> Every fashion brand on the planet reengages their customers this way and it works.
I often receive emails from (among other things) fashion brands to which I never subscribed. There are clearly multiple people worldwide who, mistakenly or intentionally, are giving my `firstname.lastname@gmail.com` at checkout or whatever rather than their own.
Every time I receive one of those emails I do two things:
1. Use their unsubscribe link on a private window, connecting with a VPN exit point in their country (or nearby). If asked, I select the "I never subscribed" or "This is spam" option.
2. Mark the email as spam on GMail, rejecting GMail's proposal to unsubscribe instead (as I already did).
I have no mercy and feel no guilt at reducing their email server's reputation. The only exceptions I make are the rare emails that ask me to confirm "my" subscription before sending "me" their stuff. That I respect, and I just ignore and delete.
The only viable way to even get most of them is to shut down internet access entirely. It's not a realistic solution, unlike blocking a few well known IP ranges belonging to a large corp like Cloudflare.
And even if you managed to get them all beforehand, some VPN providers will adapt and keep some servers in reserve, putting them online just as you managed to block the previous ones. Getting around internet censorship is a large chunk of their business, and some are really good at it.
You don’t really need to block all, you just need to annoy the users enough that paying is easier. And I think there are enough games to use up the IP reserve pretty quickly and getting new ones every time is pretty annoying.
I can provision a new VPS in about 5s of active work. I'd probably fully automate spinning up new servers and failing over because automatically detecting which got blocked is trivial. Bonus points if you use providers that let you attach multiple IPs to each VPS for cheap. Use some censorship resistant decentralized protocols to provide the next couple IPs to your client software and you're good.
And then they still need to monitor hundreds of VPN providers for whether they have new IPs, which is not neccssarily as easy as just grabbing a list of them. Once they have some, they then need to forward them to the ISPs and ask for them to be blocked. Their process is significantly less friendly to automation.
No country ever won this fight short of total shutdown/disconnects.
It's a game. The VPN marketplace is huge so it's wack-a-mole.
Big companies don't hide their VPN ASNs. Obscure, for sure, but getting a good list isn't hard. Usually they get blocked.
Smaller companies may pass under the radar, and have higher tolerance for risky strategies.
The fringe providers are the problem. They aggressively change IP ranges, front-vs-obscure ownership, and play dirty. Shady folks will resell residential ranges. End-users often get tainted goods.
... and you still have the collateral damage game when VPNs host infra with big cloud providers vs colofarms vs self-host, etc.
Specifically Albania, Bhutan, Nepal, Paraguay, Iceland, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken towards using renewable energy worldwide, but one must point out that all those countries except one are almost exclusively using hydroelectric power, whose availability at such scale is a geographical lottery. As for Iceland, which also relies mostly on hydroelectric power but not in such great a proportion, it makes up for it thanks to easy and abundantly available geothermal power (which, though environmentally friendly, is arguably not technically renewable).
Well yes, hydro and geothermal are the easiest (and earliest perfected) renewable sources to provide consistent base load. It would be odd if the first countries to achieve fully renewable power weren’t making use of those technologies.
Other countries will have to be more reliant on interconnects, diverse renewable mixes and batteries. Luckily this is now almost always cheaper and more secure than fossil fuels and the trend lines point towards that continuing to be more and more true over time.
Not to downplay the positive steps that are being taken but we are conveniently skipping over the denominator here at least in the case of Ethiopia and DRC who both have a grid that is only serving their full population at a fraction of the level needed to make this story one about geographical lotteries and abundance instead of one about poverty preventing them from access to the traditional carbon power generating routes to server the rest of the population.
Also, many of these countries are tropical or subtropical, with optimal conditions for solar energy year round. Nepal and Bhutan are relatively far from equator, but have many days of unobstructed sunshine.
