Something like the IRA but started years ago. They invest and subsidise and tax-incentivise in their own industry but do use competition within their own market to weed out losers.
Which they might very well look to neutralise in the future - humans globally need to get much much better at addressing the externalities of their consumption.
Her books are mostly about genius caring people being held back from their plan of helping humanity into a golden age by more stupid evil people and regulation and so on.
I’m no expert of course but I get the impression that we’re trying to run before we can walk. Many more robotic missions and way more basic research done more scientifically first could quite plausibly get humans there quicker in the end. Reading A City on Mars I found myself thinking this is many orders of magnitude more complicated than Apollo and will take more time.
Keep hammering the point that they are cheaper. If they are open to more advanced discussion point to the amazing structural changes that batteries are only starting to bring. Tell them something that sounds mildly like science fiction but is in fact happening already and will be HUGE. E.g. the battery you’ll have in your AC/stove/car will save you money or even make you money when part of a smart mesh of DERs.
Let me preface this that I am a huge advocate for renewables, and have been spending borderline unreasonable amounts on turning my home green.
The rub with "solar is cheaper" is that those values are almost always calculated using an ideal environment. Solar is cheapest when you are using flat barren land in Arizona where an acre costs $500, the sun shines 330 days a year, you are bulk buying 750 MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is a single rubber stamp. Those are the numbers that ultimately trickle to headlines.
Things get much more complicated (read: expensive), when you are in the North East, an acre costs $12,000, the sun shines 170 days a year, you're bulk buying a few dozen MW of panels, and the bureaucracy is 6 different government bodies full of permits and assessments.
In that situation, a gas plant that produces 10x more power on 10x less land becomes very appealing to people who are already getting crushed by soaring electricity bills. (My take: we're just going to have to deal with higher costs).
So I am all with you on abandoning fossil fuels, but to someone who is firmly in gas camp, they will have legitimate ground to stand on when balking at costs. "It's cheaper" is unfortunately not all encompassing.
As someone in New England: We don't have enough gas infrastructure up here either, you can't just add more gas plants to our grid and accomplish anything.
As it is, in the coldest periods of winter you will at times see the ISO-NE grid running on 40% oil because we don't have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to run all of the gas plants and meet natural gas heating demands. So many of the gas plants have to kick back over to burning oil.
Building it out and maintaining it isn't free. And per a friend who's been selling consumer solar installations for years in the North East and gotten disillusioned: the equipment maintenance, repairability, and replacement story isn't great at the company they last worked at and results in a lot of environmental waste. One of the reasons they left. Of course, this is just second-hand information - I don't personally have much intuition for how widespread the issue is.
Every gallon of gas you use was produced far away, shipped halfway around the world for processing, and shipped back to you. Even if you are in the US, we basically don’t have the equipment to process our own gasoline from the crude we produce.
This means that millions and millions of machines have to be maintained, shipping lanes have to stay open, infrastructure has to stay profitable, distribution has to stay easy and cheap. The web is invisible to the end user, but it is massively complicated and expensive to upkeep.
Solar, once you have the panels you have to clean them every once in a while, and replace a failing panel every once in a while. But they produce for ~30 years after being made once.
So it’s funny to argue about environmental waste in this way. It’s an issue, but everything in a solar panel can basically be recycled and we are seeing the facilities start to come online as the first wave of PV panels starts dying off.
Residential solar doesn't make that much sense from a system point of view - it's a lot more expensive than utility grade solar for the same amount of energy, but with the way the energy market works retail electricity prices are much higher than wholesale prices and that makes the upside of rooftop solar a lot bigger for consumers.
"It's cheaper" is a good route, but a lot of these people have decided they don't care about objective facts in favor of what their favorite media personality says.
I've emailed politicians as have others but only received boilerplate thankyou's. I suspect the real reason is kick-backs but they will never admit it.
No harm in people reaching out to their politicians state and federal. The more people that bring it up the better. Let them know your childrens data will not be shared and when the data is leaked you will hold the politicians accountable.
I’m not in the US but assuming everyone who disagrees with you is receiving kickbacks is a bit much. I agree this is a terrible idea and doesn’t make sense past a few seconds of thinking but the reality is it’s very popular with an awful lot of people.
Well, if the concern is they might miss out on revenue from a small child accessing their site and they are not a child specific site then perhaps they should be pushed out of the market one way or another.
No, what I mean is that adding a lot of laws to let websites be legal (age verification, GDPR, etc.) adds a huge burden and that prevents new small websites from even existing.
All I am proposing is that websites that may contain adult material add a header. That's hobby level effort. Small companies using a CDN or platform provider can either add the header in the CDN, check a box if this were to take off or open a ticket asking to add the header.
I've been ranting about this since 5 years, and every time it mostly just gets ignored. You can Google or ask ChatGPT about the iCloud Keychain API.
