perestroika

I have batteries and a stand-alone inverter. Currently, there is no grid connection, the power company is still working on getting a cable here.

My batteries are not a shiny example of how to do things - poorly installed and pretty dangerous right now (batteries should not be indoors) so I'm building a battery box outside the house for them. (Of course, already now they have redundant balancers and a battery alarm.)

Currently, my battery capacity is quite low: about 10 kWh. I plan to expand that to 18 kWh.

Currently, they suffice to run the heat pump for half a day.

Often times, I operate with a partial energy balance: e.g. panels currently produce 700 W, heat pump requires 1200 W (this seems to change with outdoor temperature), I take the difference from batteries.

But in mid-winter, I use a wood-fired stove.

Also, when it's warm enough indoors, but I feel that I need to store heat for subsequent days, I have a pool heat pump converted (more like hacked) to heat a 1 ton water tank. It circulates a solution of car windshield washing liquid (ethanol based) through a system of hoses and a long copper coil in the water tank. It draws about 600 W and make no immediate difference to room temperature.

or agreeing to tracking cookies.

Now that I think of it - yes. I agree to them, but my browser is configured to discard them on leaving.

Nice system. The first drain and spillway are well thought out.

Not sure about elsewhere, but here in Europe, one can often get plastic IBC containers in a metal support cage (1 x 1 x 1 m cube shaped) really cheap. It's smart to examine the labels before buying, to make sure it didn't hold anything hazardous. They come with a tap too and store 1000 L of water.

So if one practises gardening, a bigger tank might be handy to have. Elevating the ground under the tank or digging a hole under the tap will ensure better access.

Moderator here: "slrpnk.net" has an instance wide "constructive discussion" rule, so I removed two comments.

Do you have any experience with this?

I have participated in holding about ten, and when it moved indoors to become a freeshop, I have volunteered a dozen times.

1. Unless local climate favours you - if you hold it outdoors, your biggest concern will be weather prediction. You'll want people to exchange their goods, but not a truckload of abandoned goods damaged by rain. Avoid rainy dates, avoid announcing too far ahead (when the error margins are big), if risk of rain becomes likely, have a large quantity of plastic sheet available to cover goods. If possible, avoid changing dates - information travels slowly. If you have to cancel, announce the cancellation well, visit the site and put up a sign saying the market's canceled.

2. Your market will have a "surplus". Some people will bring more goods than others take. You will need to make a compromise between warehousing and discarding goods. We used the local autonomous social center for warehousing goods between markets. We lacked a good plan for offloading surplus to others who might distribute them to people, since we were the first local phenomenon of this sort.

3. Transporting goods to warehouse will likely require a car. I used a heavy electric bike with a towed cart first, but that quickly became insufficient. My car had no towing hook, so it was full of goods up to the ceiling. As the warehousing situation becomes more dire, be prepared to inform people about capacity limits. As a last resort, ask "unsold" goods to be taken back. Some will ignore this, but you can handle a few.

4. If you observe hoarding behaviour, set reasonable limits (e.g. "as much as you can lift with one hand"). I have observed serious hoarding only once.

5. Our market typically offered some easily prepared vegan snacks and drinks. It is always good style to display a list of ingredients and potential allergens.

6. This can wear you out. Never do this alone, we had at least 8 bored people on our team and also used the opportunity to spread anarchism.

Farmers are a bit feared by authorities all over the world.

• access to bulk quantities of unpleasant biological products
• ability to create obstacles which cannot be easily removed with cop power
• ability to easily overcome obstacles created with cop power
• ability to go off road with machines, while cops can only do that on foot
• they're often quite organized too and protect each other

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, it just shows an annoying message you can get past. At least my browser doesn't prevent me from seeing the article, so I'll copy the essence.

It was jurisdiction shopping by the oil company, trial errors by the court and manipulation of public opinion, third world oligarchy style. :(

• The jury – the most sacred due process protection available to a defendant – was patently biased in favor of the company. Seven of the 11 people seated had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Some had admitted they could not be fair, but the judge seated them anyway. There was no Native American or person of color on the jury even though issues of Indigenous rights were central to the trial.

• Morton county, where the trial was held and where many of the protests took place, voted 75% for Trump in the last election and has extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry. In a pre-trial survey, 97% of residents in the county said they could not be fair to Greenpeace. Yet the judge refused repeated requests by Greenpeace to move the case.

• Energy Transfer ran a major television and online advertising campaign in the county lauding itself in the weeks leading up to the trial. A newspaper called Central ND News, with articles critical of the protests, was also sent to county residents; Greenpeace believed Energy Transfer might have been responsible for it. But the court refused to allow Greenpeace to use court discovery procedures to determine how this unethical campaign to taint the jury pool happened.

• Adding to the absurdity, Greenpeace was blamed for the entire protest movement even though it played only a minimal role. The protests were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, on whose ancestral land the Dakota Access pipeline was being built. In fact, only six of the 100,000 people who came to the protests were from Greenpeace – yet Energy Transfer was able to convince the jury to hold the organization responsible for every dollar of supposed damages that occurred over seven months of protests.

