original question was - why are stories about him flagged. I maintain that the answer, for many people if not nearly all, is simple: ugh, not again.
Personally I don't care either way about RFK Jr's new food pyramid.
I think the bigger danger of giving this credit is lending any legitimacy to RFK Jr who is actively undermining actual medical advice and wrecking havoc on our childhood vaccine programs.
Just because a broken clock is right twice a day, doesn't mean you need to give the broken clock credit for being right.
By doing this "oh it's just tribalism" lends legitimacy to RFK Jr and furthers his ability to kill kids with preventable disease and further damage the credibility of modern medical science.
"Oh he has some good ideas" Yeah? Which ones? Does the average american have the time/curiosity/capability to sort through which of his ideas are good and which ones will kill their kids?
Why should we read any of his books? He doesn't believe in infectious disease. That shows he has no understanding of how things work, if he gets something right it's a stopped clock situation. You learn nothing from looking at a stopped clock even though it's occasionally right.
Tell me, which of the following books should I read? Should I start on the silly anthony fauci attack book? or the book on vaccines by the man who isn't a doctor?
The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right
Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
Saint Francis of Assisi: A Life of Joy
American Heroes: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the
American Civil War
Robert Smalls: American Hero
Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit
American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health
A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals
Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak
The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race
IE a potter sees the results of his work in the pots he creates.
A worker in an assembly line sees a small aspect of the pot creation and is separated from the end result.
Many of us will understand the joy of a personal project and the lack of joy in completing an issue ticket. It's generally good for one's mental health to have some kind of purpose behind their work.
reply