perestroika

It might interest people that the soon-to-be previous biggest thermal energy store is also located in Finland, under the island of Mustikkamaa in the capital city of Helsinki. The city heating company Helsingin Energia "charges" the store by pumping heat out of sewage in summer. I think it was about 10 gigawatt-hours and it's not pressurized, so water can only reach 90 C over there.

(A side note: if you allow water at 140 C to boil in a controlled manner, you get steam, which can also produce electrical power, although probably in a suboptimal manner.)

Finnish bedrock seems more suitable than average rock for such ventures (which I would call "artificial geothermal energy") - granite is a poor thermal conductor and a reliable rock for making caverns.

I hope it goes well. :)

Thank you. This is a long reading, but an interesting one. I have been curious about how it's going in Rojava, but the war closer to home has overwhelmed my senses and attention. I've been a bit fearful that the Assad regime might recover and reconquer (ISIS seems a spent force by now), or that the Erdogan regime might think of some new way to menace them.

Some remarks to the article:

In most communities, the speed of structural change had far outpaced changes in public consciousness. /.../ In a statist revolution the question of structure is primary. The will of the people matters only insofar as it affects the power of the state. But if the goal itself is for power and initiative to flow from the bottom upward, then as a rule the revolution can only proceed at the speed of popular consciousness. For a community to truly govern itself, a critical mass of its people need to want to govern themselves in the first place, and they need to share some fundamental assumptions about what that means and why it is important.

A common problem. Doing a revolution at such a pace that it doesn't scare the heck out of less adventurous people seems like a very difficult trick.

“Armed struggle is the easy part,” a community organizer named Baran once told me. “To pick up a gun and go to the front is simple. What’s difficult is to organize society, to build a new system.”

Baran is probably correct on the matter from one aspect: it is easy to start an armed struggle, and the matter of starting to fight an opponent - even if it's overwhelming and ends in defeat - is not a complicated affair, but convincing people is endlessly complicated.

However, at the point where I view an illustration in the article - the graves of their martyrs, among them an YPJ commander who died in a Turkish drone strike - I feel that I have to argue against his point. Winning against an enemy who has access to more technology and more money, and collects resources from a bigger area with more people - even if they aren't willing contributors - is not a trivial problem. Whether it's Rojava trying to hold ground against Turkey or the Syrian dictator, or Ukraine trying to hold ground against Russia - numbers matter, technology matters, economy matters, diplomacy counts (Rojava, being landlocked among neigbours fearful of a Kurdish state, even if they affirm that they aren't a state and won't destabilize other states, is especially disadvantaged)...

...if an enemy can fly a strike drone into the heart of your free territory unhindered, and drop a laser-guided bomb on a delegate returning from a conference, then you have to choose (a nasty choice) between organizing a better society, improving education or medical care or economy... and organizing air defense. Which is why Turkey should be figuratively "dragged over coals" when it again attacks Rojava. I'm not even saying "if", but only "when". :(

War is a business that makes people and societies harsh and eventually - authoritarian. It is a great tragedy that another promising revolution is having to grow up amid war. :( I hope they manage to resist its influence.

I will keep in mind to check for a follow-up story because I don't have any contacts in Rojava and they seem really under-represented on the web.

Copying out the noteworthy bits.

Claim:

the UAE’s National Center for Meteorology told CNBC it had not seeded any clouds before the storm struck on Tuesday

Verifiable with a bit of FlightRadar searching:

seeding operations tend to take place in the east of the country, far from more populated areas like Dubai. This is largely because of restrictions on air traffic, and means it was unlikely that any seeding particles were still active by the time the storms reached Dubai.

Verifiable with a weather map:

perhaps the best evidence that cloud seeding wasn’t involved in these floods is the fact that it rained all over the region. Oman didn’t do any cloud seeding, but it was even more badly affected by flooding, with a number of casualties.

Now, if I was running a cloud seeding programme and saw a mega-rainstorm coming, I would quickly consult with a person who knows about drainage and call off the flight, saying "we've got enough coming". It doesn't take superintelligence to make that decision, just a functioning meteorological office and a bit of sense.

...and the final conclusion:

Dubai is comically ill-equipped to deal with rainfall

(because they typically don't get any)

I think most people already have this firewall installed, and it's working too well - they're absorbing minimal information that contradicts their self-image or world view. :) Scammers just know how to bypass the firewall. :)

They 100% know that electrolysis methods won’t be economically viable.

I would argue against that any day. Electrolysers are viable, they are just not the current state of the industry because dirt cheap solar and wind weren't around in previous decades.

It's the storage that might not be viable in most countries (because only some have geology that allows for underground gas storage). Producing hydrogen from water at 95% efficiency is doable with today's tools, if you have somewhere to put it.

I played the idea a few years back, at some anarchist-leaning not-just-music festival. We tried setting up a link over a 70 m hill, both stations using 433 MHz (500 mW transmit power, quarter wave antennas) narrowband (no frequency hopping) LoRa boards from Chengdu EByte. Stick antennas, not directional. Both stations were right below the hillside, so the hill formed a perfect obstacle between them.

Communicating over the hill in a single hop proved impossible. With a repeater at the hilltop, it was possible to make contact with the repeater from street level (no line of sight, trees obstructing), but the repeater (Meshtastic didn't exist back then, it was entirely homebrew) had software bugs, so - no link to the other hillside. :)

With better software and better planning, the experiment would have succeeded. :) And if we'd have tried building a link over a valley, it would have been considerably easier.

