Viewing profile — tsjackson

I work in the industry. While this is theoretically true, in practice it is not. First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost …

10k is a reasonable guess for how much tax liability is needed, and it's not a huge issue, but it is an issue. Retirees and lower-middle income folks often pay less than that each …

Particularly if you go the hardware route, might be worth exploring this as an option for utility scale solar farm inspection. Quadcopter drones often have insufficient range for t…

I actually 100% agree with this comment, except the "only being done to maintain appearances" part. A blunt instrument is better than no instrument. By raising interest rates, the …

Let's take an extreme example. If banks offered everyone 0% interest mortgages with 100 year terms and no credit checks, how many more people would want to buy a house? A lot! It w…

Also, reducing spending is even slower than reducing taxes. The vast majority of government spending is on Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and defense spending. Politically th…

Too slow. While I fully agree that taxes have gotten out of whack and should be raised, raising taxes would have an impact a year from now (way too slow of timeframe to manage infl…

Lots of smoke in the comments here. The Fed is doing what needs to create relative stability. Uncomfortable, but real. Demand is outstripping supply and prices are going up. The le…

I'm really curious about this. Hypothesis 1) Tik Tok believes AI/machine learning algorithms themselves are converging across fields, and the company is finding that its internal A…

Modules degrade in production really slowly ( The other factor here is that many agreements between a solar power and a utility that buys the power only have 20 year terms. General…

Thanks for checking me on my U.S.-centrism and your comment as well! For the record, I think Australia's market is a bit younger even though it's already a bit larger as a percenta…

You're right! Thanks for the correction. Thin film modules use Cadmium Telluride, which includes two rare metals* (not rare earth* metals). I want to note that there are some simil…

I work in the solar industry, and very few large projects are turfing solar panels anymore. There are at least three companies that will usually bid against each other to purchase …

There's plenty of space - deserts of the southwest for solar plus offshore wind could easily suffice to produce all of the power needed in the US by themselves. The issue is lack o…

There's a weird sociological phenomenon where people declare that "renewables won't get us there" without any real justification. A recently announced deal in California would buil…

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing i…

Psilocybin (from mushrooms) and MDMA are both fast tracked for FDA approval as adjuncts to therapy. Psychedelics are poised to become the most common psychiatric treatment in the w…

I've been undergoing a similar transition in thought, likely triggered by the same events. I'm struggling to reconcile the competing lenses. In our current political reality, anyth…

BMAA is the neurotoxin (implicated in Alzheimers and Parkinsons). It also bioaccumulates over time, and potentially up trophic levels. So definitely not fish wonder food until ther…

Attention has quickly become our scarcest and most valuable resource, and filtering out noise is one of the most valuable services that can be provided. The no limits, "let the goo…

Techno-optimist drivel is at least as unsavory as the overly sensitive, anti-technological kneejerk reactions that this article is lamenting. It's absurd to write off real problems…

There is nothing in my statement that suggests that every viewpoint that disagrees with my own should be censored. What I'm arguing is that the world has gotten a WHOLE lot more co…

The main thrust of the argument seems to be that we should do our best to stop censorship. I'm arguing that we probably shouldn't. Our society is not really equipped to handle the …

I'm naturally sympathetic to the sentiment, but this post fails to acknowledge, much less address, the major societal changes that have precipitated our current situation. Censorsh…

People would just argue about the rules and logic embedded in the tagging algorithm.