Net metering is really, really smart when the installed base is small relative to the fossil fuel power plant capacity. But it doesn't scale forever. Once it gets up towards 20-40% of the fossil fuel capacity, it goes from an asset to a liability.
Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner time and 50MW through the night, or if instead it's 79MW at noon and 91MW at dinner and 51MW at night. The gas costs about the same irrespective of when I burn it so a bit of a fuel shift doesn't really matter.
But take that 1MW and turn it into 20MW and suddenly we go from 80MW at noon to 60MW at noon, 90MW at dinner to 110MW at dinner and uh oh. You see the problem? Whatever losses I endured at noon I don't get to make up for at dinner because my plant only goes up to 100MW and now we're not just shifting when we burn how much fuel, we're literally having to shift the power generation to a different plant.
Is this example precisely accurate? Absolutely not. But it helps you get a feel for the problem of net metering at scale. The grid can act as a battery for a few % of total generation, but by the time you hit some number, maybe 20% maybe 40% net metering turns from a cool math trick to a real cost on the grid.
Net metering only makes sense as a way to incentivize solar installations. Looking at the economics, it's not something any utility would offer willingly.
It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price. (Let's ignore the sanitary/health/quality issues that would come up.) You decide to buy a cow and you drink that milk. Sometimes you need more than your cow can give so you buy extra from the store. Sometimes you need less and you sell the extra to the store. Long term, you use as much as your cow produces on average, so you pay the store nothing. But the store has provided a valuable services to you and has incurred expenses in doing so. They have to keep the lights on and maintain a building and pay workers to handle your transactions but they make no money from you. The only way it would work at all is if they made enough money from their non-cow-owning customers to make up for it, and that can only take you so far.
> It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price.
I know of quite a few places where through net metering you don't get full price, you get the wholesale rate for your production which is significantly less.
Sure, I'm mentioning this because the number of places where you feed in at the retail rate is shrinking. It's great to get renewables on people's homes but as you get more of it, it becomes very expensive as fewer people pay for the base load
Not to be rude, but that's definitionally NOT net metering. Net metering is where you only get changed for your net consumption. If they're looking at your gross consumption and gross production separately, it just can't be net metering. You might still decide to sell solar to the grid for the wholesale price and get a reduction in your bill, but it's not net metering.
There are so many failures in microservices that just can't happen with a local binary. Inter-service communication over network is a big one with a failure rate orders of magnitude higher than running a binary on the same machine. Then you have to do deploys, monitoring, etc. across the whole platform.
You will basically need to employ solutions for problems only caused by your microservices arch. E.g. take reading the logs for a single request. In a monolith, just read the logs. For the many-service approach, you need to work out how you're going to correlate that request across them all.
Even the aforementioned network failures require a lot of design, and there's no standardization. Does the calling service retry? Does the callee have a durable queue and pick back up? What happens if a call/message gets 'too old'?
Also, from the other end, command line utils are typically made by entirely different people with entirely different philosophies/paradigms, so the encapsulation makes sense. That's not true when you're the one writing all the services, especially not at small-to-mid-size companies.
Plus, you already can do the single-concern thing in a monolith, just with modules/interfaces/etc.
One strategy to convince is to get someone less technical than you to sit by you while you try and trace everything from one error'd HTTP request from start to finish to diagnose the problem. If they see it takes half a day to check every call to every internal endpoint to 100% satisfy a particular request sometimes that can help.
Also sometimes they just think "this is a bunch of nerd stuff, why are you involving me?!" So it's not foolproof.
Oh, my non-technical boss agrees with me already. It's actually the engineers who've convinced themselves it's a good setup. Nice guys but very unwilling to change. Seems they're quite happy to have become 'experts' in this mess over the last 5-10 years. Almost like they're in retirement mode.
The real solution is probably to leave, but the market sucks at the moment. At least AI makes the 10-repos-per-tiny-feature thing easier.
Years ago I made harissa out of peppers for sauce for baked chicken wings. To my surprise it tasted tomato-ey.
After doing some Google searches I realized the plants were related and eventually it sort of made sense. Peppers are almost like a very dry, very firm tomato.
In hindsight it's obvious but at the time it was very surprising.
My dad once explained to me that there's right and there's dead and sometimes they overlap. I didn't really understand it at 8yo but he was definitely right. Being "dead right" is an undesirable situation.
They're pretty amazing for the amount of capital cost. $50 in seed and an acre of land can sequester several to over a dozen tons of carbon per year. It might not be space efficient but it requires basically zero infrastructure.
I suspect that the parent does in fact pay for any healthcare that they need or that their kids need. They just aren't buying insurance because the price of the insurance far outweighs their normal spending.
This is the real problem with health insurance is that it covers relatively routine and non emergency healthcare services where you can ship around and have market forces encourage people to find efficiency.
I understand the "if I'm dying from a car crash I can't shop around" argument and I agree. But that's very different than shopping for a family doc you like for the half dozen times a year you or your family will need to see someone for a strep test and maybe antibiotics.
Today I learned a thing! It makes sense that subsonic engines and supersonic engines would be different in retrospect but upon reading the headline I thought for sure it was going to be some kind of weird "jump on the AI hype train" article.
Good for them for trying to find a profitable proving ground for their engines.
Back during Obama's tenure lots of right sympathetic groups got labeled domestic terror organizations. It's always political. Don't like the state calling you bad names? The solution is to reduce its power not to just get the "correct" people in charge.
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/year-hate-and-ex...
I realize I didn't make the point clearly enough. This is nothing new. It's politics, always has been. The left labels people on the right they don't like with bad names. The right is absolutely going to do it back to the left. That's the game. I don't like it, but that's clearly how it goes.
