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PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

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241–250 of 281 posts

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#241
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be that California has an unfair advantage, but that southern states have an unfair disadvantage. If southern states spike their watt hours due to aircon, we could say the cause is poor construction/architecture. The poorer the insulation (southern homes' insulation is crap compared to northern) the more you need to pump the aircon. And when homes are not designed for optimal environmental efficiency or…

Heating is much more energy intensive than cooling (unless you have a heat pump, aren't particularly common in the U.S). Air conditioning consumes a lot of electrical power in comparison to heating, but if we're counting overall energy efficiency it seems like darker, colder northern climates should have a disadvantage.

In some areas, heating is cheaper with propane or wood then with electricity. Air conditioning, however, needs electricity.

We heat with wood and propane but air condition with electricity. Our electricity bill is much higher in the summer.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#242
post #206
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The freedoms of collaboration over the Internet can taken away with: 1. widespread trusted computing (we're close) 2. banning encrypted comms over unregulated spectrums (done) 3. political will to ban such freedoms (growing) How can those that prefer such freedoms preserve them? Political activism can. Can censorship resistant tech help in that situation? Plausibly deniable mesh networks? Sneakernet?

> banning encrypted comms over unregulated spectrums (done) Wow, they banned 2.4 GHz wifi? And all the other ISM bands?

Maybe the GPs point is that all spectrum is regulated? ISM requires certification and low power levels, for example. I'm a bit confused too.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might not be that California has an unfair advantage, but that southern states have an unfair disadvantage. If southern states spike their watt hours due to aircon, we could say the cause is poor construction/architecture. The poorer the insulation (southern homes' insulation is crap compared to northern) the more you need to pump the aircon. And when homes are not designed for optimal environmental efficiency or…

We dealt with disease without modern knowledge of medicine or hygiene for the past 300,000 years too. The fact that lacking something didn't make the human race go extinct doesn't mean it's something we should just give up.

Ummm… Humans "dealt with disease" before "modern medicine" frequently by dying.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#244
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really like to see that trended over time. California's energy mix tends to be low due to a lack of both a heavy heating (northern climates) and cooling (southern / south-eastern) load. Housing stock has been notoriously inefficient in insulation, though newer construction gains on that. Major usage has been in transportation. Sprawl'll do that to ya. LLNL has historical energy usage charts, and began breaking th…

The big difference between the high use per capita states and the low use per capita states seems to be industrial and transportation use. Percent industrial and transportation use in the low states: Rhode Island is 42.7% California: 62.5% New York: 41.4% Florida: 50.9% And the high states: Wyoming: 79.4% Louisiana: 86.5% North Dakota: 73.7% Alaska: 82.9% Iowa: 72.5% Texas: 76.1%

Huh.

You're basing that on this https://www.eia.gov/state/seds/data.php?incfile=/state/seds/...

Also, much of the industrial use seems likely to be energy-industry related. I'm presuming: Wyoming (coal), Louisiana (oil), North Dakota (fracked natural gas), Alaska (oil), Texas (oil and gas).

Or it may be electric power. These states' energy use is dominated by coal, and see Table 26 which bundles "industrial" and "power generation": https://www.eia.gov/coal/annual/pdf/table26.pdf

Texas is the only high-population state listed.

Note that small states have lower per-capita efficiencies across the board, though yes, those specific states have high industrial/transport usage. Note that per-capita variance in smaller states tends to be higher than large ones regardless (more of them, smaller populations, more opportunity for outliers).

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not going to get into the laptop discussion but the wildfires are 100% due to heat and drought, and those are much worse recently because of global warning. PG&E could bury ever cable, they could increase the fire prevention budget by 10 times over, and it wouldn't fix it.

I suppose if you could convert California into a rain forest, maybe they wouldn't have forest fires. Then they could run the power lines any which way, and everyone would be happy. Right? You ask how to convert it into a rain forest? How about heating the ocean offshore, so more water evaporates?

[deleted]

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We dealt with disease without modern knowledge of medicine or hygiene for the past 300,000 years too. The fact that lacking something didn't make the human race go extinct doesn't mean it's something we should just give up.

Ummm… Humans "dealt with disease" before "modern medicine" frequently by dying .

Yes, that's my point. Technology can save a lot of lives, even though living without it didn't kill enough humans to drive us to extinction.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#247
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to Californians is otherworldly. I had one tell me that everywhere should put street signs on the roadway itself. Had no concept of what snow was apparently.

We put street signs on highways in Ohio. Quite handy for knowing whether you're in the correct lane, as it doesn't have the ambiguity that overhead signs can have. Of course, we do also have overhead signs as a backup and for longer-range visibility. But it's more likely that the overhead signs are useless due to a setting sun than that the on-road ones are due to snow. The streets with on-road signs are very high pr…

I believe California does some of this in the really complex interchanges in the Bay Area, but I don't remember for certain and it's been years since I've been there.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#248
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Because it’s cool to break the rules? Does it matter to you that these rules are trying to protect our civilization from dissolving in a heap of wildfires, floods, power outages, droughts, storms, etc? This stuff is not just hypothetical any more.

Society is collapsing because of the idle power consumption of laptops?

Computers account for about 3% of residential electricity use, so obviously it's the logical place to start.

s/logical/lobbyist/

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of "activism" to restore my freedoms. I've allowed politicians to get away with a lot of bullshit, but if they come after my PC and homelab, it's time to water the Tree of Liberty.

> I've allowed politicians to get away with a lot of bullshit, but if they come after my PC and homelab, it's time to water the Tree of Liberty. Are we advocating for murder on this site now? Really?

> > I've allowed the King to get away with a lot of bullshit, but if he comes after stamps, it's time to water the Tree of Liberty.

> Are we advocating for murder in this pub now? Really?

An early American exchange. Probably.

Re: PC can't be shipped to CA, CO, HI, OR, VT or WA due to power consumption

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We dealt with disease without modern knowledge of medicine or hygiene for the past 300,000 years too. The fact that lacking something didn't make the human race go extinct doesn't mean it's something we should just give up.

Ummm… Humans "dealt with disease" before "modern medicine" frequently by dying .

frequently by dying

In the long term, humans deal with everything by dying. It's rather inefficient and denotes a tendency to run away from any problem that can't be solved within the ~55 years of an educated human period of productivity. Maybe with a little more grit and resolve to avoid such cowardly tactics as death we would undertake longer term projects.

But as long as humans insist on dying, that is going to be a nearly impossible challenge. It is hard to get a person motivated to take on a high-stakes challenge when they plan on dying before the consequences of inaction impact them.

I propose that all humans make the sensible choice to not die, at least for a century or so longer than their current predilections in this area, to demonstrate their commitment to truly advancing the cause of human kind.

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