The corporate real estate market is going to tank, people are going to turn their empty office building caused by everyone working from home into apartments, and rental prices are going to crash because of how desperate the corps are to bring in any money. Once rental market tanks, housing market tanks, and all those massive investment firms buying up neighborhoods are going to see their investment shrink like a cold Wang doodle. Expect crying ceo’s and a massive government bailout in the next 4-7 yes for this exact scenario.
How is that good? Rich people will get away with it and we will pay the price.
I know turning office buildings into apartments seems like a fantastic idea on the surface but there are a LOT of reasons this doesnt work, ranging from fire code issues, utility service locations and access and HVAC design. Sorry.
I hear crickets…
That usually means a working ecosystem in the area, so that’s still good.
Thailand is set to legalise same sex marriage and Norway is set to ban ICE cars, both in 2025.
There’s probably a lot of these small wins happening around the world. Let’s keep an eye out for them so we don’t lose all our hope for a better future.
Personally I prefer Thailand to ban straight marriage.
I don’t want anyone to have to go through being unable to marry just because of the gender of their partner
What? Why?
You happily married?
no
Lol exactly
because im single? what a stupid point.
Do you know any married people?
Norway is set to ban ICE cars
Newly registered ICE cars, I assume?
It makes sense, why does anyone need them? We will run out of fossil fuels in the next 25-50 years. They are also less cost efficient.
They’ve been saying that for the past 25-50 years, there’s more fossil fuels to be had, they’re just increasingly more difficult to reach (until the permafrost melts…)
It’s good we’re shifting to renewables, but we could continue our bullshit for the foreseeable future.
It’s more about cost efficiency. We probably won’t see the end of fossil fuels in our lifetime. The reserves are finding more and more scarce though. Plus people have told me they use solar power at home and charge their EV.
why does anyone need them?
In some, especially rural, areas, the charger infrastructure probably isn’t there and public transit isn’t viable in all cases. I’m thinking of industries like farming, forestry, etc. That said, that’s probably a fairly tiny portion of overall ICE usage for normal vehicles (I’m assuming construction equipment, tractors, etc. aren’t included in this).
I think it might also be financially difficult in some cases where people really do need a car (thinking rural life again, here), but are living on a very tight budget. That could also potentially be handled with subsidies and such, but I don’t know how that would practically work.
You’re thinking America, Norway is small enough you can go without charging for a good while and it has lots of small cities, you can have enough charge to go to some city to “refuel” without issue. Yeah it’ll not be fast, but you won’t need several full charges to go from one end of the country to another
2300 km from one tip to the other, shining a range of 500km (done models go over 600 some others just above 400, so seems reasonable middle ground) that would be just over 4 charges, but this drive is already going to take over 29 hours. One of these charges will be overnight, not causing issues for your travel and you can charge while you eat lunch, so it would take away 2 other charging sessions. That would leave with a single charge session unaccounted for. Honestly it seems pretty good
We need them because most of us have to buy used ICE cars because of our financial situation.
This is only new. They’re not stupid enough to kick off 2/3 of cars currently on the road.
Or we don’t have a good way to conveniently charge them. This makes up a significant portion of users who would buy an EV. Dunno why everyone peddling EVs always conveniently ignores this.
Look, I think EVs are a fantastic idea, but if you can’t figure out the charging infrastructure, then it doesn’t make sense for many of us.
I had absolutely no idea just how many electric chargers there are in my country until I got an EV and started using the zapmap app.
But that’s just for long journeys. Most of the time I just plug in every few days when I get home and it changes in the cheap hours overnight when I only pay 9p per kwh.
I used to spend about five times as much on petrol as I do now on electricity. And the car is just so much more fun to drive. So much zoom.
Most of the time I just plug in every few days when I get home
That’s literally exactly what I’m talking about. There are a very large, statistically significant number of individuals who do not live in detached, single family homes and cannot put in a charging station at home.
It doesn’t really make sense for those of us without to go sit at a public paid charging station for a couple hours each week when it only takes a few minutes to pump up on gas.
I think it would be different if these charging stations were in places where people spend a decent chunk of time each week, like the grocery store. But they most often are not.
There are quite a lot in supermarket, fast food restaurants etc in my country, but they’re a lot more expensive than home charging. Your point is a good one, and we need more on street chargers where people park overnight.
If you really cared you would just be less poor.
Thanks for the insight into my finances, Elon. I’ll get to having kids soon too.
