My grandfather (born Philadelphia 1932) always told a story about how kids in his town would go to the train tracks in the winter and throw rocks at the engines. This would prompt the conductor to throw back pieces of coal from the engine to shoo them away. They would then pick up the coal and run away to use it to heat their homes. The conductors always knew what was going on, but it was the railway's coal, so they just always played along.
I still find big chunks (like bigger than softball) of anthracite coal around where the Morris Canal used to be in NJ. Always assumed some just fell off as they were transporting it from PA to NY for industrial use. I don't think trains normally used chunks this large, when I was a kid we used the more thumb-sized pieces of coal to heat the house when we weren't using wood.
In coldest part of winter I think we'd go through roughly a 5 gallon pail per day of it. (stove would need charging every 12 hours)
I apprenticed repairing coal cars and mining equipment and I can confirm the industry is pretty wasteful. we used to get cars that still had nearly a hundred pounds of coal in them. we used to quietly shovel it out in the winter and use it to run little shop stoves we called dumpers for heat.
We're deep into late stage capitalism now, so nobody gets to glean... expired (but perfectly fine food) doesn't even get donated lest the corporation get sued when someone chokes on a pretzel.
"late stage capitalism" is a phrase that doesn't really mean anything; but just to be clear - can't pin that on the capitalists! If the government makes it a liability to give away expired food then it won't happen, capitalism or otherwise.
How do you light the stuff? I toured a coal mine once, and brought some home, and even with a blowtorch I could not get it to ignite - it just popped little pieces off with some sparks.
It needs a lot of heat and air to get anthracite going. We'd start a fire with wood, get some wood coals built up and then add the coal. It was important to close the door quickly on coal stove as the coaldust is explosive and we once cracked the glass on our stove. There was an electric draft fan on the coal stove we had, I don't know if this is needed or makes it easier to burn.
In my city in Poland (one of the most destitute ones in the country), until very recently, there used to be regular coal train robberies. On segments of the track where trains were moving really slow (like 20-30 km/h), the thieves would jump on the coal wagon and open it up on the side. All the coal would spill along the side of the tracks for the next dozens of meters, and the thieves would prompty load it up on a cargo truck and go away. With recent huge coal price hikes caused by Russian aggression, I suspect this practice might come back.
In Winston-Salem, NC, the tobacco company had its own coal power plant (with train line running through). It’s a chocolate shop, pizzeria, and brewery, with a very large patio now. The “RJR Tob. Co” smokestack is lit up with RGB LEDs.
I'm going to posit the closest modern analogue to coal is not wind and solar but rather nuclear. People hear nuclear and immediately think "no thanks" despite it solving energy scarcity and cleanliness in one shot.
Coal was filthy but very cheap. Not as cheap as the sunlight that made it, but cheap.
Uranium isn't cheap. Sunlight (=> wind) is free. Safe nuclear plants (hypothetically) are very, very expensive. (And have to be shut down regularly for weeks for servicing.) Nukes are much, much more expensive than windmills ($10B/GW vs $1B) and solar panels (which retain 93% efficiency after 20+ years). Then there's safe storage of dangerous waste vs. little (non-dangerus) waste.
Sure, windmills may cost less to build (debatable) but what is the total cost of intermittent production, decimated bird and bat populations, defaced landscape and stunted technological progress?
If sun and wind are "free", so is nuclear, so is coal. It's the getting them to be useful that's costly.
I'd be for it except for the fact where Uranium mostly comes from. Like it or not, coal remains the energy reserve that potentially can keep the Us free.
Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry.
What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing? Is that particularly clean?
What happens to the waste? Does it have to be stored and protected long term?
Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).
The most at-risk individuals experienced a lifetime 1% increase chance of cancer. The rest were less that 0.5%. COVID had a bigger fatality rate initially.
let's compare that to the 20,000 people the wave killed. (The one that caused the meltdown).