The Earth's heat content is about 1×10^19 TJ. This heat naturally flows to the surface by conduction at a rate of 44.2 TW and is replenished by radioactive decay at a rate of 30 TW. These power rates are more than double humanity's current energy consumption from primary sources, but most of this power is too diffuse (approximately 0.1 W/m^2 on average) to be recoverable.
This leads naturally to "artificial geothermal", where solar energy is used to heat rocks or soil, and the heat is later extracted. It doesn't have to be anywhere near as deep as ordinary geothermal, which had to accumulate that heat over many thousands of years. Just ~10 meters is about enough.
That's not where natural geothermal energy is from. It's residual heat from planetary formation and some natural radioactivity.
This form of storage also unfortunately only yields heat (via heat pumps or directly), not electricity, as the temperature difference is much too low in comparison to meaningfully run any heat engine from it.
Great if you need to heat houses; not so great if you were hoping to store the solar energy for a rainy, or rather cloudy, day (or night).
No, that is how natural geothermal energy works. Perhaps you mistakenly thought I was saying the heat comes from sunlight? I didn't. The heat comes from below (or, in some cases, from internal radioactive decay). And this delivery of heat from below (or from decay) is a slow process, taking a very long time, which is why geothermal resources have to be buried deeply (otherwise, that heat just leaks out and the temperature of the geothermal resource is too low).
Yeah, "accumulate the heat over thousands of years" indeed sounds a bit misleading to me. The heat is largely already there (or is generated pretty uniformly through radioactive processes), it's just slowly transmitted outwards down a gradient.
No, the heat is not already there. The heat comes in and goes out; the heat energy initially in the crust decays away exponentially with time and has no effect on the steady stage temperature gradient.
It was not initially in the rocks that we are tapping for geothermal energy, which would be a few kilometers. I wasn't talking about the Earth as a whole. Remember, this is about why so much more thickness is needed for the rocks for ordinary geothermal energy systems, vs. artificial geothermal.
Heat is extracted at geothermal wells much faster than it is being replenished by the average rate of heat flow from the deeper Earth. It's effectively "heat mining". Granted, there's a lot of heat to be mined.
Only as a technicality. If you find a geothermal hotspot and start to extract energy from it, the hotspot will eventually cool down faster than if you hadn't (which of course depends on the size of the hotspot and how much heat you're pulling out).
However, given that there's no downsides to cooling down a hotspot other than, well, no longer being able to extract energy from it, geothermal is a bit of an honorary "renewable".
Actual renewables ultimately all come down to recent[0] solar energy, which will never deplete their source however much they are used. All the energy in wind, hydroelectric and biofuels has recently originated in the Sun.
[0] I say "recently" because fossil fuels are all also derived from the Sun, but their rate of regeneration is a bit too slow compared to the speed at which we use them.
A lot of hydroelectric depends on snow pack and glacier runoff that is being adversely affected by global warming. Solar and wind are the only robust hedges against a warm up that might ultimately severely curtail river flow.
We have a lot of uranium and nuclear is fairly renewable at least in the span of a few centuries. The waste issue is a problem.
At a certain point there won’t be enough heat recovered from the geothermal side of the loop to generate steam on the process side of the loop and power generation will cease. I’m not smart enough to calculate how long that will take, however. I think you could still use the geothermal energy at a lower temperature for district heating and cooling, but a mechanical engineer would be more qualified to answer that.
We can make oil from biomass by heating it up in a kiln, and we can do it quickly. Oil is totally renewable. It's weird to me that we are fixating on renewable when the problem is carbon gas, isn't it?
Contrary to a popular belief, most high temperature Geothermal plants have a predicted death date.
This is due to the physics reality of the ground itself: Power of a Geothermal well will decay over time to a point where the well become unusable and need to be closed.
It is due to the fact underground water is rich in minerals and raw elements. This soup will slowly but surely cement the well itself and its associated underground.
There are techniques (similar to 'fraking') to extend the lifetime of a well but only to some extent.
