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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 5th, 2023

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  • Just a note to say that this is the electricity market breaking down - don’t celebrate it! France has had low-carbon energy since the 70s when they built a load of nuclear power. The have started building renewable plants rather than updating the nuclear plants. Electricity cannot be stored in the amounts that we use it. So many statistics about wind/solar quote power act like we can use it all… but an installation battery that could store a country like France’s worth of energy for 12 hours (solar never works at night) would be the biggest megastructure humans have built*. During a period of high pressure a whole country might get little wind for a week. Also, check out this map if you visit regularly the low carbon energy solutions are nuclear or hydro… the only countries that reliably don’t burn fossil fuels use these. [edit: clarity, *edit: Not quite-about 100mx100mx50m, approximately the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but made of flammable material - I got confused with something that could provide a week or two for windless anticyclones]




  • fellowmortal@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoFunny@sh.itjust.worksYo, Elon
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    13 days ago

    An individual giving money to good causes will always be limited by the fact that it is based on the whims/biases of that individual. So, it is possible to see that some billionaires like Bill Gates and (dare I say it…) J K Rowling give substantial amounts to charities - we can also see that they are donating to personal pet causes. Society already has a way for rich people to give to a structured system that (attempts to) give(s) out the money to a wide variety of causes - its called tax and the system is government! If these people who society has allowed to become so wealthy just paid taxes and supported a proper, fair government then they wouldn’t need charities… but then they wouldn’t get to name buildings after themselves.




  • There is an intrinsic micro-mort rate for working on a roof. If you take this number and the number of hours that are spent working at height fitting solar panels (I got this from industry data a few years ago) its then fairly easy to put the annual deaths from fitting solar panels far above that of nuclear. These deaths are a ‘tragic accident’, rather than systemic so…

    [edit: I can’t find a value for professionals anymore. This link mentions 1micromort per person on a ladder at home] [edit: clarity]




  • I have thought about this from time to time. I want good surveillance, but I also don’t want to lose control of the video.

    I think that the solution that I favor right now is a Wyze cam V2 or similar flashed with openmiko. edit:(I had to buy wyze v2 cameras from the US on ebay to get v2 versions, user:@ashok36@ashok36@lemmy.world suggests in this comment to use v3 and Wyzemini firmware - this might do the job. clarification: the point is to replace the manufacturer’s firmware which will phone home with something open source that you could audit)

    These can be attached via USB or wifi interface to a server with zoneminder (https://zoneminder.com/) From there you could think about offsite records too and motion detection etc. [edit: wifi is useful as I don’t want to rewire the house - though could be blocked (or the router could be unplugged!) if you are expecting technically savvy criminals. A solution here would be to use an old router on a separate wifi network, put somewhere where most of the property would have been traversed before it could be accessed (e.g. upstairs).]

    Having said this, the setup is just fiddly enough that I keep to finding myself finding other stuff to do. [edit: ‘Fiddly’ is the wrong word, I think its pretty simple, I just find myself wanting more features until the project doesn’t happen at all. I’d be clear that this is a feasible DIY project, so long as you accept that ‘done’ is better than ‘perfect’]

    [edit: One last note - if you host the video yourself, you take responsibility for the security - this means keeping zoneminder and the OS up to date and offsite backups/networks/cameras secure. This is possibly something that a company is better at (but don’t bet on it!). However, you are also a smaller attack target (because bad actors only get your video) so blackmailing you with whatever you do in your surveilled place is less valuable than having the same data for 1000s of people. Also, if someone has access to your home network - they can set up man-in-the-middle attacks and steal your bank details - you have to be doing something interesting in front of those cameras for it to be worth more than the contents of your bank account.]

    edit:clarity/details