These are good questions to ask, but there are, what, three total nuclear disasters to consider in modern history? And of those, only the one in Russia caused deaths (plural) and true disaster. And of the horrific conditions, incompetent design, and complete mismanagement and deliberate lying, 30 people died total.
Fossil fuel pollution is responsible for (by some figures) 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Enough.
Uranium is 16,000 as energy dense as Coal (and coal is the densest) . That means you'd need ONE tanker sized craft to transport way, way more fuel than all the tankers of the world.
Navy nuclear safety is the result of planning and engineering and obscene amounts of money. There is no way commercial energy plants could profit if they spent the resources the navy does.
It's true that the Navy spends a lot of money, but it's also true that the Navy can be (and has been) wasteful in terms of spending.
What this means is that commercial power can in principle achieve the same safety outcomes with planning and engineering and maybe something south of 'obscene' amounts of money.
There's also the fact that a lot of the expense for the nuclear Navy is having to achieve militarized and maritime variants of gear that can be produced much more simply for civilian applications on land. Fitting anything into a submarine is going to be expensive, including diesel engines, but we don't use that as a reason to say diesel is not practical for civilian transport elsewhere.
Over half our reactors are currently stopped because of various corrosion issues, we regularly have to stop some because of drought, etc.
France might have been the poster child for nuclear energy, but it’s on the verge of becoming a poster child for what happens after you over rely on it for two decade.
So, how do you get large energy conglomerates and oligopolies from neglecting this infrastructure? Mega corps, especially energy corps in the US, aren't exactly known for playing by the book and are very much known for cutting every available corner. The proponents of nuclear fission often forget that greed and neglect runs rampant.
> So, how do you get large energy conglomerates and oligopolies from neglecting this infrastructure?
This isn't unique to private sector - public infrastructure suffers from underinvestment too.
The same way that you get GCHP, coal, wind and solar infrastructure, or roads and rail infrastructure supported - long term backing from governments.
> The proponents of nuclear fission often forget that greed and neglect runs rampant.
And the opposers will point at the failures and ignore the huge successes of decades of low cost, low carbon electricity globally around the world.
Looking at the UK (where I live, purely because I'm familiar with the situation here) the newest currently operating nuclear plant here was built in 1995, meanwhile the oldest gas plant in the country was built in 1993. The operating lifespan of the majority of these power stations has been 50 years, meanwhile we're still building them and struggling to build _one_ nuclear plant here in the last 30 years.
So to answer your original question - stop having them build gas power plants and have them invest in nuclear plants instead.
Maybe energy production shouldn’t be viewed as a profit center? Socializing the thing modern civilization depends on makes sense - with unlimited energy there would be plenty of other ways to make money.
Those are the official Soviet figures, right? My understanding is that these were laughably understated.
I don't disagree with the rest of your analysis, but my experience is that people become more hostile to nuclear power when we fail to be transparent with the numbers. Moreover, even if we assume a liberal 10k deaths from the Chernobyl reactor, the math still works out in your favor.
There is consensus that a total of approximately 30 people died from immediate blast trauma and acute radiation syndrome (ARS) in the seconds to months after the disaster, respectively, with 60 in total in the decades since, inclusive of later radiation induced cancer
The contested numbers are those related to long term radiation exposure
There is no strong evidence of an increase in deaths
If you talk to people born in the late 80s to early 90s in the areas near Chernobyl you’ll find out that many kids died in their teens and early 20s or are living with cancer today. Maybe they didn’t die, but they no longer have thyroids. Saying that 60 total died from Chernobyl is insulting.
High rates of cancer in teenagers is not surprising? I’m not talking about 50+, I’m talking about tumors at 16-25 at a rate high enough that you can ask a Belarusian kid if they still talk to their high school friends and they’ll answer “many died already” which is not the normal answer you get from those questions. I don’t understand your correlation of people who are 90 without thyroids vs people in their 20s that had tumors and had to have them removed.
Your dads job is to see people with cancer, of course he sees a lot of them. It’s like a mechanic saying “I see lots of broken engines, therefore any engine that’s broken is normal, even if it’s at 20000km”
Where do you get the uranium from? It doesn't magically fall out of the sky. It comes from heavy extractive of industry.
