The whole point of labor vs "education" is to let the useless fail out in a way schools don't allow (witness 95% graduation rates at schools with 0% math proficiency and 20% attendance).
Any top 60% teenager is going to be useful for something and quickly trainable to do a lot more. The 4th quintile is still usable in the right roles, and the faster the bottom quintile can be shuffled off to where they can't do any harm, the better. Could it be worse than letting them stab their teachers and fellow students for 19 years like we do now?
I already talked about my dad starting work early. He quickly got scouted by a (then) high tech company, who paid him to work 4 days a week and go to school for his engineering license requirements the other 3 days.
We have already had working systems for this in living memory. We're in that situation where we collectively forget how to do something and then come up with crazy explanations for why it must be impossible.
SteveKirk
15d ago
You are literally replying to a thread about how that worked in practice.
There's so many easy jobs for a site boy, which seems to be a completely vanished role now. I was doing "construction work" at 12, even though most of it was sweep, fetch, and carry with a bit of "show the kid how to do this" whenever there was a slow minute.
By the time I was 15 I had a reputation and was worth an adult's salary, which really helped out with the "girlfriends are fucking expensive" issue.
Come to think of it Obama's rules probably made that job very illegal. But if I'd knocked up my HSGF and not gone to college, I could have still made a decent living and been a highly paid specialist by 20.
I did the math for my location (similar lat to Paris), and even with best seasonal angle practices you're still only getting 10% of what you would in summer (while non-industrial energy use more than doubles due to heating). Germany's significantly further north with worse weather as you say.
It hadn't really struck me that Texas and Arizona are basically as good as North Africa for solar. I should run the numbers for that and get a cap factor estimate.
Edit: fixed 31 degree angle in Phoenix AZ, you're getting a 25% base capacity factor minus probably at least 15% losses to AC delivered.
So more like 20% CF than the 36% you figured. But there's only 24% lower output in winter than summer, which is amazing compared to up north.
Of course all this excludes noon curtailment losses, which are going to be a big deal very shortly. The entire new battery capacity listed as "generation" in the doc doesn't even begin to cover for that.
Well, they got beat up by the other Republicans first. The whole split between "we must deepen the revolution by rooting out and destroying all social norms" vs "hey we need the gun factories to work, you can lynch the manager's family later"
I mean, eventually they revised history to blame the purges on the Soviet handlers targeting trotskyist deviationists or whatever, but before Stalin fell out of Western intellectual favor in the 50s the anarchists were denounced as traitors even by their friends. Which is why Orwell couldn't get Homage published by the UK communist press.
(Was it Hemingway whose anarchist buddies got executed by the Republic, and he wrote some excuse of the "can't help breaking a few eggs" sort?)
None of this should imply any sort of sympathy towards either the anarchists or republicans: it was just two groups of monsters devouring each other. If it hadn't been for the need to fight Franco, the leftist government would have happily kept allowing the anarchists to torture and murder every class enemy of the new regime, from nuns to families.
SteveKirk
15d ago
The usual suggestion seems to be only allowing trucks to deliver at night. This has the added benefit of keeping the peons who take deliveries out of sight and mind. And of course keeping us off public transit that only runs during the day.
SteveKirk
16d ago
Did they fix the "moving the mouse in the menu crashed the browser" issue? I loved it aside from that: most functional out of the box browser I've ever used. Didn't need to install a single addon.
I guess the solar build out in Germany produced some worst-case capacity figures, didn't it. Is it really that good in the sun belt?
And yeah, I priced out a solar build recently and noticed concrete, posts, and especially wire would cost far more than the panels. Let alone all the charger and inverter kit.
SteveKirk
16d ago
What were your beliefs about freedom of speech and the importance of government power to crush dissent in 2007?
Short list of some modern ones: Noah berlatsky, Sophie Lewis, jacob breslow, Katie Cruz, Allyn Walker, Randy Wicker, etc.
I've ragged on the pedophiles there more than the family abolitionists, but mostly because there's so many of the latter in academia that it's impossible to keep track: it's basically the default position now. Didn't include obvious examples like Vaush and "Ana Valens" because that would of course be called nutpucking or whatever.
Also despite their irl relevance in destroying communities, I didn't include any of the revcom Antifa lumpenprole "spiteful mutant" demographic, because most don't have any coherent policy statements.