• Secrecy pervaded the proceedings. The court repeatedly refused to open a live stream to the public or to create and release transcripts. A request by media organizations (including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times) to access the live stream was denied. Thousands of key documents were sealed and thus hidden from public scrutiny.

• The judge, James Gion, made evidentiary decisions that gutted Greenpeace’s ability to mount a defense. For example, a major expert report showed that the pipeline had leaked roughly 1m gallons of drilling fluids into drinking water sources used by millions of people. Greenpeace lawyers needed the document to debunk the argument that the pipeline was safe, but the judge refused to let the organization use it.

• The 35-page verdict form was confusing and the results seemed to prove the jury was in fact confused. It appears the exorbitant damages number was calculated by pulling numbers out of thin air – including millions for public relations expenses, private security costs, which were being paid anyway, and refinancing costs due to various banks withdrawing from the project once they learned about the protests. (Lobbying banks is also constitutionally protected advocacy.)

Interesting, but feels like abuse of the patent system (which is widespread) and feels pointless.

Personal experience: I drive the earliest highway-capable electric car, a MIEV from 2011. It has a "manual gear stick". Gear B gives hard acceleration and hard regenerative braking. D gives medium. C gives slow acceleration and soft regenerative braking. In reality, there's only one mechanical gear - the parking lock. All other "gears" including reverse are electronically implemented. As for why the letters are out of sequence, I don't know.

I use B in summer and D in winter, because applying B on glass-flat ice can lead to skidding. I hear that people in mountainous places appreciate B when going downhill - constant deceleration with no touching of the brake pedal.

But something that's been rinsed and repeated over the history shouldn't be patentable any more.

In our case, back in 2007, a cop from security police showed up at a protest offering symbolic support to revolting monks in Myanmar (who were crushed, but the situation in Myanmar continues). The demonstration was 100% peaceful.

The guy had a pretty good camera and claimed to be a journalist. He was too invasive, though, and some anarchist had an even better camera. The guy had forgot to remove his ring, issued to graduates of the Interior Defense Academy. Later, he was encountered by chance in the cafeteria of the National Library, across the street from security police HQ. Busted with much fun. :)

Pic here. Article (Estonian language) here.

Aluminum-rust is truly hard to ignite.

Thermites where the other component (besides the typical aluminum) contains a second light metal can be lit easily, but tend to burn quick with a blinding flame, and produce a lot of gas / vapour. I have once produced electrical power with solar panels during a thermite experiment (for fun, not for any practical use). :) One shouldn't stare into their flame, its spectrum has a lot of harmful UV.

Once upon a time, I also had a model rocket burst its case (too small nozzle) with thermite. Fortunately I was at a safe distance. (Note: thermites don't have a good specific impulse, they're exotic and fun, but not good propellants.)

Light thermites wouldn't be capable of melting through metal, but I think they would ignite aluminum-rust. Regardless, I would not recommend them as the first resort in any situation. But it's worth remembering that they exist.

I think one can use them to build an underwater torch. Another nice ability is producing molten copper on site (copper can't be welded with electricity because it's the most conductive metal, so thermite helps splice together thick copper conductors).

The concept is new to me, so I'm a bit challenged to give an opinion. I will try however.

In some systems, software can be isolated from the real world in a nice sandbox with no unexpected inputs. If a clear way of expressing what one really wants is available, and more convenient than a programming language, I believe a well-trained and self-critical AI (capable of estimating its probability of success at a task) will be highly qualified to write that kind of software, and tell when things are doubtful.

The coder may not understand the code, though, which is something I find politically unacceptable. I don't want a society where people don't understand how their systems work.

It could even contain a logic bomb and nobody would know. Even the AI which wrote it may tomorrow fail to understand it, after the software has become sufficiently unique through customization. So, there's a risk that the software lacks even a single qualified maintainer.

Meanwhile some software is mission critical - if it fails, something irreversible happens in the real world. This kind of software usually must be understood by several people. New people must be capable of coming to understand it through review. They must be able to predict its limitations, give specifications for each subsystem and build testing routines to detect introduction of errors.

Mission critical software typically has a close relationship with hardware. It typically has sensors coming from the real world and effectors changing the real world. Testing it resembles doing electronical and physical experiments. The system may have undescribed properties that an AI cannot be informed about. It may be impossible to code successfully without actually doing those experiments, finding out the limitations and quirks of hardware, and thus it may be impossible for an AI to build from a prompt.

I'm currently building a drone system and I'm up to my neck in undocumented hardware interactions, but even a heating controller will encounter some. I don't think people will experience success in the near future with letting an AI build such systems for them. In principle it can. In principle, you can let an AI teach a robot dog to walk, and it will take only a few hours. But this will likely require giving it control of said robot dog, letting it run experiments and learn from outcomes. Which may take a week, while writing the code might have also taken a week. In the end, one code base will be maintainable, the other likely not.

The proposed principles of forming the interrim parliament won't do. Unless they manage to change something about it to obtain independent delegates (anything other than appointment by the caretaker president), nothing good will come of it. :(