sonori

I mean either way, Fusion is such a long way off that it doesn’t really have much of an impact on climate seeing as we need to reach net zero decades before any significant number of plants could come online. While worthwhile from a scientific and long term perspective looking 50 to a 100 years into the future, but we built the first fission reactor in a spare room under some sports arena in Chicago and it’s still to complex and expensive to be cost effective compared to battery backed solar and wind, so a process that’s so much more expensive and difficult that we haven’t even done it yet probably isn’t going to change anything in the next few decades.

Honestly, the place where I can see nuclear fission making the strongest case is when it comes to large ocean crossing cargo ships. The extra crew and tech make it more expensive than fuel oil, but not massively so, and as such it could work out as being cheaper for very large ships than any other method of decarbonization.

Of course that only matters if we’re actually serious about forcing decarbonization in all sectors and not just the current method of just where it is cheaper than massively subsidized oil, so maybe we’ll see more pressure to do so in a decade or so. For now, when we’re limited principally from the amount of money we are willing to invest in building clean energy, the long wait times and low return on investment make it seem increasingly like a way to slow solar and wind’s growth, and thusly buy oil and gas a few more years of market share, which is probably why said oil and gas companies went from fighting nuclear with every add campaign they could muster in the 90s and 2000s to their current support for it.

The hard part is that there are places where hydrogen really is the best path forward for decarbonization, especially when it comes to making fertilizers or various other industrial processes, and even maybe for marine applications, but the conversation keeps getting pushed towards cars, buses, trains, and other small vehicles where it just isn’t practical.

Given how involved oil companies have been in marketing it in those segments, and the willingness of certain car, bus, and train companies to be perpetually ‘trialing’ hydrogen instead of just using batteries or centenary, it is rightly often seen as just a way to greenwash and delay from electrification, but there are still things where hydrogen really is the better option for decarbonization and we should be pushing for more green hydrogen production and infrastructure there while calling out the organizations acting in bad faith.

I’m admittedly uncertain that investing in new battery technology is really likely to help though. We just don’t have the decade or two required for said tech to be discovered, refined, put into production, and then scaled up.

Between LFP for mass vehicles, Li-ion for space and mass critical applications, and Sodium ion for bulk storage, centenary and marine nuclear for bulk transport, along with solar, wind, and hydro for generation and long term energy storage, I think we already have all the tech necessary to scale up and decarbonize both the grid and overland transport. At this point the focus and funding should instead be put towards applying said technology as quickly and at as large a scale as possible as fast as possible.

We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, now we just need to actually do it.

So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.

So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?

Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.

While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.

Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.

Touché

Given Middle Earth is an artificial world that was sung into existence by beings of vast power, I’m not sure plate tectonics had all that much to do with directing its formation.

Assuming US. Government wise, Get your name and sex on your passport and Social security card updated before Jan 20th. Get both passport book and card when you apply. Updating Social security should also update IRS. Pay for expedited processing, This Must be Done Now!

Offhand I believe you have 90 days to update your drivers license.

Get your birth certificate updated if the state you were born in lets you. Even if it doesn’t, make sure that you have multiple physical copies of it and your social security certificate. Do not keep them all in the same place. Safe Deposit Boxes tend to only cost a few dozen dollars a year, if you cannot afford that mutually exchange your extra copy with your closest trusted friend’s copy.

Bank is also a big one and should match Social security, probably also want to update any credit cards.

Insurance, Health, Auto, Home, etc… Don’t give them a reason to give you the run around.

Work, or at least HR, should also be informed so that they are sending pay to right name and taxes all work out.

Post office may also need to be informed, though I believe offhand they will generally accept passport or drivers licenses as proof of identity.

If you have the misfortune of being in their system, make sure that the Department of Justice has you updated. This should have already come up for the legal name change but state and federal don’t always do a good job communicating and it is your problem when they fuck it up.

So offhand,

Passport

Social security

Drivers license

Birth certificate (if possible)

Bank/credit cards

Insurance

Whoever pays you at work

post office(maybe)

DoJ(if applicable)

As a rule, if it’s important, expensive, or looks official, it should match.

The more things match your real name (congratulations) and not your dead name, the safer you are and the easier your life will be.

Personally, I prefer ‘Tradition is the rotting corpse of wisdom’, but that works too.

I just installed a sol ark system, and can confirm that they work just as well with a pi and Solar Assistant. Not open source, but integrates well with homeassistant and no need for network connecting the actual electrical equipment, just usb.

Note again that my example of it working pretty effectively was for a decently sized nation and not just a small highly desirable city that wants to grow. The percentage of public to private housing in a city is meaningless to demand of people who want to live there.

I’m also not sure that Vienna counts as some massive failure of public housing, as the city is famed for its average rent being so far below comparable cities.

I also don’t see the problem with the government owning most of the apartments in a city, and indeed the more well to do citizens you can get to pay rent to the housing agency the less in taxes everyone else needs to pay.

Eventually if you build enough housing for everyone who wants to live in a place to live there, people will stop competing with each other for the limited spots. Prices are so high in dense urban areas because so many people want to live there, and so price goes up until enough people are pushed out that there are enough apartments to satisfy demand.

If you want to crash prices as you put it, you demonstrably need massively more housing than people who want housing, either by building more housing or by reducing the number of people who want to live there. If you don’t, people will just fight over the limited slots, and in a private market that means the slots universally go to the richest.

Given private developers will never willingly build enough housing to satisfy demand and therefore drop the price their units self for, it falls to an entity that is not seeking maximum profit from a given development to do so.

Around both outlying Vancouver skytrain and Toronto regional areas there is a lot of single family residential within a few blocks of stations that could be redeveloped for higher density, even neglecting that massive portion of the Toronto dock lands near the size of downtown that the government just sold off for private development. The government can absolutely get its hands on lots of land to develop, especially as industrial activity continues to move away from city centers.

The government also uniquely has the ability to build more metro lines that bridge areas to downtown, and could thusly drive density in currently cheap areas.

Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.