As opposed to the Windmill Fairy?
What's the reasonable worst case scenario with a nuclear plant failing?
Using Fukushima as an example, the worst case is that fewer people died as a result of the meltdown than died from the hasty reaction of shutting down all of Japan's other nuclear plants (https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2019/10/31/shutting-...).
What happens to the waste?
It's contained, which is a large improvement over spewing it into the atmosphere.
These clever questions you're asking have been studied extensively, and nuclear comes out far ahead of fossil fuels on every conceivable metric. You can try to make the argument that we don't need to build any more nuclear plants because wind and solar will provide everything we need in 10 years, although you'll need to explain why this is true now when people have been incorrectly claiming it for 40+ years. But if you're shutting down nuclear plants and burning more coal as a result (hello Germany), you've taken a very wrong turn.
You are experiencing bog-standard selection bias. The positive contribution is from all nuclear plants, not just Fukushima. Your point would only make sense if all nuclear plants had similar accidents.
An analogy to your argument: TWA flight 800 killed all its passengers, therefore all flights should be banned.
Edit: maybe try to learn your own internal biases, because I suspect you would make better arguments if you understood your weaknesses.
I said nothing about banning fusion power plants, so your analogy is incorrect and your cod psychology on my motivation or ‘biases’ unhelpful.
The full cost of nuclear including externalities is lower than say coal, but far higher than wind or solar or even hydro and the market has spoken as a result.
An area of Japan and an area of Ukraine are now uninhabitable for a generation or two due to previous disasters. The cost of that is very very high and more than most societies are willing to bear even if in theory the risk is low, but more importantly decommissioning costs on waste and plants are huge, so fusion is far behind.
Literally zero people died in the immediate aftermath, and in the years since one person who worked at the plant has died.
The data is clear, in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power, nuclear is the safest, cleanest form of power we have. [1]
Coal power kills between 24 and 100 people per TWh generated (100 for brown coal). Nuclear is 0.03 - between industrial solar and wind, and significantly lower than rooftop solar. It also has a lower carbon impact than both wind and solar.
Yes people were evacuated. But they'd have been evacuated anyways whatever kind of plant was there.
I wasn’t talking about deaths but about cost. The data is pretty clear on that too which is why solar and wind have risen while new fission plants decline.
The mining and waste are much smaller scale due to the incredible energy density of nuclear.
Look at how ugly coal gets, for the same amount of energy. Kids down in the mines, miner's strikes when it ended, people dying of smog. All sorts of terrible things derived from coal need to be included in this comparison.
The only thing nuclear really has against it is that when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. And people have thought about those modes of failure quite a bit, so why don't we see if they've come up with something?
It doesn't have to be that way. I'm no great fan of Nuclear power (although mostly because we know it will be privatised and the private company running it will suddenly be bankrupt when it comes to the clean up) but the US and Russia hid a lot of their weapons development behind "too cheap to meter" nuclear power stations.
I wouldn't guarantee they would not do that again, but the incentives are very different this time around, so the design of the power stations shouldn't produce material suitable for modern nuclear weapons as a side effect.
Regarding privatization, we could easily require private companies to put up a bond/insurance for the cleanup so they pay for it ahead of time thus preventing issues if they go bankrupt. I say “easily” because passing anti-nuclear regulation seems to be the one thing the US federal government can get done effectively.
>Nuclear can be great at eliminating scarcity. And it can be clean in use (if you ignore extracting and refining the fuel. And ignore contamination. And ignore waste storage. And ignore decommissioning).
Now apply the same analysis to the manufacture of solar panels and lithium batteries.
The consensus on nuclear waste seems to be, largely: store it in dry casks on site.
One great thing about nuclear waste is that there really is fuck all of it.
Clean up those 20,000 barrels of DDT off the coast of California and dump all the nuclear dry casks of all nuclear waste there instead and the world would be much better place.
