Who do you want running the country? The litch or the revenant?

Sideshow Bob is way too smart to be compared to trump

I agree it’s not the ideal solution, but it’s better than most solutions we have, depending on location.

Rooftop solar doesn’t only need to be on residential buildings, it can also be on industrial and commercial buildings, which take a significant land area.

One last benefit of most renewable energy that is related to its distributed nature: it’s easy to slowly roll out update and replacements. If a new tech emerges you can quickly change your rollout plan to use the new tech, and replace the old tech a little bit at a time, without any energy disruption.
With mega-projects like nuclear reactors, you can’t really change direction mid-construction, and you can’t just replace the reactors as new tech comes online, because each reactor is a huge part of the energy supply and each one costs a fortune.

Also, according to the doc you shared of land-use, in-store wind power is nearly the same as nuclear, since the ecology between the windmills isn’t destroyed.

So while I agree that nuclear absolutely has a place, and that renewables have some undesirable ecological repercussions, they’re still generally an excellent solution.

The elephant in the room, though, is that all the renewable solutions I mentioned will require energy storage, to handle demand variation and production variation. The most reliable and economically feasible energy storage is pumped hydro, which will have a similar land usage to hydro power. On the upside, although it has a significant impact, it does not make the land ecological unviable, it just changes what ecosystem will thrive there - so sites must be chosen with care.

Right, like I’ve said it’s not the best solution everywhere. But where it’s an option (which is many places) it’s a better one. Not solar in the case of grasslands, probably wind. But you get the idea.

Are you displacing whole ecosystems, though?
How much do wind farms affect grasslands and prairies, etc? They’ll have an impact for sure, but it’s not like the whole place gets paved over.
And solar can get placed on roofs of existing structures. Or distributed so it doesn’t affect any one area too much.

I have to admit idk much about sourcing the materials involved in building solar panels and windmills. Idk if they require destructive mining operations.
I imagine that a nuclear reactor would require more concrete, metal, and rate earth magnets that a solar/wind farm, but idk. I likewise don’t know the details about mining and refining the various fissile material and nuclear poisons.

The other advantage of renewables is that it’s distributed so it’s naturally redundant. If it needs to get shut down (repairs, or a problem with the grid) it wont have a big impact.

I like nuclear, and it’s certainly the better choice for some locations, but many locations seems better suited for renewable

I agree it absolutely has problems and I hope we come up with a better solution in the near future.

But it’s currently the lesser evil. Even though nuclear plants don’t need a lot of fuel, getting that fuel is still typically more damaging than creating a water reservoir, or using an existing natural reservoir.

That’s fair. But lesser of evils, yanno.

You haven’t heard of any advancements in energy storage at all?

Not that we need them, the best energy storage is old AF and excellent

That’s why they mentioned “pumped hydro”

The USA specifically has so much useless land with minimal ecological value, that if an energy project could actually be done at a federal level we could probably not have to worry about it.

There is a whole bunch of land in central USA that is not especially unique or teaming with life, slap down a big renewable energy farm.

I agree it’s safe but idk it’s the best we currently have, I think that probably depends on locale.

Solar and wind (and maybe tidal?), with pumped hydro energy storage is probably cheaper, safer, and cleaner… But it requires access to a fair bit more water than a nuclear plant requires, at least initially.

But nuclear is still far better than using fossil fuels for baseline demand.

I’m coming for that boatussy, fr.

You’re right wrt personal preference. It’s just strange to me how seemingly all the neurodivergents but me hate overhead lighting 😭

Floor lamps that are above head height are… Ok I guess, but that’s still mostly head-on. Light that is clearly cast down is so much more satisfying. Personal preference, of course.
And to be clear I don’t have anything against mood lighting or accent lights, I like them… Just not only them.

The impression I have (mainly from social media like tiktok and Lemmy) is that the desired lighting is head high and below which just… Puts me in a tailspin lol. Idk how people can live like that 🤣

In my ideal room, there would be indirect overhead lighting that illuminated most of the ceiling to provide an indirect overhead area light, with a near-head level accent lights. I’ve looked into if I could use a short-throw projector onto the ceiling to provide some kind of crazy configurable overhead lighting, but they’re simply not meant for that kind of application

I’m not talking about descriptions, I’m talking about pictures and videos.
And I’m not talking about lighting set into the floor, I mean like floor lamps and shit.

They put these laps on shelves and desks and standing on the floor, but they’re almost always below eye level when standing, so everyone looks like a b-movie villain as they move about the room. It drives me crazy.

Give me an overhead area light. Soft shadows from light cast downward onto my face.

Ceiling light is best light.

All these fucking mood lighting I see people talk about make you look like some kind of underlit villain, or like you’re telling goosebumps stories around the world’s mildest campfire.

Why am I the only neurodivergent person who finds floor lights fucking disgusting ???

I don’t necessarily agree that decentralized is fractured by design, nor that “working as intended” means that it’s the best solution for this/every situation.

I’m saying that as we decentralize, we get both advantages and disadvantages. I’m saying that this is a situation where we can’t both have our cake and eat it too.

For example:
We could decentralize communities themselves, preventing them from fracturing. Instead of having communities hosted on a single instance, communities could be feeds aggregating all posts tagged as belonging to that community. Then if you defederate an instance you simply stop seeing posts from users in that instance.
But then good-faith mods are defanged and can no longer protect vulnerable community members from antagonistic actors.

I think my straw example tradeoff is a bad one, that’s too much decentralization of power.

I actually already discussed that if you go back and read the comment that you’re replying to

But again that fractures the community.

You lose all the community history, and not everyone migrates to the new community. You end up with a bunch of new splinter communities, none of which have critical mass to survive.

I’m talking about systemic solutions for the general problem of bad-actor mods.

Defederating an instance is fracturing the community which difficult for a community to withstand with our current user numbers.

Giving mods less power, such as making communities themselves defederated, makes problems for good-faith mods who are trying to protect vulnerable community members.

It’d be neat if the community itself could vote to migrate to a new instance, but that’d be so fraught with abuse that I can’t see it actually working.

I don’t think there is a solution.
Effective moderation to protect vulnerable people needs more centralization. Avoiding the influence of bad-actor mods needs more decentralization. The two seem fairly mutually exclusive. Or rather, they trade off against each other.

With more users, having a fractured community wouldn’t be a huge problem, because they could all have critical mass. But with the current user base that is generally not feasible, even for really popular topics.