But eventually EVs will go down in price or should like a lot of other things as they become more popular. They shouldn’t ban sale of used ICEs though. That wouldn’t be fair. And it would make ICEs worthless. I can’t afford an EV yet but no hope to one day. If a country band ICEs the logical thing would be for EVs to go down to be affordable.
I’m not up to speed with it as I’m not Norwegian myself but I think that’s correct. They’re aiming to be ICE free in 2035.
Well, in the northern hemisphere, we’ll start getting progressively more daylight in 6 days.
Thank fuck. I hate the thing where the sunrise is at 10am, and sunset is at 2pm.
I can take the cold. I like seasons. I despise the short days.
I love it. For about 2 weeks. Then I just want to go to Spain until May.
Oh hell yeah
Booooo!
Vampires hate this one weird trick
What, not being in highschool? That tends to put them off their feed, I hear. 🤢🙃
Wait, already? I want dark. Me need dark.
It’ll still continue to feel dark until early March so don’t worry.
Keep your blinds down then, but the rest of us praise the sun!
If only I could be so grossly incandescent!
Night man, ahhEHHHahhhhh!!!
I only praise the man-made sun.
Yea this is my first winter in the northern hemisphere, I was warned about the dark being unbearable, but it’s been pretty good so far…
It depends how north are you
Absolutely, but unless you’re in Antarctica, it can get much more extreme in the North than South. Tierra del Fuego is south of Australia and South Africa, but it’s closer to the equator than the southern tip of Norway.
By like 2° latitude… But yeah… Nobody lives below Tierra del Fuego all year (scientists maybe?) but plenty of people live North of there (Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Finland etc.).
Source that there is a Finland?
It’s harder on the upswing for me. Maybe it’s because January and February seem to stretch on after the holidays, but I don’t really get tired of winter until later (luckily).
Battery prices are collapsing and we are at an inflection point where electric vehicles will soon be more economical to purchase, drive and maintain for a much greater number of people. This is as inevitable as the phaseout of coal.
Unless you live in the US where tarrifs will keep that from being a reality.
There’s too much money in renewables for rich people. The tariffs may or may not happen, but the renewable switch is a runaway train, and almost entirely in the country.
On the electricity futures market, wind producers regularly sell their power for negative prices (paying transmission companies to take their power) because it’s so cheap for them to make, with such negligible overhead; since the government subsidies are based on the mWh they produce, they can sell it at a loss and still make money. But even if those subsidies go away, renewables can still easily undercut every other producer on the grid.
That’s just one example. The same tipping point is approaching fast all over just about every industry. Obama and Biden got the renewable energy industry over the hump of research and infrastructure outlay, so now Tr*mp gets to take the credit for their work while it all falls into place; and because the rich people are benefiting from it financially, they’re going to protect the industry.
I’m talking about batteries, specifically. And the US is decades behind on batteries.
The tariffs may or may not happen
The 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs already happened in September. Joe Biden announced them in May and they kicked off already. I don’t expect Trump to change anything with that.
Sodium ion batteries are also supposedly gearing up to be a solid li-ion alternative in the next 2-3 years. Not as energy dense yet but they’re closing the gap.
Fingers crossed that pans out.
Not only that, but lithium sulfur is coming too.
Yeah, but that will be true for the electric cars made in the coming years, not the ones made in the past few years. People were right to be put off by the prices.
And even then, will these new cheap batteries be durable? I worry a lot about all these EVs becoming unusable in 10 years because the batteries are ruined, just like my 10 year old laptop
People who didn’t lease will lose their shirts but the price of new cars is the primary driver for the price of used cars. New, cheap, and more useable EVs will make used ones cheap.
As to the reliability, it remains to be seen. Considering the size of a vehicle I think an aftermarket will pop up for refurbishing and replacing batteries like it has for the earliest modern EVs in the us, the leaf.
Solar panels also seems to be on a tipping point
Oh it tipped a few years ago. It’s just still being implemented. There may be less startup to ramping up fossil fuel plants still, but solar is cheaper to build and operate
So I guess what kind of tipping point we’re talking about, I meant we’ll soon be drowning in cheap solar panels, it’s just as you said not yet at capacity.
I looked at adding solar to my house 6-7 years ago and it was going to cost $60k. The return on investment would have taken 25-30 years.
What does it cost these day?
I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.
All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.
About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.
I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.
And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.
Yeah, I was shopping for lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries maybe two years ago and was looking at spending over £1000 per battery. Now those batteries are not much over £100 and prices still seem to be falling.