If the topic interests you (and you can bear artificially translated English), a French content creator did a pretty good video on the topic:
About 20% of this is residual heat from planetary accretion; the remainder is attributed to past and current radioactive decay of naturally occurring isotopes.
Most of the radiogenic heating in the Earth results from the decay of the daughter nuclei in the decay chains of uranium-238 and thorium-232, and potassium-40.
Potassium is more or less distributed in the body (especially in soft tissues) following intake of foods. A 70-kg man contains about 126 g of potassium (0.18%), most of that is located in muscles. The daily consumption of potassium is approximately 2.5 grams. Hence the concentration of potassium-40 is nearly stable in all persons at a level of about 55 Bq/kg (3850 Bq in total), which corresponds to the annual effective dose of 0.2 mSv.
Almost none of it is from fission. Fission is a very rare natural decay mode of uranium and thorium. Most of their radioactive energy output is from ordinary non-fission radioactive decay.
No, not quite. Geothermal is powered by the accumulated heat stored in rocks from fission Uranium and other heavy atoms deep in the Earth (and other phenomena).
Geothermal hotspots do not reheat by fission or otherwise at the same speed that we extract their energy (if they did we'd be in trouble if we weren't extracting it!).
As I mentioned in another comment, build a Dyson sphere of solar panels around the Sun and it will last just as long. Build an all-Earth geothermal plant and the heat will be depleted.
How long would it take for the heat to be depleted? Humans have only managed to drill something like 12km into the earth because it gets too hot to go further.
If it were possible to access all of the Earth's stored geothermal energy, probably a very, very, very long time.
But if we're open to applying a quantitative timescale threshold to the thought experiment, at which we can argue geothermal is renewable, that raises the question for nuclear. If we could access all fissile uranium and thorium on Earth, how long would it take for us to deplete its stored energy? Does that mean nuclear energy is renewable?
Can’t speak for large scale sites with abundant volcanic activity… But for residential geothermal the bore hole has a lifetime based on how much ground water there is and how active usage it sees.
This is because using it cools the hole slowly and after a few decades (depending on how quickly ground water can dissipate heat gradient) a new hole need to be drilled a distance away.
There are some modern heat pumps which can put heat energy back into the hole during the warmer season when the pump acts as a (cooler). For my own Daikin pump this would be possible if I had a different flooring than wood.
"Unfortunately" I choose wooden flooring on my heated floors. Cooling this means that the I risk condensation due to moisture build-up and therefore a long-term risk of mould. But I have only need of cooling 1-2 months of the year, so it is not a big deal, I can solve it by clever use of insulation instead.
But for those able to use a geothermal pump like this it also has the short-term benefit of increasing the effectiveness of the hole as well.
However much solar or wind energy we use, the Sun will last exactly as long. This is not a matter of scale. Even if we were to build a photovoltaic Dyson sphere around the Sun, it would have the same lifespan.
That is not the case for geothermal. It could in theory be cooled down if exploited at a massive scale.
Saying geothermal is not renewable is not an indictment nor a criticism. Geothermal is great and we should use it more. It's just technically not renewable, but that doesn't matter.
I guess there's a point where that's arguably true. But it's not correct universally, and it's certainly not true if you look at earth and the sun.
The heat generated within the earth comes from nuclear decay and the energy radiates out from the planet. It would do that no matter what. Humans can tap into it and it would have the same lifespan.
If humans somehow started extracting the heat leftover from the planets formation, then yeah, that is exhaustible. There's about 100,000,000,000 times our total annual energy (not electricity) use in there. Planet only has 5 billion years left, and only about 1 billion livable years.
That time gets considerably shorter if we start pumping that energy to the surface, because we cook the surface with the waste heat.
So even assuming it was technologically possible to access the heat there, you could not draw enough to exhaust it in the time frame you have remaining to do so without killing the biosphere.
And after a hundred generations of this there will be no fusible material left. We can extract energy from rotating black holes until they stop, and then the universe is dead.
