• 4 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • The article says:

    The Golden State’s poorest residents — those already enrolled in discounted rate programs — would pay small fixed charges.

    and

    Millionaires and billionaires would be slapped with the same fixed charges as middle-class families struggling to get by

    Maybe I’m misreading, or maybe the article is poorly written, but it sounds like everyone would be paying fixed fees.

    Setting a fee based on income sounds super error prone and vulnerable to gaming in the same way that the rich can avoid taxation. Imagine a CEO making $1 in salary with the rest in stocks, how would that be charged? Or imagine $1 in salary, but the rest in free housing, food, transportation, etc. What’s the overhead for properly monitoring all this? It must be huge to do a credible job. We’re already not doing it and repeating the same obvious error can only be assumed to be intentional.

    Just remove base fees and charge people for their usage. Poor people already use much less electricity than rich people so they would save money under my proposal, while the people who use more would have to pay more.


  • in the form of flat fees on their monthly electric bills

    Base fees are regressive and financially disincentivize progress.

    If you want people to use less electricity, remove base fees and increase usage fees.

    Another way of looking at it: imagine you had to pay a big fee to enter the grocery store, but once inside, everything was similarly priced. A potato would cost almost the same as a ribeye steak. You’d see lots of people walking out with steak, and as a result we’d have a major increase in agriculutural climate emissions.

    Electricity is the same way. When everyone’s paying base fees to artificially lower usage rates, poor people are subsidizing the extravagant usage of the rich.

    Remove regressive base fees and charge people for the damage they do.


  • Proper composting not only destroys seeds, it also kills pathogens like e. coli and salmonella while even breaking down things like diesel and TNT.

    There’s a ton of misinformation about composting and I think the central cause is that multiple decomposition methods that produce different results are all lazily called composting by lay people.

    As an example, composting uses biological heat produced by thermophilic microorganisms (mostly bacteria) to destroy pathogens etc. and which eat the material to produce compost. Worms, used in vermiculture, do not raise the temperature, have much less success destroying pathogens, and produce worm castings, which are physically distinct from compost and typically sell for around 10x the price.

    I’ve even seen discussions where people think that fire, which produces ash, is compost. Like… you can see a pile of compost, and a pile of ash, and literally can’t tell the difference? Add water (and oxygen) to compost and you’ll get compost tea for plants and trees. Add water to ash and you’ll get lye used in drain cleaner products. They are not the same.



  • She’s rich enough to be able to easily afford ANY travel type possible, without having to even ask the cost, and she chooses the dirtiest and most expensive one.

    If she cared about climate change, she would just intrinsically understand that paying someone else to be a good person doesn’t morally justify her being a bad person (aka, how carbon credits are marketed and sold).

    Instead of taking a trans-oceanic flight, she could go on a container ship or sailboat. She’s a musician and I bet these experiences would be vastly more inspiring than harassing college kids through lawyers.

    For domestic travel she could use a vehicle powered by restaurant waste vegetable oil (WVO) instead of fossil fuel. Or she could take an EV charged by renewable sources. Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman did a 13000 mile (21000km) electric motorcycle trip in 2019 from the southern tip of Argentina to Los Angeles called The Long Way Up, their 3rd such superlong trip, and their first on electric vehicles. They loved it and called it the future, and they had support from a prototype Rivian truck, which therefore advanced the space of electric cars as well. MANY people are doing this, some rich, some poor. For our climate emissions, there’s no time left for excuses either for Taylor Swift or for ourselves.






  • DNS, web, mail, WireGuard, etc. I wrote the webserver in about 700 lines of Go and the other software is by other people. Currently I’m rewriting everything in Rust and will write an authoritative DNS server in Rust. Eventually I want all my services to run on my own software (except for WireGuard, which is best in-kernel).

    My first professional mailserver was around 1996, with 400 users, up to over 3000 users by 2001. It was awesome then but now mail is the last thing I’d recommend anyone self-host. The ecosystem has been deteriorating for decades at this point.