What would one use lithium on phosphatase leisure batteries for? I’m not familiar with those
Well, you know…sometimes you just need a vibrator that can go a continuous month between recharges…
LiFePo (Lithium Iron Phosphate) is heavier than traditional Lithium Ion batteries for the same amount of energy storage, but doesn’t degrade when discharged to zero the way traditional Lithium Ion does.
That looks like autocorrect or text-to-speech mangled ‘lithium iron phosphate’
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursids
The Ursid (URS) meteor activity begins annually around December 17 and runs for over a week, until the 25th or 26th.
Daytime energy is soon going to be free in much of the world. The advances in green tech, especially solar and batteries, are real. Much faster progress than even the optimists were predicting a decade ago. The revolution is reaching a tipping point where it becomes self-sustaining and requires no state subsidies. I am not a tech utopian, and this alone will not save us. But there’s no denying it’s good news. It’s all happening far too late but it does look like humans are going to kick their fossil habit after all.
Inconvenient footnote: thank China.
Yes, but, we depend on fossil fuels for far more than just energy. We still get most of our plastics from them, and most of our fertilizer, without which we can’t feed most of the developed countries. And while renewables are great for stationary use, we still don’t have anything with the energy density of fossil fuels for cars, shipping, air travel, and cargo. And, whether anyone thinks it’s a good use or not, war is entirely, inefficiently, and intensely run on oil.
There are a lot of other issues entirely unrelated to power grid energy production we have to solve first, the most challenging being our own aggressive human nature. We’re a long way from kicking the oil habit.
The energy density of batteries just keeps increasing, for cars at least it’s now good enough. I agree completely about the rest but this was meant to be a happy thread! I agree with OP that we need to talk about good news too sometimes.
Fair point about positive things; I just think it’s important to not delude ourselves.
Completely agree. Self-delusion is such a temptation and the danger is real.
This IS good news!
I hope I live to see a modular, upgradable, repairable laptop with a ridiculously ludicrous battery life. (Without it being powered by some sort of highly volatile fusion core or something Lol)
You wish, if we keep going towards everything has a battery power demand is only going to go up
Sure, but energy efficiency is always improving, distribution and storage are always improving. And the full electrification of transport (which is what you seem to be alluding to) is not going to happen overnight.
People can talk shit on China from a geopolitical stance and I’ll agree with them, but yeah, they picked up the slack where other countries were lacking when it came to green progression. Technically our (US) own fault too. Greed ruling over progression really fucked us.
Can’t wait to get charged $0.50/kWh by PGE for energy they generate for free, weeee.
Is there a good place to ask about independent (non-grid-connected) solar for an otherwise grid-connected structure? I’d love to set something like this up, but can’t find any systems which don’t require wiring into the gird.
I’ve set up an off grid solar system out of necessity. Used to be an electrician so I know a good bit (but not everything by any means). What are your questions I can maybe point you in the right direction.
Based on your initial question, it depends on local zoning. You can likely legally grid tie a set up and have a battery backup. I think if you want to be legal I’d go that route.
If you want I think you could set up a completely separate system in a more sneaky fashion that is completely isolated from the grid / your existing house circuitry. But when grid tying (including into your house circuitry) you have to be pretty safe because that power can go upstream and feed the grid or the house when workers think the power is off, which is obviously very dangerous and could get you in a lot of trouble if it went wrong.
Engineer here, so I’m aware of the fundamentals of “how not to kill yourself with electricity”. Anything tying into the grid I’m definitely calling a professional for.
But no, I’m not in a financial or property situation to install a grid-connected system, so I was imagining a “balcony solar” kit that’d just charge a small battery bank I could run some lights, a fan, or some similar low-load devices off of. I don’t know if such a thing exists (or if it’s a smart idea), but I’d like to look into it and find out.
Yeah for sure. You could get an all in one inverter battery bank, but I prefer piecemeal systems because of repairability/replacing parts/upgrading parts.
Basically you’d get a battery, when I was shopping around I found eg4 or gyll batteries to be the cheapest. Small Texas company. That could have changed. Some ppl make their own or use them from a car, but soldering plus making a management system seemed like more than I wanted to deal with.
You need a way to charge the battery (panels etc) and also a way to get the power into the battery safely and efficiently (charge controller).
And then you need a way to get energy out of the battery to your apploances. You can get DC appliances that match your battery voltage or get an inverter.
For all of those parts you need to run some simple calculations for efficiency and compatibility and use case (how big of a system etc), as well as some fuses and possibly lightning arrestors and grounding.
Totally doable and a good bit of fun
Best ask in a more specialized forum. Personally I rent so I have to take what I’m given.