These are real grievances that real people have about nuclear, and silencing those people and the questions they raise does great harm to a potentially nuclear-powered future.
There's four billion tons dissolved in the ocean. But even if you weren't interested, switching to breeder reactors would make the terrestrial supply last 100x longer. And of course there's thorium cycle which dramatically expands the supply too. Supply is not an issue.
But last time I looked, nobody's ever built a commercial thorium reactor. Solar is here right now.
Every time I hear people push nuclear I get a sense of "perfect is the enemy of good". Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.
> Sure, nuclear is better in some dimensions. But along the "short term deployability" dimension, it's just not in the running.
I've heard the exact same argument in favor of Nuclear. As I understand, the argument is that renewables need a grid-scale storage solution to be viable as a complete solution to our energy needs, since wind and the sun are not consistent and reliable everywhere. That solution doesn't exist yet, so we need to supplement renewables. If we have to do that, Nuclear is a better option than fossil fuels.
The most annoying thing about anti-reneweable people pretending to be nuclear fans is that they don't realise that nuclear grids need "storage" the same as renewable grids.
Here's nuclear fan David Mackay to explain it to you, in a quote from his 2008 book:
> If we kick fossil fuels and go all-out for renewables, or all-out for nuclear, or
a mixture of the two, we may have a problem. Most of the big renewables
are not turn-off-and-onable. When the wind blows and the sun comes out,
power is there for the taking; but maybe two hours later, it’s not available
any more. Nuclear power stations are not usually designed to be turn-offand-
onable either. They are usually on all the time, and their delivered
power can be turned down and up only on a timescale of hours. This is a
problem because, on an electricity network, consumption and production
must be exactly equal all the time. The electricity grid can’t store energy. To
have an energy plan that adds up every minute of every day, we therefore
need something easily turn-off-and-onable. It’s commonly assumed that the
easily turn-off-and-onable something should be a source of power that gets
turned off and on to compensate for the fluctuations of supply relative to
demand (for example, a fossil fuel power station!). But another equally
effective way to match supply and demand would be to have an easily
turn-off-and-onable demand for power – a sink of power that can be turned
off and on at the drop of a hat.
> Either way, the easily turn-off-and-onable something needs to be a big
something because electricity demand varies a lot
The thing is, I think David Mackay is attacking a strawman - or at least it feels like you're using it that way. I don't think anyone is saying we should have solely nuclear. We know of course that nuclear is suitable for base load but not for variable load. Wind and solar are great to build on top of. And yeah, we'll still need gas peaker plants even with grid storage more than likely.
Mackay does go on to hit the nail on the head at the very end - a big problem for power grids is that variable supply like peaker plants are incredibly expensive, whereas controlling demand via smart grid is significantly, significantly cheaper.
The Ontario grid is basically perfect, IMO. 59% nuclear. 24% hydro. 8% wind. [1] 92% zero-carbon. 7% natural gas, what I assume is peaker capacity. Sure, that could be replaced by grid storage. But we're talking 5% improvement overall from grid storage. Incremental, not a step-change.
He's not attacking anything, he's pointing out that renewables need a method to balance demand and so does nuclear, and so do grids with large amounts of either/both.
He does this because he wanted to build lots of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels, and he wanted to work out how to do that for real within physical and economic constraints.
Hydro (which was often built alongside nuclear for this very reason) is one such answer. Demand response is another. Green/pink hydrogen another. All apply equally well to nuclear and renewables. Some make sense even for gas grids and that's where we started rolling them out.
Which is bad news for nuclear, because once you build enough of these solutions, you just need to choose the cheapest way to generate the bulk energy, which probably involves a lot of wind and solar and not much nuclear.
> you just need to choose the cheapest way to generate the bulk energy.
I disagree with that framing, I think we deserve better than the cheapest way. We deserve the best way. Cost factors in but is not the be all and end all.
[edit](Grid storage is probably not going to be a problem; I'm not sure it's not my area) - but the supply of fissile material is definitely not an issue. Literally the reason we don't look at breeder and thorium cycle is because we have more than enough uranium. If we start to run out, we have a path forward.
