Have you ever had to convince a non-technical boss or client that the exploratory MVP you wrote and showed to them working must be completely rewritten before going into production? I tried that once when I attempted to take us down the TDD route and let me tell you, that did not go over well.
People blame engineers for not writing tests or doing TDD when, if they did, they would likely be replaced with someone who can churn out code faster. It is rare, IME, to have culture where the measured and slow progress of TDD is an acceptable trade off.
Places where software is carrying a great deal of value tend to be more like that. That is, if mistakes can cost $20,000 / hour or so, then even the business will back down on the push now vs. be sure it works debate.
As always, the job of a paid software person is to merge what the product people want with what good software quality requires (and what power a future version will unleash). Implement valuable things in software in a way that makes the future of that software better and more powerful.
My very first paid web gig was connecting a small business' Access based product catalog to their website. I was 14 or 15 at the time. I was able to do it with out any real coding knowledge except for some basic HTML I learned from MySpace and some copy-paste VBScript, haha. The site was a hit and I made $1,200 and immediately spent it all on an electric guitar.
Just because something has worked one way for ages doesn't mean it can't work another way. It really is a culture thing I think. If you've been working in an office your whole life and you are used to that then I can totally see it being difficult.
If you are a digital native whose social life has taken place largely online it is likely WFH is better.
In some ways the world/technology/culture has changed so much and so frequently over the last 40-50 years that each generation's lived experience growing up is markedly different than the last. In the totality of the human experience this is pretty rare. I think work is only going to become more age segregated over time due to cultural differences.
I got a certain amount of schadenfreude from seeing Apple's opulent "spaceship" campus sit essentially empty during COVID. A building shaped like an asshole is probably a good place for assholes to go to work.
I just don't see how land use is an issue worth worrying about right now, climate emergency and all. The federal government owns _huge_ swaths of sunny arid desert land in the west. It is largely not suitable for crops, livestock, suburbs, etc. We could install millions of acres worth of current solar tech out there and generate enough power for everyone. The real difficulty lies in the infrastructure it would take to get the power to where people are.
What we should be focusing on is transmission and distribution, those are the really hard problems. We could have all the power we want but if our grids can't handle the rapidly increasing demand it does nothing for us. And as more people go 100% electric for transportation, heating, and cooking the integrity of power distribution becomes even more important because we will have put all our energy eggs in the electricity basket.
The only place land use seems relevant is for smaller scale off-the-grid cases where someone's property is small but they want to generate all their own electricity.
> The real difficulty lies in the infrastructure it would take to get the power to where people are.
I live in Oregon and slightly over 1/2 of the state is federal or state owned land which cannot be purchased. Even out in the middle of nowhere, there are still massive transmission lines carrying electricity from one part of the state to another through these areas. This is often in fairly mountainous terrain and dense forests. I'm often in awe at how much work they have to go through to keep the area immediately around these lines clear of trees and vegetation. I explore forest roads quite a bit. This is just to point out that we've been doing that type of thing for a long time and I don't think transmission itself is tremendously difficult. We just lack the will.
If anything, the fact that its federal land probably makes it more feasible to run those sorts of clear-cut transmission lines through areas. You don't need to establish easements or eminent domain private property to build such things.
There are some challenges with transmission, but I think the bigger ones isn't necessarily building the infrastructure -- it's making the transmission lines themselves more efficient and reducing losses. We can't build all our solar in the southwest of the US and then distribute that all over the country; Our current transmission technology would produce too much loss over such distances.
> just don't see how land use is an issue worth worrying about right now
1. In small(ish), densely-populated countries, land is in short supply, regardless of any socio-economic-political considerations.
2. In many countries, land is private, or has been fully "divvied up" in some form or another, despite being only sparsely used. In these countries, reallocating land is a headache - politically, economically and legally.
But I agree that storage, transmission and distribution are important things to focus on. Or rather - the important thing to focus on is to actually deploy lots of solar instead of fossil (which the recent US federal legislation makes even harder than before).
Because the technology is in good enough shape already to partially replace fossil-fuel-based production - at least in day-time. Some might even claim that it can replace fossil-fuel-based energy production in daytime entirely, and with existing storage tech, perhaps even mostly-replace it in night-time. But the first claim is sufficient and AFAICT pretty much in consensus.
> What do you think, expect or hope this will accomplish?
Significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by burning less coal and natural gas.
Secondary potential goals:
* A motivation to switch to synthesized car fuel / fuel cells / electric.
* Improvement in air quality around where coal-fired plants operate now.
OK, that isn't a bad perspective to have. Most people are not aware of the realities (vs. the fantasy) of solar and go straight for variants of "save the planet", which is absolute nonsense.
