they have to pay according to how many hours they were powering their devices with how many kilowatts

Let’s see, power multiplied by time is… energy. So they’re paying for the total energy used. If they use 2 kW for their hair dryer and it doesn’t even come close to an hour of usage, they have to pay for that too.

Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.

I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.

But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.

Are you seriously saying that when you’re talking about a solar panel you care about how much energy it produces per hour, not per second, per day, per week, or per year?

If you want to estimate the energy usage of a 400 watt lighting system during an 8 hour workday

Why would you want to do that? And what kind of lighting system in 2026 uses 400 Watts?

Are you seriously saying that when you’re using your 2000 watt hair dryer, you want to pretend that you used it for an hour, and then scale that back to the few seconds you actually used it? Are you seriously pretending that your 800 watt microwave oven is on for a full hour at full power while you’re heating your nuggets, so it makes sense to think of it in terms of kilowatt hours?

The reason most people think kWh is intuitive is that they’re used to it because their electrical utility uses it. It’s the same reason that Americans think Fahrenheit is more intuitive, while the rest of the world thinks Celsius is more intuitive. It’s why Americans think miles make more sense for measuring distance, while the rest of the world thinks kilometers are easier to use.

No they’re not. You’re just used to them.

Why would I care about “Joules per hour”? What matters is power (Watts), and total energy used (Joules). “Kilowatt hour per month” is just an awkward way of saying “Joules per month”

Cool, just be careful on the rules. Switzerland is technically not part of the EEA. They’re part of the EFTA, and have a bunch of bilateral agreements with the rest of the EU, but there are still quirks to the deals. Even if you’re charged only minimal fees or duties, that could add up if you’re buying a car. At a minimum, you’ll probably have to do paperwork to export the car from Switzerland to another country. And the Swiss love their paperwork.

Have you ever crossed the Swiss border? That was an interesting one. Switzerland isn’t in the EU but they’re in a lot of bilateral agreements which means they mostly have an open border. But, that agreement is a lot less solid than the rest of the EU agreements.

It seems like the France / Belgium border could be turned back into a proper border control post within a few months. But, the Swiss / France border seems like it could be back in full force within a few days. Currently you can drive past it at nearly full highway speeds, but all the border control buildings are there, and the roads leading up to them are just ready for them to start diverting traffic again. I also seem to remember that it offered a last second chance to turn around and not cross the border, something you didn’t get at say France / Germany. Probably because there actually is a meaningful difference in laws between the two sides, so there’s a chance someone might decide not to do it.

Astronomy uses special units because the SI units are more than 10 orders of magnitude different. You’d have to use really exotic prefixes like “zetta” or “yotta” if you wanted to keep using metres.

The difference between a kilowatt and a megajoule is just 3 orders of magnitude. You just have to switch from “k” to “M”. People are already familiar not only with “M” but with “G” and “T” because of Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc. There’s nothing about kilowatt hours that’s more intuitive or easy to use.

This appliance uses 1 kilowatt. Running it for 1 second uses 1 kJ. Easy.

Are you billed by the hour, or by the month?

It’s much harder to get citizenship in most EU countries than it is to get citizenship in the USA. Until Trump, it was also easier to get into the US on a visa than to get into Europe on a visa.

I think I’ve seen border checkpoints while driving between EU countries, but it was hard to tell because they hadn’t been in operation for decades. But, there’s still a vague sense of a border. It seems like the countries maintain that area enough so that if ever they had to put the border control points back into operation it could be done. So, you can sort of tell that you crossed a border, even if you don’t have to slow down at all.

I seem to remember that the USA was part of the model when the EU was being designed. That doing business between EU member states was supposed to be as easy as doing business state-to-state in the USA. It isn’t quite there yet. But, the USA has been working at reducing state-to-state friction for nearly 2 centuries, whereas the EU has only had decades.

I know it’s not the main point of his video, but I really wish he’d looked into the CapEx vs OpEx stuff a bit more.

For example, when talking about how much fuel his car uses in its lifetime vs. the cost of buying solar panels, he makes it clear that the solar panels are a better investment than buying gasoline. But, what he doesn’t talk about is the difficulty for a lot of people in coming up with the money up-front to make that investment. Especially if you’re poor, finding $25 per week to put gas in your car is easier than spending $3000 up front to put solar panels on your house. I know later he makes the argument that it might not even make sense to put solar panels on your house. But, that up front cost is also there for buying an electric vehicle vs. buying a car with an ICE (fuck ICE). The Nissan Cube he showed had a starting price of $18k when it was last available new in 2014. The Ioniq 5 starts at double that, at more than $36k. As far as I can tell, you can’t get a new electric car for less than $30k, whereas the cheapest gas cars are only $23k or so.

A big reason for the status quo is that paying small amounts constantly is possible when you’re poor, but paying a big up front cost to go electric isn’t. What’s worse (and goes with the last half hour of his video), is that we’re in this situation because the fossil fuel companies keep getting subsidies, whereas any subsidies for electric cars or photovoltaic panels keeps getting shut down.

Also, I know it’s an American channel so it has to use things like “gallons”, but please when talking about energy, use Joules, not “kilowatt hours”.

Wind sometimes runs out (as in, calm weather) and wind turbines do eventually run out after a few decades. But, 3 gallons of gasoline-equivalent per minute seemed a bit small for my intuition, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to compare it to pumpjacks for oil.