Are wind and solar viable at scale? My understanding was that you would need a non-existant storage solution to accommodate inconsistent production capacity.
> But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.”
It's interesting to note that coal was the solution to a prior generation's ecological problem, and now it's the source of our generation's problems.
At the turn of the century, horses were considered a massive public health problem, because there were just so much horse feces and dead horses lying on the streets in major cities.
> On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases. Each horse also produced around 2 pints of urine per day and to make things worse, the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years. Horse carcasses therefore also had to be removed from the streets. The bodies were often left to putrefy so the corpses could be more easily sawn into pieces for removal. The streets of London were beginning to poison its people. But this wasn’t just a British crisis: New York had a population of 100,000 horses producing around 2.5m pounds of manure a day. This problem came to a head when in 1894, The Times newspaper predicted… “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.”
Of course, now particularly in the US we see many downsides from having nearly totally shifted to a car-only culture. But that seems to have been preferable to managing the logistics of millions of pounds of horse manure.
>> the average life expectancy for a working horse was only around 3 years.
Wow. Just googling horse lifespan gives range of 25-30 years. Those horses must have been massively abused (or have huge disease problems) to die so quickly.
You'd think they'd have taken better care of them, since I imagine they weren't cheap. But I guess it's probably an example of market incentives creating perverse results quite different from what the propaganda would tell you.
You're the one saying that they didn't manage properly the forests, I don't know if they did or not but what I know is that when the population increase at some point forests cannot provide enough wood for everybody..
Especially since, as stated in the article, the fireplace of the time were inefficient..
The point isn't that coppicing et. al. produces infinite wood, it's that it's a better way to manage forests than just chopping down all the fucking trees, eh?
Coal has never been the solution to an ecological problem.
> Steven Preister's house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer.
Unrelated to the article, but I thought this was an odd characterization. The building I live in in SF is at least 10 years older than that. Most of the buildings around me were built before 1910. I think my building is ugly and sucks because of noise and draft and stuff falling apart. I wonder if they built better in DC because of the snow and comparably more rain?
As someone who has lived nearby, I can say that this house is not rare nor remarkable in that area. It's technically a piece of American history but there are thousands of equally historic homes within walking distance. The author was using a bit of poetic license to add some flourish to the article.
Ok, that's absurd. I live in a turn of the century neighborhood and am surrounded by miles of very similar houses. I bet I could find more than a dozen doppelgängers in a 10 minute bike ride.
Agreed. To sound full of myself, I live in a historic house that’s simply much nicer than that. (Middle of nowhere Midwest) not expensive at all. I’m with you on the characterization. How bizarre.
This somehow just again sets into perspective what "old" means in different countries. I live in a house older than the US at the moment, and it's not even something special, compared to churches which are closer to Caesar than the founding of the US.
It's a cultural thing that most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization. There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US and ruins that make Rome look young, but they don't occupy anyone's mindspace when it comes to how they think of age.
Hopefully this is a joke? There are no structures in the US built prior to 1000ad, and the oldest structures built by indigenous people were abandoned long before European contact, because of deforestation.
So for context, I've literally seen/worked on structures older than that. I'll format this as a list to avoid a giant wall of text.
* Plenty of structures were built prior to 1100CE. You can't build a freeway in Tucson without digging up an late archaic (~2300-1500 BCE) pithouse, as an example.
* Plenty of indigenous structures have centuries of continuous inhabitation. Taos is a good example, having a single structure that's been inhabited since the 13th century. Other communities are older (e.g. Oraibi dates from ~1150), but don't have extant usable structures from those early days.
* Indigenous structures were not abandoned prior to European contact, let alone because of deforestation. Did you autocorrect from "disease" (which would also be mistaken, but less so)? Very simplified statement here because this is a topic that could fill a library. Happy to talk more on it.
Can you give me an example of a "structure" in the present day US that was built prior to 1000 AD? I'm not talking about a pit underground, which is not a "structure".