Why would you pass up on the free money of selling the power? You’re probably looking for a hybrid system if you just want to keep the lights on during a service outage. Or I guess you can just build an off grid system and wire it to a generator transfer switch if you want to power your house circuits but only during an outage.
Most half decent solar installers can help either way.
Mostly because I am not in a place, financially or home-wise, to install a full grid-connected system. I’m just looking for something that I can use to charge enough battery to run a lamp, fan, charge devices, or other such similar light loads on a daily basis. It won’t bring my power bill to zero, but it will chip away at it.
Oh so not really even your home circuits then. Just get something like a jackery, ecoflow, or bluetti. I’ve had a bluetti and ecoflow and recommend an ecoflow product. If you really really wanted to you could power an in wall circuit with one but it would be pretty jank.
I bet the Solarpunk and homesteading / permaculture communities might have some ideas on this!
Best I can do is more bitcoins
It’s gotten so good that China might be restricting output to keep the prices high…
(their onshore wind, and pumped hydro storage, are also great success stories, as is the EV industry there)
Indeed. China is such a paradox. An absolute anathema in terms of culture and politics. It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little. And yet, and yet. Without China we would be royally screwed. They are pulling the weight of the green transition basically alone. So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism,
So personally I’ve decided to hold off on China-bashing for now.
You just did, according to .ml users, because ACkShuLly cHiNa iSnT aN AuThoRitArIaN CounTRy
Joke’s on them: not only authoritarian, but capitalist authoritarian.
Tiananmen Square was not that long ago. There are lots of living people who would have seen their fellow students get crushed by tanks and rinsed down a drain.
That will keep a generation and their children quiet. Their children have also now seen how risings are punished via Hong Kong.
I don’t think it’s even possible to imagine what you would do having seen your government enact that kind of violence on your peers. So I certainly don’t judge.
In a way it’s even scarier than that. Most younger Chinese do not even know those things happened. I can confirm this incredible fact from personal experience. At this point “Tiananmen Square 1989” has more meaning to the average educated Westerner than it does over there. It has been scrubbed from history.
It’s almost impossible for us Westerners to grasp how a people could accept that level of authoritarianism, how they could value their personal freedom so little.
This assumes that they have an alternative to authoritarianism that they could enact if they wanted. For some reason, the authorities don’t allow that. And the authorities also don’t like when people talk about it, so it’s difficult to discuss and convince others that authoritarianism is bad.
Yes sure but China has never been anything remotely like a Western democracy. It would be difficult to keep the lid on a billion people if they really wanted to live differently. Political culture runs deep.
If they want to defer to authority, they can just keep voting in the ruling party. Democracy doesn’t mean no choices.
Voting? Democratic elections are literally not a thing in China, at least not higher than the level of the village. There are no political parties other than the Communist Party. But for Western democracies I do agree. We have no excuses.
My later comment was misunderstood. If being ruled by strong Communist leaders is the “political culture” of China, then fine. Give them a choice every few years and they will keep selecting that.
But we all know that the “revolution” needs to maintained by not giving the people the choice. If given a choice, the people might be “fooled” by Western influence and select someone other than the Communists. So the Communists pick all the candidates and then let the people choose only between them.
The fact is that the “political culture” that supposedly backs authoritarianism would not survive free and open elections. The political culture being unwaveringly Communist is a sham and a lie.
Voting is absolutely meaningless in Xi’s China. But I gotta give it to them for their solar panel work. Too bad it’s all about to jump in price due to the idiotic tariffs.
Capitalism only encourages innovation when its profitable. Its a bit of a flaw.
Optimistic of you to assume pricing is cost-plus not willingness-to-pay. US utilities (and their foreign counterparts) will only too gladly keep charging you
Agreed. In theory that problem can be dealt with by properly regulated competition.
Extinction of mankind.
Hate to break it to you, but short of something sudden like our sun exploding, getting directly hit by a cosmic ray or giant asteroid, it’s incredibly unlikely.
We have reached a technological point where we could save ourselves from our own extinction, caused by us or not. It’ll almost certainly be a tiny fraction of today’s population though, but enough will survive to avoid extinction
That technology requires massive manufacturing capacity that requires civilization. When water and food become scarce from a changed climate, there goes that.
We won’t go extinct for a time, agreed. We’ll cling to our hardened structures and aging tech for as long as we can.
But humans thrived on easy mode. In a climate we evolved to thrive in. Without that, we’ll become subject to nature’s whims once again.
This is precisely why “we’re going to colonize Mars” is a hilarious pipedream. We couldn’t make a practically infinitely forgiving environment that automatically recycled our waste, water, and air work. We stressed it as hard as we could for as long as we could until it started pushing back, yet we only increased our attack.