Having and living with solar is very different from what people imagine solar to be. Here's a simple example from my 13 kW array:
What are those massive dips sometimes causing a reduction of output of more than 50%? Clouds. Simple as that. This is what a "normal" clear-sky day looks like:
Output like that is frequent but not the norm. Clear sunny days in Southern California. If you live somewhere with more weather than we have here, it will be more like the first example.
The consequences of weather are severe. Here's a look at January of this year:
This is to say at least two things about the reality, vs. the fantasy, of solar:
First, the technology isn't reliable. Not inherently, of course, the power output reliability is a function of weather. And we can't control that. I can't think of a single place on earth where there aren't any clouds, rain, fog, storms, dust, etc. Note from the images I provided that my 13 kW array never really peaks out at 13 kW. I think the most I've seen is 11 kW. You would need an absolutely perfect day with perfectly clean panels to, maybe, reach a higher peak for a few seconds.
Also note where the annual production peak is located, May. Most people think solar peaks in the summer. Not so. Panels have a negative temperature dependency. Which means they make less power when they get hot. May, here, happens to be the balance point between incoming light and lower temperatures.
Having built and operated this system for a number of years, here's the biggest problem with solar as I see it (and this isn't something trivial):
A solar system built to deliver steady-state power 24/7 must be about
10 times the size of the required steady-state output.
In other words, if you want a solar power plant that can deliver 1 MW (Mega Watt) 24/7, you have to install about 10 MW of solar panels and a massive storage system.
I've done the math on this multiple times, it's undeniable. Some of it is very simple and some of it requires basic high-school calculus. Here's a couple of examples:
The area under the roughly parabolic shape of normal (ideal day) production is 2/3 of that of the rectangle that would represent steady-state power at the peak level for those 12 hours. In other words, you start to produce at, say, 10 kW at 8 AM and stay at that level until 8 PM.
That simple reality means that, in order to produce the same energy of a steady 12 kW power source you need to multiply your system size by 1.5. In other words, if you need 10 kW x 12 hours of energy, you need to build a 15 kW system.
The next easy to understand reality is that you need to double that system (at a minimum) in order to have that much energy available at night. Now we go from a 10 kW system to a 30 kW system plus the corresponding amount of storage.
Another easy one is inverter (and related components) average efficiency. I'll place that at 90%. That means you lose 10% just to make power you can use. It also means that we now need to add solar panels in order to achieve the required output. That means that we went from a 10 kW system to a 33 kW system. A multiplier of 3.3.
This super-simple analysis quickly got us to over 3x requirement for the system size. The way we get to 10x (or more in some cases) is to start including weather-related effects as well as time-of-year realities. Add to that efficiency calculations for large systems as well as statistical assumptions for failure rates (if you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of anything, failures are an unavoidable reality) and it is easy to show that you need to install a system that is in the order of 7x to over 10x the desired steady-state power delivery.
This is the solar problem. And this is where the idea of "saving the planet" or even perhaps reducing CO2, etc. can start to quickly fall apart. One of the simple implications of this reality is that you need a massive amount of land in order to achieve output at scale. The next reality --something most people never think about-- is that you'll need, again, massive amounts of concrete, steel and other materials to build something like that. And, finally, we have to account for the energy and fuel burned not just in manufacturing and transporting all the required materials and components, but for the construction process itself. You can't build a 1000 acre solar farm without probably thousands of vehicles moving things, digging holes, delivering concrete, etc.
Anyhow, not coming down on solar, just pointing out that there is such a thing as understanding that it isn't some magical perfect technology that you install at no cost (environmental and otherwise) and produce perfect power 24/7. It's far more complex and, yes, dirty, than most people might imagine.
I guess what I am saying is that we really need honest assessments of these and other technologies before jumping head first into continental-scale projects that could be truly detrimental when viewed from a wholistic perspective.
After my analysis I came to understand that our clean future pretty much requires nuclear energy at a massive scale. I don't think we can do it without nuclear. Solar and wind cannot achieve what we need.
What do we need? In the US, if we want to go to a fully electric ground transportation system (cars and trucks included) we need to DOUBLE the current power system. That isn't trivial. Imagine creating a full duplicate of our current power production system. We need somewhere in the order of 1200 GW to support a full transition to electric vehicles. Our current power generation capacity sits at about 1200 GW, hence the need to double it. This, of course, will also require a doubling in capacity of our entire power distribution system. We cannot currently carry twice the power.
In other words, this is far more complex than just installing solar panels.
Correct. In addition to the proposed solution, there should be a global setting on the phone that lets users decide that all web links in apps should open in browser; ask every time; or open in app every time. In addition, a per app setting that overrides the global setting should be available too.