Can you give me an example of a "medieval-era houses in the US" that somebody lives in today? The ones you mentioned were built after the middle ages, your dates are not right and describe the time the settlement was created, not the time the structures were built.
Which Taos structure has been inhabited since the 13th century?
The Taos pueblo structures standing today were built around 1400, not the middle ages, not the 13th century.
The Oraibi _settlement_ has been inhabited for centuries. The structures were built in the 17th century, not the middle ages, not 1150.
Generally the "medieval period" extends from sometime in the first few centuries CE to as late as the end of the 16th century. Obviously this is being used in the same informal sense that I'd have talking with friends, rather than a specific technical sense that would be more regionally appropriate.
The 13th century when the earliest kivas and walls at Taos Pueblo are well-agreed to be dated. Oral histories date it rather earlier, but I'm being conservative. I have pretty terrible internet access right now, so I can't link anything on those dates, but I'm fairly sure that's how the UN filings date it at least, though I couldn't tell you whether those apply to the north or south houses specifically.
Re: oraibi, I tried to make it clear that I was talking about the town itself rather than specific structures within it. The earliest structures are below the cliff, not above where the modern town is. That move happened in the 17th and 18th centuries to make it more defensible. As far as I'm aware, most of the extant buildings are 20th century at the earliest.
As for "structure", a pithouse is a structure and a primarily aboveground one at that. The name refers to the fact that they're dug into the ground for thermal and flooring reasons. The late archaic ones in the Tucson area along the Santa Cruz river were often built alongside small irrigation canals and house groups often had low walls around them. Again, can't link, but there are experimental reconstructions of Pueblo I era pithouses that you can look at pictures of. They're "similar enough" to be worth looking at, even though there are meaningful reasons they're part of different archeological periods.
Seems pretty tenuous, and I don't see any radiocarbon dating or high quality archeology. It's not surprised this doesn't "occupy anyone's mindspace".
I think the claim "There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US " is misleading and possibly wrong. A more accurate claim would be "It is possible but unconfirmed that there are a handful of occupied houses in one location in the US with walls that were originally built in the late medieval era. These are extremely far from population centers, so it's unsurprising most people don't think about them the way Europeans think about older structures".
Well, there were some issues with genocide between then and now that cut down on the number of example I can give you and inherently limit them to places far from major population centers. There are a lot of places all over the country with fairly continuous habitation records that abruptly terminate in the colonial period. The Southwest broadly managed to retain a higher degree of independence than most other parts of the continent until the 20th century partly as a result of that remoteness and more organized military responses.
I think you’re arguing past each other. Nobody (I hope at least) disputed European settlers treated the native Americans horribly.
The argument was that in many places in Europe it’s literally unremarkable that people live in houses significantly older than the mentioned 1910 specimen in DC (my completely unremarkable apartment building in Berlin was built around the same time and nobody thinks of it as significant in any way & I know multiple people in Austria and Germany living in houses built in the 1800s and earlier).
While Native Americans built structures before colonizations the number of Americans currently living in such is negligibly small.
There are definitely structures in the US that were built prior to 1000AD. For example the first 4 stories of Pueblo Bonito were built around 850.
Some of the pueblos that were built around 1000 years ago are still used (e.g. Taos Pueblo, although most of the buildings have been retrofitted with modern conveniences like doors)
The Taos Pueblo has been continuously inhabited since the 13th century, if not before. This qualifies to satisfy the truth criteria of the first phrase.
Note that the second claim refers to ruins and not continuous inhabitation.
I'm not a specialist in North American indigenous cultures, but am aware that there are signs of human inhabitation at sites such as Bandelier (NM) dating to 10kya, and elsehwere cliff and/or pueblo dwellings dating to several thousand years BCE.
Both would make Rome look old.
Heading further south, the earliest Mayan villages date to 2,000 BCE, again pre-dating Rome. Cities emerged in the period 750--500 BCE, roughly contemporaneously with the agreed origins of Rome (753 BCE), and well before the rise of the Roman Republic (509--27 BCE) or Empire (27 BCE -- ~480 CE (Western)).