A few peak humans growing potatoes on mars is a cute “yay humanity” moment. But you’ve met us. A colony of hundreds, or thousands, some born into what would inevitably be a highly class segregated system that demands their servitude, given the private profit egotists now in charge of such things, where anyone making a mistake or having had enough easily leading to boom everybody dead try again? Yeah, that’ll go swell.
The Yellowstone Caldera erupting would probably do it, too. Also, a sufficiently big meteor, a rogue planet, or black hole. All would are beyond our current level of technology to survive or avoid. Or a local supernova, although there are no known likely candidates so that one is less likely.
Technically the cosmos are moving in such a way that our entire galaxy could collide with another celestial body at any moment if it were moving at sufficient speed relative to us, and we might never see it coming because the speed of light is only so fast.
This, and space is huge, it’s really unlikely to get hit by anything. It will happen over infinite tescales, but I’m not as worried about it as I’m worried over another work email.
With meteors it isn’t if, it’s when. The question is whether or not we’ll be ready for it when it happens.
We’ll let it hit us as 2 superpowers argue and threaten one another over who gets the mineral extraction rights.
I guarantee it.
Humans can do a lot of things that they aren’t.
There’s a bloke on Youtube who actually purveys good news on a regular basis if anyone’s interested: https://www.youtube.com/@itsSamBentley
Thanks for sharing this!
I might be getting a new job which is better in every way. Only a couple people know about it.
Holy shit awesome man! Even if it doesn’t pan out don’t lose hope! I got rejected on 3 different positions and thought I was just not the cut. 7 years later after landing the 4th and I’m a completely different person. NEVER give up! You and your future are worth it. I promise.
Hey!! Congrats!!! That’s really nice!!! What will you do in this new job?
Reception, with some managerial responsibilities. There’s room to move up.
I have a Bachelor’s in Game Programming. The world doesn’t need another game programmer right now, but my experience managing projects came in handy.
I currently work in grocery, min wage, as a janitor/stocker.
Nice!!! Not only is this a nice job it also gives you contacts, something that can be really really powerful when looking for a new job as some people can just make a new position for you, literally how my dad went from a reception worker to his accounting job when he graduated!! I wish you a great job and that things work out amazingly for you!!!
people spilling their minds over astrology will be glad the mercury retrograde is going to be over for this year.
And then it’ll be back soon: https://youtu.be/SumDHcnCRuU (3:15 minute CGP Grey vid)
My birthday. It’s tomorrow.
Grats Leni
Thanks
That’s wonderful news. Congrats!
Thanks
Well how about that. It’s also my birthday. Happy birthday, Leni
Thanks. Happy birthday to you too!
I hope it goes great for you!!! 💖
Thanks
Happy birthday!
Thanks :)
Wow! We have so much in common! I have a birthday too. 😁
Happy birthday!
Really? I bet it’s probably more than a year away though right?
I have plenty of birthdays that are more than a year away.
You’ve been spinning around a massive ball of fire at 74 thousand miles per hour for a year 🤘
I’m surprised it hasn’t made me motion sick yet. A new record.
Theory: alcohol inhibits the otherwise natural blocking of earth spinning induced motion sickness. If you drink enough, you can feel the world spinning and lose balance.
Imagine if it all suddenly stopped and we all got still-sickness.
Happy Birthday!
Thank you
Happy cake (do we do cake on lemmy? Why not pie?) day.
Happy Birthday!
Thanks <3
Happy birthday!
Thanks <3
I’m about to go to sleep
Good night sweet prince
Goddamn you DrSleepless, your name checks out, why can’t I fall asleep
Because you’re doomscrolling on your phone
Sameeee
Economy and way of life is going to get even worse for us here in the US.
wait wait. you have a point.
this is an opportunity to buy low and…wait a second…I’m getting a report that the economy will never recover.
in better news, spend your money now because you’ll only get to use it as heat later!
That’s ok, they can downvote all they want, y’all will remember me when shit gets worse. lol
Good job putting the round peg in the square hole!
I don’t get why this comment has triggered so many people. Lmao.
…the OP specified a positive… piece of news.
Why am I the guy telling you this? The dude two replies ago should’ve said something.
…I’m disappointed in everyone 😔
People are so sensitive on here. And actually everywhere on the internet. All cry babies. Also, all are geniuses, too.
You deleted your post, go on, what positive thing did you have to say?
Humanity will probably die out in the next hundred years and the planet will finally be able to recover, even if it has to start over from microbes to get there.
