> Removing 1/10

feels euphemistic for the original “colloquial” usage I have for it.

> The killing of one in ten, chosen by lots, from a rebellious city or a mutinous army was a punishment sometimes used by the Romans. The word has been used (loosely and unetymologically, to the irritation of pedants) since 1660s for "destroy a large but indefinite number of." [0]

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decimate

Yup. What amuses me is that people think that decimate is to massively degrade something. I assume they're thinking "reduce to 1/10th" rather than "reduce to 9/10th". The effect is markedly different

And sun isn't uncommon. I was chatting with a person in Auckland, NZ. He said it was a cloudly day and he was producing much more solar power than he needed. His take: the panels are the cheapest part of the system so they just over-provisioned. We can all do that - it aint hard

Our rainy day production is still a fifth * of our peak in Kerala, India. Wish all inverters support 5x overprovisioning, current ones support 1.5x and suffer lower life. Seems 1.1x is the recommended provisioning guideline.

* UK internet stranger said he gets negligible output when it rains

Thanks for the feedback about inverters - I was unaware.

Its local environmental damage versus global environmental gains

No, you don't have to change any ecosystems to build a NPP. No idea why you would think that in the first place really.

To be clear, I'm in favor of nuclear, but people attack it saying it does change the local ecosystem (heating up water for cooling and pumping the warm water into rivers, and of course the nuclear waste).

Here we just had someone say that hydro is fine because it only changes the local ecosystem so I jumped on that line of reasoning. I would argue with you that nuclear changes the local ecosystem way, way less than a dam does and so it's even better.

I wasn't saying its fine, I was saying it was a tradeoff. And I wasn't making an argument about Nuclear, either.

In NZ we're discussing pumped hydro in Lake Onslow which will provides months of backup for the country

Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a 3x duck curve in its energy demand.

It's nowhere close to 50%. Round-trip (so that's after both ways) efficiency is about 70-80% for a pumped storage scheme. Buy 10MW to pump the water, and get back 7-8MW when you release it. Contrast that with a reality here in the UK where the gas dominated spot price this morning when I woke up was about £180 per MWh, yet yesterday afternoon solar and wind had it down to £25 per MWh, so you could buy 100MWh of energy for £2500 but sell it less than a day later and make 400% on your investment in under 24 hours despite the efficiency loss. Very silly to insist this can't be profitable.

For the cost and expense of building a pumped hydro plant though, you could just deploy batteries which will do the same thing for a much lower capital and management investment and vastly simplified engineering. And a higher round-trip efficiency.

LiFePO4 works to demand shift on a daily cycle just fine and scales better to solar input (where you need much higher power handling so you can charge it on limited sunlight - a pumped hydro system is limited to charging at about half its discharge rate).

I think that's the point about the lake Onslow project - its MASSIVE. So yes, expensive, but months of backup for the whole country would not be cheap even with batteries

The 1000 MW installed pump/generating capacity of the proposed Lake Onslow Scheme is not unusual by world standards. However, its energy storage capacity (up to 5 TWh) would appear to make it the world's largest pumped storage scheme by energy storage measure. The unusual ratio between energy storage and installed capacity comes about from New Zealand's special hydro generation situation. Hydro is the dominant mode of power generation but national hydro storage capacity is relatively limited. This makes hydro electricity output vulnerable to extended dry periods. Developed to 5 TWh of storage, the large Lake Onslow Scheme would more that double New Zealand's total hydro storage capacity. The scheme would thus provide dry period insurance as well carrying out the usual short-term pumping and generating operations. It would be an open-cycle system. The lower reservoir is the Clutha River, which is New Zealand's largest river by discharge measure.

It seems a long time ago now since I first proposed the possibility of pumped storage at Lake Onslow. But just confirming - having the equivalent amount of energy (4-5 TWh) in batteries would be impossibly expensive. Also, the batteries would need to be replaced from time to time.

Over-provisioning with renewables is cheaper

Which of course is why the countries that do that the most have the highest energy costs in the world. And just for fun, they usually have some of the dirtiest grids because of all the drawbacks of renewables.

I vehemently disagree with this idea. I think you need to understand that all humans are fallible and you should have less vertical power structures and more horizontal structures. Putting all the power into one person's hands is asking for tyrants

There's the theory and there's the real world

Enterprises do that if they choose. Patients can choose as well. And it's their choice, not anyone else's

The laws are, the policing is not. At least not in medical data

I think we were on the same track. I absolutely loved the Amiga and was about to jump on board BeOS when it went under. I never got to use BeOS as a daily driver (just ran their demo disk). How did you find it?

From them internets after the x86 version got out, I think. Played enough with what I found around, and I ultimately bought (with real money) the BeOS 5.0 Personal Edition, made it dual-boot my Linux machine and knew that this is it! It felt like an Amiga but on soulless PC hardware instead! The exhilaration was unlimited! It booted fast, no old cruft, unorthodox designs, everything one-in-a-thousand a true harbinger customer loves!

Eventually I think the setup gradually bit rot with no updates and unsupported hardware, so I reluctantly had to go back to Linux. I remember Ubuntu and Gnome 2 started to look pretty nice (well, for an inferior desktop environment) in the early years of 2000.

(Unsurprisingly, years later Gnome came out with Gnome 3 and killed all the good stuff that Gnome 2 had accumulated. I can only wait and see how long Mate desktop survives.)

I still keep a Haiku VM around and boot it every now and then.

I ran BeOS on both the dual PowerPC desktop and later on an x86 laptop. Thanks to its posix-ish environment, I was able to do all my upper division CS projects on it.

Others who had windows or macs had to "telnet" into a remote Unix workstation in an engineering lab to do the same.

I ran it in a dual boot with linux install but I ended up using Linux more despite liking beos because of the ecosystem. There were just more software available on Linux, especially lightweight tui tools.