It's possible there are a handful of houses at one site with some structural walls built around 1400 that are currently inhabited. There's no direct evidence for that claim except oral tradition and reports from 140 years later. Claiming that "There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US" is misleading, and a lack of awareness of these houses is not noteworthy.
The reason Americans don't think about old buildings the way Europeans do is that there aren't any anywhere close to where most Americans live, and anything older than 600 years requires an extensive intentional search to find. It's not a lack of awareness, as the GP implies.
The facts are: In the US, most Americans, including indigenous people, go their entire lives without seeing a single structure built before 1500. You can't see one without driving several hours from any population center, and several days from the population centers where the overwhelming majority live.
In Europe, most people see buildings built before 1500 every day. Many people live in them.
Those are both facts. My belief/opinion is that these facts explain the difference in attitude between Americans and Europeans. It has nothing to do with whether "most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization"
Also I'd like to point out that both of my paragraphs are facts, not opinions. The difference is that I could be wrong if for example there was evidence that the Taos pueblo structures were built in the 13th century, but there isn't.
I think I replied pretty directly. The central claim of the comment is that Americans think about old buildings differently because they don't identify with pre-colonial culture. I'm saying that actually there are essentially no buildings that are old here which is true despite one possible counterexample.
I am quoting it directly so having difficulty understanding the discrepancy.
> It's a cultural thing that most Americans simply don't identify with or think about history prior to British/American colonization.
That is the claim
> There are still people living in medieval-era houses in the US and ruins that make Rome look young
This is technically true but highly misleading. There is one site in the US where oral tradition maintains that some parts of two of the structures were built prior to 1400. There has been no radiocarbon dating of the structures. The closest contemporaneous account is from 1540 and doesn't describe the structures in detail, only the settlement.
The ruins are not visible to most Americans,
> but they don't occupy anyone's mindspace when it comes to how they think of age.
The claim here is that despite the existence of medieval-era home and ancient ruins, Americans don't identify with history prior to colonization.
My counter argument is that the evidence for any medieval era homes is weak, and at most there are two, both located at one site. The ruins are extremely rare and far from population centers, which explains the lack of awareness.
It's true that most Americans don't identify with history prior to European colonization, but it's true _because of_ the lack of ruins and ancient homes, not in spite of their existence.
This is all in contrast to Europe where people see and interact with medieval era homes and buildings all the time.
You have places like Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. It’s construction date is disputes, but is at least 1000ad, and it wasn’t abandoned before European contact.
A significant percentage of single-family and rowhouses in DC are older Preister's, the actually historic ones by about a century. My own house is a couple years newer than his, 1919 I think. I just put up solar panels without any NIMBY nonsense like this. My only regret is that the south-facing roof is in the rear, so it was not economical to plaster the north-facing front roof with panels and thus trigger any passing reactionaries.
There was a devastating earthquake and subsequent fires in 1906 that burned down nearly the entire city. Since the entire population of the city was displaced, they rebuilt as quickly as possible to get out of the refugee cottages/camps.
It doesn't really matter how you build a home though, it's eventually going to become creaky and drafty over time. The only real way to mitigate it is regular maintenance and repair. That's true of all infrastructure.
Buildings tend not to be built exclusively in brick or stone and even when they are tend to be held together with mortar. Even brick and stone are susceptible to water intrusion and a bunch of other things. For example freeze-thaw is a very natural cause of erosion of stone. Vegetation is another common cause of undermining those sorts of structures.
Of course some materials last longer than others but that doesn’t make the resulting structures habitable.
With maintenance sure. Which was the very next part of the original post you quoted so this reply to me makes no sense.
For example I’ve got a rubble wall that’s really showing the effects of freeze-thaw just now and if I don’t actively spend the money and time to fix that damage it will fall down eventually.
If you think that's bad, every structure in Berkeley over 40 years old is automatically considered a historic resource, requiring the approval of the landmarks preservation commission to change or demolish.
