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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.



  • 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.



  • My rooftop solar is actually fairly typical, it’s just that we’ve been very aggressively reducing electricity usage since the solar was installed. Home heating is the biggest user of electricity here, and so we’ve reduced winter air temperature in the house to about 54-60F (about 12-15.5C), while using the techniques in the book Heating People, not Spaces by Kris De Decker, author of Low-Tech Magazine, and other techniques as well. Just as an example, instead of heating the house overly hot all day and watching TV after dinner, we’ll keep the house cool, use an electric mattress pad on the pull-out couch, and snuggle while watching TV. This not only uses almost no electricity, but it’s also more fun.

    We also haven’t used our clothes dryer a single time in 4 years now, using the clothesline instead, despite living in a cold place (USDA Zone 5). We look ahead on the 10-day forecast to anticipate best times and it works out fine. In a few days we’ll do 3 loads of laundry, 1 each 3 days in a row. The savings aren’t just the ~1kWh from each dryer load. Next time you do a load of laundry, go outside and put your hand by the dryer vent and feel all that indoor air being vented outside for up to an hour. Now imagine the same volume of cold winter air equalizing air pressure in the house by slipping through gaps in the doors. That’s a LOT of cold air that is then reheated (typically using fossil methane, or electricity largely created by burning fossil fuels). It’s the same story in summer: the dryer pulls in all that hot air that makes people use more AC or electric fans.

    We’ve been doing extensive solar cooking for a few years now, typically cooking at least one thing about 6 days a week for 8 months of the year. Curry, bread, banana bread, corn bread, muffins, apple pie, sweet corn on the cob, veggies, pizza, pasta, leftovers, many many dishes. That keeps a ton of cooking heat out of the house while using no electricity, while also being the safest and most ethical cooking method (caveat: parabolic solar cookers are not safe, I’ve never used them and don’t recommend them. They’re pretty cool but should be treated with extreme caution, just as with a fresnel lens.)

    These are just a couple changes we’ve made; there are dozens. Just to name one more, reducing our indoor shower/sink usage is worth mentioning, as it takes significant energy to heat water. Using a showerhead that uses 50% less water, and taking a 50% shorter shower on top, saves a ton of hot-water energy. Same for efficient sink aerators.

    Some upcoming projects/plans:

    • get a heat pump with mini splits
    • work on passive solar heating, even though our house is poorly situated for it
    • figure out how to safely pull enough snow off the solar panels after a snowstorm, possibly using a telescoping handle and squeegee
    • improve shading for summer (we don’t use AC, but still…)
    • get a heat pump based water heater

    If you want to get started saving money and carbon, I’d suggest lowering your winter house temp by one degree. Once you’ve adjusted and kinda forgotten about the change, lower it again by one degree. Keep doing this over a period of time and do it slowly so you can stick with it, making it a change that lasts the rest of your life. Do the same in summer, increasing the temperature slowly from the previous normal. At first the change is kind of meaningless, it’s so small, but later you’ll start looking for ways to comfortably go further. You’ll find or invent ways to hold on to heat longer in winter, and get rid of it faster in summer.


  • Propane isn’t a fossil fuel, it’s a byproduct of fossil fuel processing/refinement, and understanding this matters. You can’t mine or harvest propane like coal or petroleum because propane is not a fossil fuel. It’s a byproduct. Once we stop using fossil fuels, propane will go away.

    Propane has an extremely low GWP (global warming potential) compared to other refrigerants. Anyone who has a refrigerator, freezer, air conditioner, or heat pump, is using refrigerants. The most common refrigerants are R-22 (chlorodifluoromethane) with a GWP of 1810 (1810 times worse than CO2) and R-410a with an approximate, difficult-to-calculate GWP of 2088. There’s also R-32 (difluoromethane) with a 100-year GWP of 675. Depending on who you ask, propane has a 20-year GWP of 0.072 and a 100-year GWP of 0.02, or a GWP of 3. In any case, that’s WAY lower than what we’re already using.

    Probably the most ineffective way to attack fossil fuels is by attacking propane, while the most effective way to attack fossil fuels is to build wind and solar to make fossil fuels irrelevant. My rooftop solar produces over 200% of our usage, for example. That’s a lot of coal my neighbors aren’t indirectly burning.

    We should very aggressively build wind, solar, and other renewables to replace fossil fuels. Until then, in the reality that we’re living in, it would be harmful and kind of useless to attack propane.

    BTW, do you want people burning more charcoal in their backyards? Because that’s what they’ll do if you snap your magic fingers and eliminate propane, and the fossil fuel industry will either put their fossil fuel byproducts into something else anyway or just release it into the atmosphere where it does its climate change damage. So you get the choice between: A) the current climate damage or B) the current climate damage and more.

    But I agree it’s embarrassing that people think so-called “natural gas” is renewable. That’s almost surely in part because it has “natural” in the name, and that’s why I support just calling it by its real name, which is methane.








  • 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.