And to see for yourself, open the Keychain Access app on your Mac, and search for "Facebook", "TikTok" etc (that data is accessible by those apps on all your other Apple devices too)
This is the truth. It would only take half a dozen Republicans to stop the madness now so the obvious question is why don't they?
The political system and elite institutions have failed their country. Does the US self correct with the next two election cycles? Hard to believe right now.
Maybe. Maybe not. If my local phone and phone accessories shop can do it for little money in 15 minutes then the current calculus changes for a heck of a lot of people.
No. I can't find a legit battery for my Samsung phone, only forgeries and "compatible with"s. Local repair shop said they could put a new OEM battery into this 4yo second-hand phone
So I pay them and they do it. The result:
- back cover becomes rather loose while it's warm e.g. from fast charging or a hot day out. No longer waterproof
- the battery is no better than the original and is (2y later now) degrading faster than the original. If you ask a lot of it, the last 35% are gone within minutes. I think it's a knock-off battery but that the repair person doesn't know that
If there had been commercially available repair parts and tool access, neither would have been a problem and I could just have done it myself
My mom has the same model and sent hers in to the manufacturer for a battery swap. Took a while and cost half the price of the phone (since it was a 2yo second-hand at that time). That could have been much faster, even if the manufacturer is free to set the same steep prices
A colleague got their phone back from Google for some repair last week, I don't remember if screen or battery swap. He asked and they said it wouldn't be reset. He put a sticker on it not to wipe the device. They wiped the device. He's now trying to piece together what's in various backup files that Android allows making. Fun fun fun. Also not necessary if you, or your techy nephew, can just do it at home
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The requirement for commercially availability of repair is so much better than the current state of what repair places can/are offering
I think the supply chain is pretty broken. I had just about the same experience as you with an iPhone 7 a few years back. I booked my replacement through Apple's website, so I was pretty confident I wouldn't get scammed. The new battery started bulging in less than two years, to the point that there was a serious gap between the screen and the body.
It was clearly worse than the battery that came with my refurbished (!) phone, which never did that; it just couldn't hold a decent charge anymore. I won't even go into the absolutely ridiculous experience I had with the repair shop, like not honoring booked times and whatnot and having me wait in line for ages, both to drop off and pick up my phone.
My current phone has lost some of its battery health as reported by the OS, but still gives me over a day of use, but when the time comes to fix it, I'll go directly to Apple.
Same with laptops btw. I once caught a seller where the webpage and sticker said 5200 mAh but acpi -i reported 4400 mAh. They provided a replacement free of charge, presumably their supplier scammed them in turn (it was a small local webshop), but that replacement also wasn't great even if now the chip reported the expected capacity. Never once have I had good experiences with replacement batteries, I really wonder what they do with the originals to make them so vastly superior
Also quite noticeable that the laptop battery market became much smaller once the batteries became an internal component (around 2015) that you can't see without opening it up completely. These also used to be behind a slider or two
People don't dare unscrew electronics, even if it's about as trivial as replacing a light bulb in a fixture that requires removing a screw. With phones having the battery inside as well now, not above the sim tray for example, I wonder how much such legislation is going to help the average person
Last time I checked I’d have to leave my phone for a couple of days and the glue factor meant they wouldn’t guarantee it would come back perfectly. My assumption is this might make it a more trivial change.
There were models that were both waterproof and not glued (the only tools needed for a battery swap were the replacement battery and opposable thumbs). I never had/tested one myself though, this is just going off of the manufacturer's claims and IP (ingress protection) certification
I used to have a Galaxy S5, the model that usually comes up in these discussions. Now, I never went and threw it in a swimming pool, or pressure washed it, or whatever other ridiculous test you may come up with. But I did attach it to my motorbike's handlebars and rode around under heavy rain on more occasions than I care to remember.
It was often drenched to the point that the map on the screen was basically illegible without stopping and wiping off the water. But it never skipped a beat. Basically, I was the limiting factor and would eventually give up and find some hotel with a hot shower to pass the night.
No, but everyone else forgot this is a possibility and are increasingly making the mechanisms of social and civil life dependent on possession of a modern smartphone.
Why waste space for gaskets and o-rings when you can already get the battery changed out while you wait with glue? Glue is clearly the superior method, which is why almost the entire market has adopted it.
Heat pads exist even in the most basic repair shops. It's not advanced technology, no need to over-engineer it.
There are a number of phone designs that require special heating apparatus and very careful prying tools to get the back case off. And then extremely careful application of new glue to reassemble. Basically the whole thing is glued together at the factory. Google "phone heating pad for repair" for some examples...
My last phone was all glued and the entry point was the screen. The repair guy said there was a 50% chance the screen would break in trying to unglue it so it was not worth the try. It was a shame, it was a decent phone killed prematurely by a faulty battery.
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