That guy in the comic saying “roofs are impossible” is every American about every single topic.

Does it take more land than a solar array? What about a coal plant + its open pit mines, or a nuclear plant + its waste storage?

I have literally never heard of space even remotely being an issue for grid storage before, except in the context of pumped hydro sites. Why are people suddenly whining about how it can’t fit into a closet? Are they under the impression that this is how the grid works right now? Do they think there needs to be a gas peaker plant in every substation or else the grid collapses?

show the less extreme Trump supporters

Doesn’t exist

There is no point in playing nice to attract customers if they can’t pay, so businesses are stealing from the poor (mostly data in the case of MS) and selling only to the rich (higher valuation).

Do you remember when CEOs would make announcements at conferences they’d be trying to convince consumers about how good their product is? Pretty frequently they were lying, but now they’re not even talking to us, when they speak they’re addressing stock holders and other companies.

They were the most hated company in the 2000s and pivoted to one of the good guys by the end of 2010s.

I want an apology letter from all the “stop hating on Microsoft, its not 1999 anymore and they have a new CEO :) :) :)” people.

Sounds like it might be worth keeping a change of clothes and shoes down there. Imagine if you ended up down there in your pajamas.

(Not trying to lecture you, this is something I hadn’t really considered before either.)

You might be interested in this drink.

IMO you’re much too charitable. I think these are the reasons (at least for American conservatives), roughly in order of what I consider to be the most to least sympathetic:

• A fondness and nostalgia for fossil power. To be clear I think if this is the reason you’re supporting fossil fuel use when lives are on the line you’re crazy, especially when museums and motorsport categories for older engine technologies can (and already do) exist, but I can at least understand it.
• Anxiety about change. While there are lots of reasons to think that renewables will put us in a better position than fossil fuels (they’re cheaper, can be less centralized, and better insulated against geopolitical instability) a lot of people are very anxious about things like EV range and grid instability. If they’re a “low information voter” or have been fed a steady diet of oil industry propaganda then they probably have a very exaggerated view of these issues and a very poor understanding of how the world works.
• The entire idea of anthropogenic climate change and things like a circular economy directly contradicts the Christian worldview they’re operating under. For one they don’t believe in climate change for the same reason they don’t believe in herd immunity from vaccines or systemic racism. Cumulative effects, dynamic systems, and tipping points aren’t part of how they think the world works. Secondly, they view the world as something their god gave to humanity to conquer, dominate, and exploit. Telling them that they can’t suck the world dry and throw away the husk come judgment day is tantamount to telling them their religion is fake.
• For a portion of the population the above three attitudes have metastasized into conspiracy theories and fascist ideologies. Things like a belief that “15 minute cities” means they will be put into open air prisons, or that wanting to reduce resource consumption means that they will be subjected to population control so that black people can replace white people. I don’t feel like writing a giant comment examining the core of the reactionary mind, but suffice it to say that things like language and truth are very fluid for them. If something makes them feel bad then it must be bad, literally and physically. The conspiracy theories are created to justify the feelings.
• In addition to the above plenty of people want to hurt others. The fact that large powerful vehicles kill people, the fact that they’re loud, inconvenient for others, and spew black smoke, makes them more appealing. The fact that oil use creates wars that kill children is a bonus. All of this is tough and manly. It makes them feel good.

I didn’t know Priuses had jake brakes.

For square meters of physical space.

True, but out of all the ecosystem the one which gets the highest insolation per square meter requires the lowest amount of square meters of disruption for a given amount of power.

Additional options include:

• Partially cover agricultural fields that get too much sun (yes, it is possible for a plant to get too much sun, depending on the species)
• Cover water reservoirs with floating panels, which both cools the panel (improving its efficiency and lifespan) and lowers evaporative water losses.
• Cover patches of desert, which get a ton of sun.
• Cover rooftops.

The wonderbread fetish guy combines both of these into one.

It’s the wrong frequency to cook anything.

The idea that microwave ovens use some specific frequency that’s good for cooking is a myth.

Dielectric heating occurs over a very broad range of frequencies. What actually matters is the energy density of the EM field. A microwave oven cooks food because its putting more than 1000 watts into a small confined space, your cellphone doesn’t because its transmitter is shooting less than 1 watt into the open air (where the energy density quickly diminishes by the square cube law).

If Open Office were as good a suite of office software as Microsoft, it’d be the industry standard. No business wants to pay Microsoft license fees just because, they do it because the tools work better and create a better end product.

The idea that everything that businesses do is as efficient as physically possible and the executives are all mega geniuses that are incapable of making bad decisions (or are even incentivized to make good decisions) is untrue.

COBAL is not the greatest programming language to ever be invented. It, and the various pieces of dogshit software that companies collectively shell out billions for every year, are used because they are entrenched in their respective industries and corporate structures, not because of their brilliant design.

They’ll bring back the blight town toxic blowdart guys pelting you while you try to descend some rickety scaffolding.

Maybe they could be synced using RF over fiber. This has been proposed as candidate technology for 6g wireless networks, to enable cell free massive MIMO.

That would mean that you would need to run optical fiber to each of them, though we’ve already seen fiber drones spool out kilometers of the stuff as they fly.

EDIT: I just remembered this interesting article about doing radio interferometry over a fiber network using cheap quartz oscillators instead of atomic clocks. My (layman’s) understanding is that the quartz oscillators are good enough over a few milliseconds, but will fall out of sync with each other over longer time spans. Meanwhile the fiber optic reference signal (distributed from a central atomic clock) can be kept correct on average by reflecting the reference back down the fiber and doing active correction of the changing path length (caused by thermal fluctuations and vibrations along the fiber) but will be incorrect on a millisecond-to-miliscond basis because of light speed lag and the path length being a moving target. So they use the quartz oscillators over small time scales and use the fiber reference signal to keep them synced over long time scales. Surprisingly the article says they actually get a better sync this way than with using multiple atomic clocks.

So perhaps something like that is possible.

I think its a combination of that and games moving from community run servers (named things like “Gregz Hangout | Gungame 24/7 | No isms” ) to just clicking a matchmaking button and being dropped into a match with a bunch of people you’ve never seen before and will never see again after that game is over.

With the server model occasionally people join or leave, but you’ll likely see most of the same people over several matches and maps. And if you rejoin that server another day because you liked it you might see that some of those people came back for the same reasons that you did.

• It says in the article they were selling them. I think this is illegal in most countries with planned economies because they don’t want a capitalist market to develop in parallel with the planned system (the entire point of economic planning was to eliminate markets after all).
• They were producing their computers using components that were stolen from government factories. This wasn’t a novel design, and the name wasn’t their’s either, they were just assembling CoBra computers (itself a clone of the British ZX spectrum) outside of the factory they were normally produced in, using the same components the factory used to produce them.

I should note that the article also says that ordinary people couldn’t ‘purchase’ (exchange vouchers for) these computers, so this is the only way they would be able to attain one. The government hadn’t allocated any of them for use by the general population. So, make of that what you will.

Long distance power transmission also effectively makes the day length longer, lessening the need for storage.