With ordinary WiFi and directional antennas (panel or ladder antennas), I've been able to establish links over 1 km. If one used a LoRa card, and had a directional antenna for the frequency involved, in clear line of sight, I believe 10 km would be attainable without being a radio specialist.

Coincidentally, there's a cheaper way too. :)

The ratings of existing power lines can be recalculated on an hourly basis according to outdoor temperature and wind.

That however, requires software and agility, which big companies seldom have... and it doesn't help during a heat wave with no wind, of course.

Poleward winds, which previously made few inroads into the atmosphere above Antarctica, are now carrying more and more warm, moist air from lower latitudes – including Australia – deep into the continent, say scientists, and these have been blamed for the dramatic polar “heatwave” that hit Concordia. Exactly why these currents are now able to plunge so deep into the continent’s air space is not yet clear, however.

Even if they cannot explain the "how", it seems beyond doubt that the process can happen repeatedly.

When it happens repeatedly, one should plan for faster Antarcic ice loss, since the excess heat of the rest of the planet can now increasingly reach and melt glaciers.

That has implications for coastal regions everywhere on the planet. Don't build on the coast. Make plans for higher storm surges and sea level rise. And - needless to say - don't add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

That was some interesting reading, thank you. :)

About the Little Ice Age - I feel like the article slightly mis-dates the period, placing it earlier than many sources suggest.

As a side note, human-amplified mechanisms have been proposed to the Little Ice Age, aside from natural ones - from the conquests of Genghis Khan and his successors, to the Black Death, to the smallpox epidemic that Europeans brought into Americas... but the likely trigger, I think, was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1257_Samalas_eruption

As for human societies taking different turns when facing difficulty - I would search for the cause in their world views, technologies and interactions. Europe had already put itself on a course to technical sophistication - techniques such as writing, number systems and methods of calculation enable a single ruler to boss around more people, and ever since the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Chinese invented their versions, they had big bosses claiming divine mandate or origin.

Everywhere in Eurasia, people also rode and transported cargo - horses, camels and elephants were used to transport goods and fight wars. Their existence enabled the use of wagons and carts, which enabled winches and cranes, siege engines, windmills, sawmills and watermills, to the point of having technology to equip armies and fleets...

...and indeed, armies and fleets were a common problem everywhere in Eurasia. Some where Christian, some Islamic, some believed their own flavour of stories, but the elite having access to writing (without the common people having the same) enabled spread of ideology and top-down management.

Genghis Khan added a key component - an efficient postal system. This enabled remote control of and fast-moving armies, allowing to manage supply chains, give strategic input to distant generals and subsequently - conquer pretty much the known world.

He was not unique, though - Arab armies did a similar trick earlier, Europeans repeated the nasty trick later, enabled by technology from China (gunpowder, printing and compass)... the Ottoman empire grew between the two and took a bite of both, then Russia conquered Eurasia in reverse and Western kingdoms colonized the coasts of many seas.

Eurasia was a considerably more fast-paced, violent and top-down place indeed, and the pace and violence probably had a role in shaping the thought landscape.

“You have to go measure things in the real world, because nature surprises you,” Keith said at that conference in 2017.

He has continually stressed that the amount of material involved would represent a small fraction of the particulate pollution already emitted by planes, and that doing the same experiment for any other scientific purpose wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

I agree with that. It seems overblown that some folks were opposed to spreading two kilograms of limestone dust and measuring the result.

A single aerobatic flight of an ultralight aircraft with a smoke trail probably requires more pyrotechnical material, not to speak of fuel. Not to speak of a proper passenger or cargo flight. Not to speak of a satellite launch.

People already do the things anyway, only without properly understanding the results.

As for the argument that "then everyone will start experimenting" - well, that depends on the result of the previous expriment, does it not? And some do it anyway. China has a weather modification bureau, Saudi Arabia practises cloud seeding to increase chances of rainfall, etc.

I never directly use Cloudflare because of my boycott on it. I will go as far as to grab archive.org-mirrored content to reach CF’d content but that’s as far as I go. Tor actually helps me avoid CF, inherently. So I’m curious what protections you use from spam and ads and how that affects your Cloudflare visits. That needs to be documented. In fact, it would help expand the list groups excluded. If Cloudflare is mistreating uMatrix users, for example, then that should be added as a group of people Cloudflare excludes.

Neither do I - my post was not clear enough about that.

I often need to use CloudFlare-equipped sites, and often have to adjust NoScript and uBlock to get them to work. :)

I mostly agree with the article - Facebook is the weakest attractor currently. As for how to compare CloudFlare and Google - that's difficult, because they provide too different services.

Myself, I'm somewhat irritated but not much influenced by both.

My primary mobile phone runs an old version of Replicant, so I don't get access to Google Play or their app store. Of course, being a programmer and having chosen this, and having no shortage of mobile devices, I can work around the difficulty, but I realize many people can't.

CloudFlare irks me when I try to protect myself against spam and ads. It's a constant dance of turning security measures on and off to get through their barriers. Their lack of transparency also irks me. I recently had to build a script to fix someone's customer database. It had to query the local state postal company (a user of CloudFlare) for postal codes (zip codes). Of course, CloudFlare blocked access because my user agent string looked homebrew. I had to have my program pretend being CURL before it finally let me access the resource. Having to trick someone to access a public service isn't my idea of a good passtime. :)