The general theme is "after the revolution we can destroy the last of existing society and rebuild it to satisfy our fetishes." They make up a big chunk of the low level propagandists in communist revolutions for the usual party loyalty reasons, but inevitably get purged once the state has to deal with the consequences (in the Soviet case, an unmanageable number of orphans from post-war free-love couplings)
The west is in an usual situation where these types get to run a permanent social revolution because the real one never happens, and the damage they do is (currently) being absorbed by the surplus produced by capitalism.
For example, you are all paying every gay men tens of thousands of dollars a year to take AIDs prevention drugs, and that's why your "health insurance" is so high. Whereas Cuba's public health system doesn't do that because there is no surplus.
Troi was totally the ship's political officer though. You can't unsee it after you notice. Outside the command hierarchy but involved in decision-making, authority to interrogate anyone on board for problematic thoughts the computer caught them writing in their journal?
SteveKirk
16d ago
The brief period of "abolish the family, socialize sexual access for all!" after the Russian revolution is really understudied. Lenin cracked down on it alongside the counter-revolution of "he who does not work shall not eat", but just like in Spain there was a brief but real complete social takeover by that faction of the left I'd probably get modded for naming and linking to
That's counting batteries as "generation" rather than load shifting, btw. And it's like a 48GW real increase on a 1300GW system, or 3.7%. whereas all the "electrification" programs predict doubling demand by 2030 due to electric everything. So less than half the growth rate required.
And next year Biden's 100% tariffs on EVs, solar and batteries hit.
Well, calling them "biden's tariffs" is a bit of a joke when he probably never even drooled on the order, but you know what I mean.
Edit: oh Jesus Christ they literally used nameplate capacity for solar. So multiply all the solar figures by .12, meaning all the solar built in the US will produce ~4x as much as the single nuclear plant built in that same year, and probably less than we lost from the decommissioned coal plants
Edit: after doing the math an absolutely optimal setup in the SW US might be more like .2 than .12. Germany's "energy revolution" dragged down global solar capacity factor along with their economy lol
SteveKirk
17d ago
I'm still using Firefox, although it's increasingly nonfunctional. Tmk it's still the only browser with good tab management systems.
Been meaning to give Vivaldi another try. Heard they fixed the bug where moving the mouse too fast in the menu crashed the browser...
Google and Yandex for search, the latter whenever my "censored results" sense goes off.
SteveKirk
17d ago
I think it started with imitating famous Japanese social scientist Jared Taylor's upper class accent.
There was a great article in Social Matter(?) (possibly by David Grant?) charting the decline of American liberalism through Star Trek.
From Kirk lecturing aliens about democracy in front of the literal American flag, to TNG's mushy ethical navel gazing, to DS9's cynicism, to Voyager's "me and my tumblr mutuals against the galaxy" interpersonal drama.
TOS liberalism wasn't coherent, but it was muscular and sure of itself. After that everything was built on a foundation that was already being "deconstructed"
I wonder what the author would make of the new shift to Gaslight, Genocide, Girlboss.
SteveKirk
18d ago
Just like how systemic racism can be perpetrated by a black cop, it turns out systemic Judaism can be perpetrated by goyim. It has to be true, because you can't falsify it!
SteveKirk
18d ago
Telephoto lenses are a propagandist's best friend. https://petapixel.com/2020/05/02/controversial-photo-of-crowds-on-ca-beach-was-shot-with-a-telephoto-lens/
They're in a very low orbit, and get much less visible once there's not a giant row of them.
I sometimes lay down staring at the sky, and even with the light pollution being much worse now it's amazing the things you start seeing. Dim stars, thousands of meteors, satellites.
I would actually be interested in whether the Hollywood decline coincided with a loss of Jewish control, like it did with the universities.
In both cases it always seemed like they kept a tight leash on the pet elements that could harm profits/donations: Hakeem Jeffries got the "woah there sambo" treatment in the 90s once he clarified that "soulless white ice people" included the jews.
Once the grievance-studies departments took over the admin staff, the Rudenstines and Bacows couldn't stop Harvard going Gay.
Perhaps Harvey Weinstein's casting couch was the one remaining meritocratic hiring process in Hollywood?
Was just outside for a morning walk and by complete coincidence saw a starlink train pass overhead. Two dozen stars in a row is an amazing sight.
After they fell behind the trees I ran in and searched for train locations just in case it was a UFO lol.
No, it was not. It was a few decades ago doing work that hasn't substantially changed. If it was naturally declining they wouldn't have put so much work into making it illegal
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