I’m doing these calculations in metric, because the US traditional units are insane, and nobody should subject themselves to that.

3 gallons is about 11.3L, so 11.3L per minute is 678 L per hour, or about 16 kL of “gasoline-equivalent” per day.

Apparently a pumpjack pumps about 5 to 40 “barrels” of crude oil per day. A barrel is 159 L so that’s 795 L to 6360 L per day.

So, the back of the envelope “how much ‘energy’ does this big mechanical thing produce” seems fairly similar, ignoring a whole lot of complexity.

Sure, like I said, they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, they’re still fundamentally a cable company.

as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks

Theme parks.

“Kids, pile into the van, we’re going to Comcast World!”

I’m sure they own lots of IP from their various acquisitions. But, fundamentally they’re a cable company.

Investors had a general idea of what was going on at Tesla and thought their profits might be down to 20% of what they were last year, so prices went down before Tesla announced their results. Then the results came out. The results were terrible, but not as terrible as the rumours made it sound. So, share prices went back up a bit.

That makes perfect sense. Stocks are like gambling, where a lot of the bets make sense. This is like the odds on a sports game being very long before an injury report is released, and the odds getting slightly better after the injury report is released and it’s not as bad as feared.

Where TSLA stock makes absolutely no sense is the P/E ratio. That’s the price investors are paying for the shares compared to the earnings per share. An old, reliable company that probably won’t grow very much but that has reliably made a steady profit year after year might have a P/E ratio of 5. Tech stocks that might grow a lot in the future might have a P/E ratio of 20 because the expectation is that they have a lot of room to grow, and that in 5 years their revenues and profits might have tripled.

For a typical car company that’s well run, a P/E ratio of about 5-10 is normal. Volkswagen is at about 8, Toyota is at about 10, Ford is at about 12.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently 283.38, and its market cap is $1.386 trillion. So, Tesla investors somehow think that Tesla is going to grow to become hundreds of times its current size and/or massively profitable.

So, the day-to-day movements of Tesla’s stock price make sense in the abstract. Investors assuming bad news sell shares, when the news isn’t as bad as feared, investors buy shares. Where they make no sense at all is that the investors are somehow deluding themselves into thinking this tiny car company is about to do something to juice its share price to the moon, like inventing nuclear fusion, or perfecting a time machine.

It’s a tiny amount, but it sets an important precedent. Not only Air Canada, but every company in Canada is now going to have to follow that precedent. It means that if a chatbot in Canada says something, the presumption is that the chatbot is speaking for the company.

It would have been a disaster to have any other ruling. It would have meant that the chatbot was now an accountability sink. No matter what the chatbot said, it would have been the chatbot’s fault. With this ruling, it’s the other way around. People can assume that the chatbot speaks for the company (the same way they would with a human rep) and sue the company for damages if they’re misled by the chatbot. That’s excellent for users, and also excellent to slow down chatbot adoption, because the company is now on the hook for its hallucinations, not the end-user.

Google became crap shortly after their company name became a synonym for online searches. When you don’t have competitors, you don’t have to work as hard to provide search results – especially if you’re actively paying Apple not to come up with their own search engine, Firefox to maintain Google as their default search engine, etc. IMO AI has been the shiny new thing they’re interested in as they continue to neglect search quality, but it wasn’t responsible for the decline of search quality.

Yeah, this is why polling is hard.

Online polls are much more likely to be answered by people who like to answer polls than people who don’t. People who use Duck Duck Go are much more likely to be privacy-focused, knowledgeable enough to use a different search engine other than the default, etc.

This is also an echo chamber (The Fediverse) discussing the results of a poll on another similar echo chamber (Duck Duck Go). You won’t find nearly as many people on Lemmy or Mastodon who love AI as you will in most of the world. Still, I do get the impression that it’s a lot less popular than the AI companies want us to think.

I mean, that’s such a broad take, any system can change, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable

It also doesn’t mean that they’re all the same system. So, if capitalism is one of the many systems that can backslide into authoritarianism doesn’t mean that authoritarianism is a part of capitalism, despite your claim to the contrary.

We have had systems of feudalism and monarchies that have stayed steady for hundreds of years. In pre history, people lived in communes for thousands of years.

Yes, in the modern world things change much more quickly. Technologies didn’t change for thousands of years. That meant that the number of people a farmer or a plot of land could feed stayed constant for thousands of years. That meant the maximum size of a city was pretty constant. That dictated the kinds of governments that were stable.

It was technology that has made systems unstable, not capitalism.

Also, the gold standard was based on trust too. You trusted that the government would honour your request to exchange dollars for gold. There was nothing magical about being on the gold standard.

Money is just IOUs created by the government. The government uses them to pay for goods and services it wants. If the government wants someone to guard a building, they pay in IOUs. Then, every year, the government taxes everybody in the country and demands that they return a certain number of government IOUs to the country. It’s this obligation to pay taxes that gives their IOUs their value.

The person who was paid to guard a building is left holding a pile of IOUs. Fundamentally, they’re worthless. But, there are other people in the country who have to pay taxes and aren’t doing jobs for the government. So, the guy with the IOUs goes to the farmer and says “I know you’re going to need to pay taxes and don’t have any IOUs, I’ll trade you some of my IOUs for some of your vegetables”. After that exchange the farmer has enough IOUs to pay the government at tax time, and the guard still has enough to pay his own taxes.