So solar energy is renewable over a human lifetime, not renewable over a stellar lifetime, renewable over a stellar formation cycle, not renewable over the lifetime of a universe, and renewable if universes turn out to be cyclical. And all but the first are pendantry in the context of renewable energy conversations.
The way you're saying it is deeply irresponsible. The way to deal with methanol poisoning is not "just ethanol", and you cannot "cure yourself" by drinking everclear.
If you ever find out you have been drinking methanol by all means do drink safe spirits if you have immediate access to them (after throwing up what you can if you're still in time), but get medical help now. Ethanol will not cure you from methanol poisoning, it will only help reduce and delay the damage somewhat while you're waiting for an ambulance or making your way to a hospital to get proper treatment.
Worth noting that even in clinical settings, ethanol has largely been replaced by fomepizole (Antizol) as the preferred antidote. It's more predictable, easier to dose, and doesn't come with the side effect of making a critically ill patient drunk. Ethanol is the field expedient, not the standard of care.
You're not going to get any sort of concerning level of methanol though from home distilling unless you're collecting and drinking just the heads. You'd have to be trying, and even then it would be difficult. It's basically impossible.
Any amount of methanol you're getting from home distilling is going to be easily and safely canceled with alcohol.
Absolutely! Visualising a long string of opponents saying 'Check' to each other until one calls the checkmate reminded me of when you and your opponent both take the classic dub-Victoria understrategy and repeatedly 'Parsons Green' each other. Such memories!
As the owner of a GMail account which is also of legal adult age (and a Reddit account which will be 18 this year), I am morbidly curious what will happen once these mandatory "age verification" start to be enforced.
It should be trivial for Google and Reddit to grandfather-in accounts which are more than 18 years old (arguably less, who created their account when they were, e.g. 5 years old?). However, I'm betting they will come up with all sorts of rationalisations as to why this is not possible, anything from the bullshit ("not technically feasible" my ass) or the self-contradictory ("an account may have changed owner"... so in violation of the ToS? And what's to stop an account from changing ownership after age verification?).
I admit I am prematurely riling myself up with indignation for something which may never happen. Maybe I am wrong and Google, Reddit, etc. take the common sense approach, but I have no hope in it.
I think it's simpler than that. Bubble wrap the wrong way round means the only air cushioning is provided by the bubbles, and all the space between the bubbles is just a thin layer of plastic flat on the object that needs protection. Bubble wrap the right way round means the object is air-cushioned from the outside by both the bubbles themselves and the space between them (with the added bonus of the wrapping keeping a flatish outside surface).
If it makes you feel better, I can tell you that using any form of plastic for shipping safety is bad and you should feel bad about it, because we have better alternatives like paper or even mycelium-based packaging matreials?
Thank you for your attempt to make me feel better, I would be truly devastated to learn that information if I were in the business of shipping fragile items in plastic bubble wrap, and that devastation would certainly assuage my current disappointment. Unfortunately I am not in that business and cannot even remember the last time I bubble-wrapped anything, so I cannot take any morally-masochistic solace from learning about the better alternatives. My disappointment remains immeasurable, but I will keep that info in mind in case I ever need it.
I often receive emails from (among other things) fashion brands to which I never subscribed. There are clearly multiple people worldwide who, mistakenly or intentionally, are giving my `firstname.lastname@gmail.com` at checkout or whatever rather than their own.
Every time I receive one of those emails I do two things:
1. Use their unsubscribe link on a private window, connecting with a VPN exit point in their country (or nearby). If asked, I select the "I never subscribed" or "This is spam" option.
2. Mark the email as spam on GMail, rejecting GMail's proposal to unsubscribe instead (as I already did).
I have no mercy and feel no guilt at reducing their email server's reputation. The only exceptions I make are the rare emails that ask me to confirm "my" subscription before sending "me" their stuff. That I respect, and I just ignore and delete.
reply