Don't read what I'm saying as an endorsement of what the right is going to the left right now. Nor should you read it as an endorsement of what the left did to the right back then. They're both bad.
What are you talking about? This is weaponization of the FBI to treat US citizens like criminals by designating them as terrorists or supporters of terrorism. This is not a "both sides" issue. This is the full weight of the state being used against its own citizens for constitutionally-protected activity.
You specifically mentioned Obama. How did the Obama admin do the same? Does it make this a dismissable non-issue?
"Don't read what I'm saying as an endorsement of what the right is going [doing] to the left right now. "
That's me in the post you're critizing me for. I'm explicitly saying it's not good. What else do I need to do to make sure that you understand that I don't think it's okay?
Not say things like "it's always political", and otherwise both-sides the topic as if the current regime is not a watershed break with American norms, however flawed and imperfectly-adhered-to they were. Yes, our government has been decaying towards authoritarianism for quite some time and yes, there is plenty of blame to go around. But if we earnestly care about individual liberty, now is the time to throw our backs into stopping it.
This was also bad, and was criticized by Dem members of Congress along with the mainstream media, and led to the IRS Commissioner's resignation. Hopefully Bondi will too.
There was a time when one of the virtues was not to brag about how virtuous you were. I think that's why a lot of folks have a problem with virtue signalling. In their minds if you're signalling by doing something publicly it karmically negates what you're doing and almost alchemically turns it into something resembling vice.
I'm merely trying to explain how it is that people can have a problem with virtue signalling and to them it doesn't really contradict what is to them true virtue where you do something good and stay quiet about it.
This comment feels like it was made outside the context of the existing conversation. The comment I replied to was calling all charity virtue signaling and not just vocal giving.
But either way, I personally don’t think a library is any less valuable to a community just because it has Carnegie’s name above the entrance.
Society providing incentives for rich people to give money to charitable causes is good actually. An evil person doing good things for selfish reasons is still doing good things.
The real problem comes when you look up what charity actually does with the money.
It is hard to not get the feeling that outside of the local food bank, most charities are a type of money making scam when you dig into what they do with the money.
Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me. It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work.
It's almost as if we want to give the flu as many opportunities as possible to spill over, instead of just letting the birds who have immunity survive and thus basically drive the virus to extinction.
> Why we keep killing the birds that survive the infection is beyond me
We don’t know the reservoir capabilities of novel viruses, nor can we confidently rule when a previously-sick bird is well and non-infectious at scale.
> It's an evolutionary pressure that we refuse to allow to work
We’re selecting against birds that get infected in the first place. (Probably to no tangible effect. But the goal isn’t to have birds that can survive a plague, it’s to prevent it in the first place.)
Thanks for the response! I agree that it's not obvious the reservoir possibilities.
I don't agree that we're selecting against birds that get infected in the first place, or at least I don't think that's how it works. My understanding is that if any birds on a farm get sick, the whole house is killed. Maybe the whole farm.
To me that seems like selecting for lucky birds not selecting for populations that never get sick because lots of populations never get exposed.
I could be wrong on my understanding or how I interpret the impact, though, so I'm super open to learning more.
The main idea behind culling is to prevent the virus itself from evolving inside the herd. Viruses evolve much more rapidly than birds.
Now sure, if there were a clear way to tell that some birds have been infected and survived and recovered, it could be a good idea not to sacrifice those birds, and even to specifically breed them. However, there is no good way to do so, especially not with any confidence. It's much more likely you'll end up infecting any population that you put these new birds in to.
So, the best and cheapest solution is to sacrifice the entire group, to prevent the disease from spreading to other populations, and to do so quickly, to prevent the virus from evolving or crossing a species boundary.
I believe the rationale is that during the process of infecting a flock of birds the virus would be exposed to pressure that would encourage its mutation, especially as these birds begin to successfully fight it off. The current avian H5N1 only needs a couple of mutations to spread human-to-human pretty well.
So the current culling of entire flocks is seen as a means of nipping any of these mutations in the bud.
During the 20th century the American government (as well as others) put a lot of effort into finding ways to control people. Drugs, control of the media, MK Ultra and Mockingbird are just two examples of many. Everything more or less failed. Dosing unsuspecting civilians with LSD doesn't have much useful effect.
But one thing worked, and they should have known it all along. Fear. If you can make people afraid, you can control them. They want us to fear birds. They want us to fear our neighbors. They want us to fear other governments, and faceless terror organizations that are probably hiding in your bushes outside, if you see something, say something!
They've been beating the bird flu drum for years, and why? Suppose bird flu is a real threat, what is the public meant to do about it? Stop eating birds? There is no pragmatic course of action anybody but highly specialized scientists can take to counter this alleged threat, and yet they keep beating the war drum, trying to make everybody afraid. Fear is the point.
They did know it all along. It's been used since time immemorial.
But mass media and social media have given it new opportunities. Ironically I think we all expected that having access to more information would have been a tool against that, but it turns out to be much less effective at explaining fear than conjuring it.
Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner time and 50MW through the night, or if instead it's 79MW at noon and 91MW at dinner and 51MW at night. The gas costs about the same irrespective of when I burn it so a bit of a fuel shift doesn't really matter.
But take that 1MW and turn it into 20MW and suddenly we go from 80MW at noon to 60MW at noon, 90MW at dinner to 110MW at dinner and uh oh. You see the problem? Whatever losses I endured at noon I don't get to make up for at dinner because my plant only goes up to 100MW and now we're not just shifting when we burn how much fuel, we're literally having to shift the power generation to a different plant.
Is this example precisely accurate? Absolutely not. But it helps you get a feel for the problem of net metering at scale. The grid can act as a battery for a few % of total generation, but by the time you hit some number, maybe 20% maybe 40% net metering turns from a cool math trick to a real cost on the grid.
reply