Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.
So who's working on fixing it? It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature. Meanwhile you have folks seeing these three things together:
- England is 90% renewables
- Renewables are a really cheap source of energy.
- England has very high energy prices.
And the obvious conclusion is that someone is lying. It's eroding support for renewables among those that don't have time to investigate how or why the spot price of gas sets the overall energy price.
The thing is, it's nowhere near 90% in general. 90% is the generation right now, with sunlight and good wind. On the site you can see that renewables were 66% in the last 24h, 46% in the last week, and 42% in the last year. I don't think it's possible to have 90% renewable generation overall without massive energy storage.
>It's not like "the price is fixed to the price of gas" is some iron law of nature.
It kind of is.
Gas is the only source of electricity currently which can be scaled up and down at will and on demand.
Even once grids eventually go 100% green we will probably still use (green, synthesised) stored gas as the power source of last resort on cold, windless nights after batteries and pumped storage have been depleted.
A lot of wind power is generated in Scotland, for example. The power conduits that transmit power along the country can often not deliver all of that power to the South on a windy day. There is an excess of power in the north but the wind farms cannot deliver it, they are not paid to generate power so they switch their wind turbines off, even though there is wind available to capture.
This new test means that wind farms will not switch off in such conditions and electricity prices will be allowed to fall to zero, but only for those in the local area.
It’s not the same thing. Customers on some of Octopus’ tariffs get occasional zero or negative pricing to spur demand that can help balance the grid or reduce curtailment.
This trial is different. I think the real goal is to incentivise local communities to support the construction of wind farms. If you have a wind farm nearby, surplus generation is used to supply you with free power when otherwise the turbines would have been curtailed.
Why is it that some of the most useful features in Apple products are impossible to find on your own? I recently also learned about "three finger swipe to undo" in iOS instead of shaking the damn thing like it owes me money.
1. Gives the person more opportunities to reconsider.
2. Gives loved ones more opportunities to notice what's happening and intervene.
There's a world of difference between refinancing your home by visiting a bank several times over a period of a few weeks and refinancing your home by tapping a few buttons on your phone.
The difference convenience makes to the rate of making errors in judgement is actually so obvious that even military equipment will have additional steps you have to take to enable lethal weapons/eject/etc.
I think the worst part is carrying the two in your pocket at all times. Previously a gambler trying to quit could avoid specific locations. How the hell do you avoid the internet?
A lot of gambling is Canada is privatized. Sports gambling, for example. Most of the money being made in the gambling industry is not in the lotto.
Edit: Also the liquor thing varies by province. Ontario has a crown corporation selling liquor, but in Alberta all liquor sales are by private entities.
This has always been the case for most high-stakes gambling. The problem isn't winning big, the problem is getting the counterparty to pay. Skilled gamblers (when it comes to games with any skill component) throughout history have been adept at winning subtly and then moving on before anyone figures out they have an edge.
> I won’t speculate on how he would have felt about generative AI, but I can say that GenAI is something I care about. It causes a lot of problems for a lot of people. It drives rising energy prices in poor communities, disrupts wildlife and fresh water supplies, increases pollution, and stresses global supply chains.
This kind of stuff drives me crazy sometimes. There's is little that's unique to AI here. These are the effects of any kind of industrial expansion. They're also the effects of population growth, in general. This stuff is a problem iff AI is a scam or hugely oversold and these resources are being wasted. But that's a different argument and a less clear-cut one.
> It re-enforces the horrible, dangerous working conditions that miners in many African countries are enduring to supply rare metals like Cobalt for the billions of new chips that this boom demands.
This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.
I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".
>This point also deserves special mention. Most green technologies (solar panels, electric cars) also require a bunch of cobalt. Again, the "badness" seems to depend on your a priori evaluation of what the cobalt is being used for and not the cobalt mining itself.
Neither solar panels nor Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries require cobalt. Pretty sure all the emphasis on that is mainly meant to cloud things and try to paint these things as just as bad for the environment as eg coal, and apparently it's been very successful based on how frequently I see it repeated, but it's not true currently. It was true with NMC batteries, but I think those have fallen out of favor even in EVs, and grid scale is dominated by LFP. Don't think solar panels have ever needed cobalt, they're glass, aluminum, silicon, and a bit of silver/copper. Thin films have cadmium sometimes, but those aren't the ones in use en masse for solar farms.
There’s a lot of good points in your comment, but fwiw it’s not clear whether they exist to dismiss a complaint or muster focus on the issues.
You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?
If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.
Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.
I think my main point is that these particular concerns largely depend on someone already sharing the author's opinion - that AI is bad. They're not convincing otherwise because most other IT buildouts (e.g. "cloud computing", cryptocurrency) have a lot of the same drawbacks. Whether these costs are worth it or not then depends entirely on the nature of the technology they're being used for (which is why I brought up green tech).
> I think there's also a pretty good chance that if a robot that could mine the same cobalt with no human intervention appeared tomorrow, many folks would complain about "hard working cobalt miners in Africa losing their livelihood to automation".
Well, yeah? Just because the current work safety situation is bad, doesn't mean being out of a job couldn't be worse. I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.
> I'd love a world where more automation meant less, safer, higher paying work for everyone. Our world never worked like that, to my knowledge, and I'm not sure it ever will.
I'm not sure what you mean because that's literally what happened. The only remaining caveat is that it's not yet "everyone", but even that part is improving. If I was born in feudal Europe I would have spent my life planting, weeding, and de-pesting potatoes by hand instead of sitting at a computer in a climate-controlled office.
Sorry, I did a quick google search which seemed to indicate that cobalt is present in solar panels and batteries and not a deep dive. The broader point, that whether mining X mineral for Y purpose is bad depends entirely on what you already think of Y, remains.
Mining practices can be bad even if the minerals are used for a purpose that we judge as good. Those can coexist (in tension, which is where we end up thinking about tradeoffs).
The waste of screen space is the big one for me. It feels like every company is racing to dumb down their products and fill their UI with whitespace instead of using that space for controls or content. My bank just redesigned their website and now even checking the balance of a few accounts + credit cards requires scrolling on a 1080p display. Ridiculous.
reply