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Jul 16 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Lurking the r/generator subreddit recently I learned something interesting about the situation in Texas. Quite reasonably a lot of people in the Houston area have decided to get generators installed, since there have been recent major power outages both in summer and winter...
This being Texas, what most people want to run off their generator is a five-ton whole-house air conditioner. This as you can imagine is pretty power hungry, particularly when it first powers on. To avoid storing gas/diesel, a lot of people have opted for a natural gas hookup
Natural gas distribution in Texas is not set up to support hundreds of multi-kilowatt generators running at the same time, let alone firing up at the same time. So what people have collaboratively built in Texas is a system for converting power outages into massive gas outages.
Now all we need is for those generators to fall back on a water wheel for alternative power and we can make it so that all utilities in Texas go offline simultaneously.
A common failure pattern is to think your backup power is off-grid when it is in fact just running off a different grid.
The more tractable solution for backup power is to have a smaller generator to run your fridge, internets, and heat/cool a single room in your home. You can hoard enough propane to run that for days. But people in Texas aren't ready for partial cooling. Image

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More from @Pinboard

Jul 9
The first time I voted in a US election I was amazed that no proof of citizenship—not even photo ID—was required. From the point of view of an immigrant, you're constantly made to prove your legal residency for stuff—jobs, school, driving—but for some reason not voting.
I don't really get why positive proof of ID isn't a voting requirement, other than the fact that voting law in the US is very old and predates the modern surveillance state. I don't have strong feelings about it, but it's definitely a US oddity, like the lack of national ID
From the point of view of public faith in elections, there does seem to be something rickety about the combination of trust-me voter registration requirements, absentee ballots, and mail-in votes getting counted for weeks after election day.
Read 5 tweets
Jan 5
Cryptocurrency and generative AI make roughly the same size claims to being transformative innovations, so it's interesting to see how many interesting things people have already found to do with the latter, while the first has mostly been an expensive tour through human folly
I like thinking of cryptocurrency as "financial string theory", but for the parallel to really work a lot more physicists would need to be in jail
With both crypto and string theory, you have domain experts in thrall to a mathematical apparatus so intellectually satisfying that they get emotionally invested into bringing it into contact with reality. But instead each failed attempt pushes them further out into la-la-land
Read 5 tweets
Dec 21, 2023
Rising from the crypt to talk a little about how pre-wikipedia generations lived. There was a big encyclopedia in the library, but only really rich families would own one. The best that poor kids could hope for was grocery store encyclopedias, bought one volume at a time
Grocery chains really would sell the world's saddest encyclopedia, one slim volume a week, and you felt lucky to have it. Unrestricted access to a full set of the Encyclopedia Britannica is the thing that felt most like having access to the world wide web in the pre-www days.
Naturally when the web came along, we all wondered how encyclopedias would work online, and for a brief while it looked like Microsoft would sell expensive access to a kind of crappy one. And then wikipedia appeared and blew everyone's mind by the fact that it worked
Read 8 tweets
Aug 28, 2023
Early this year I went online after taking too many drugs and ordered a Mongolian yurt. Here is my yurt, and here is my story: Image
The great thing about yurts is you can get high, make a deposit, and forget you bought one for seven months. Then in late July I got email giving me an imminent delivery date and demanding to see a photo of the finished substructure. I tried to bluff them with a quick Lowe's run Image
The yurt company was totally on to me, though. Everyone lies about the substructure. Demands for photo evidence grew insistent, and I found myself having to level heavy things in the desert while getting heatstroke


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Read 19 tweets
Jul 28, 2023
This whole thread on large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean is great, but the real showstopper is that global-warming induced breakdown in this flow will result in significant *cooling* for a large chunk of Eurasia, greatly complicating the politics of climate response.
The existing strategy for mitigating climate change is incoherent because:

1. It demands a total restructuring of societies worldwide
2. Most of this burden would fall on developing nations
3. It ignores imminent tipping points that (by definition) there is no coming back from
But with no politically achievable plan for capping (let alone reducing) global emissions, what will happen is we'll run into one of these tipping points, and if that happens to be AMOC collapse, then suddenly a bunch of G7 economies have much less incentive to decarbonize
Read 6 tweets
Mar 2, 2023
Cantonese and Uyghur have since been put back into Signal. But this whole thread shows a troubling level of ignorance from the person in charge of software people are supposed to entrust their lives and freedom to. There's no such language as Traditional Chinese, for starters.
People in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, which is written with traditional Chinese characters but is not legible to nonspeakers. In the past, the CCP's belief that Cantonese is just a wacky subdialect of Mandarin has made it easier for Cantonese speakers to hide in plain sight online
I don't expect Whittaker to know the subtleties of every language Signal supports, but to not understand the basics of how people would use the app in Hong Kong or the Uyghur diaspora this far in to her tenure is pretty appalling.
Read 6 tweets

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