A bit odd to compare the blight of solar panels to the introduction of coal.
There’s no reason to not densely pack solar panels atop commercial buildings or any other large pieces of land, then “transport” the energy to the homes. The constraints are completely different.
Indeed, the main concern with solar is just cost and availability. Getting electricity for free from the sun is a great value proposition for most people. Spending tens of thousands on your roof, not so much. The upfront investment is a bit of a hurdle. And you get some push-back from Nimby's complaining about what things look like. Of course nothing compared to if you were to cause a lot of smog by burning coal.
With coal the concern is the sooth, dust, pollution, and smell. It's just nasty, toxic stuff. Smog from coal is unpleasant. It's not like a wood fire which at least smells nice. Coal is what you used to burn if you could not afford wood or gas. Throwing a lump of coal on the fire is nobody's idea of a romantic thing to do. Making a nice wood fire, completely different thing.
Here in Berlin, people were burning coal in some parts of the city until gentrification caused most of the remaining DDR construction to get renovated. As recent as ten years ago, you could smell coal in the winter in e.g. Prenzlauer Berg, which is now a properly gentrified area full of hipsters, coffee shops, etc. One of my colleagues at the time rented an attic with only a coal furnace. He had to carry the stuff upstairs if he wanted heating. But he payed very little in rent so he was OK with that. It's the most run down, poor areas that got rid of coal last.
My family burned coal when I was a child, and eventually switched to wood. Cost aside, coal still seemed a lot more practical for seriously heating a house because it stays lit much longer, wood constantly demands attention and refuelling. But it's harder to light and the ash is useless. Nostalgic though :)
Solar shingles are a relatively new consumer option I’ve seen deployed very effectively. Looks slick if done right and helps reduce/solve the problem you’re mentioning.
My gut reaction is that it probably costs a ton more to install and wire solar shingles and is less efficient? Unless we're talking new commercial installs and not residential?
Given that property and finance underlie a market-capitalist system, digging to the foundations of the law of each can be ... quite illuminating.
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776).
Smith also defines wealth as "the annual labour and produce of the nation".
Market transactions don't generat wealth, a social good, but profit, an accounting fiction, maximised by internalising revenues and externalising costs.
The externalising of costs and internalisation of benefits (within Party operations, to specific high-power entities within the Party) can explain much of this.
The specific political dynamics of pollution and environmental degredation within Western countries (the UK, US, India, Western Europpe, etc.) is often quite similar. The politically powerful impose environmental costs on the disempowered, racial outsiders, minorities, immigrants, colonies, etc.
I see far more similarity in these systems than differences.
It wasn't the captains of industry and political power who embraced Leopold, Carson, Meadows, and Commoner. And a surprising amount of early environmentalism had a strong tinge of racism about it (c.f., Muir).
Power differenctial informs far more than any specific ideology does.
Because people make money. How many of us own Apple products? We know they have near slave labor and high suicide rates in Foxconn. The US doesn’t even attach tariffs to them.
I think the point of making this comparison is to say "See, Americans have resisted changes in their energy sources before, just like they're resisting it today."
If so, I have a few issues with it:
1. Everyone who resisted the transition to coal in the 1800s-1860s has been dead for over a hundred years. A different set of people are resisting it now. They don't know each other, or coordinate. They don't draw inspiration from each other. Much has happened in the interim. So, this feels like a meaningless historical anecdote, and not an enlightening framing device.
2. The vast majority of Americans support solar and wind energy as power sources. Around 80% support for increasing both solar and wind energy[1].
3. Coal isn't sustainable and it's a huge source of air pollution. That's how we phrase it today, whereas in the 19th century they complained about not being able to grow coal themselves, and about it being a "secret poisoner". But the complaints amount to the same thing. On what basis do we imply their concerns were ignorant and short-sighted when it seems like they turned out to be essentially correct?
To your first point, what is interesting, and often frustrating, is exactly what you’re saying: people resisting change now did not learn from people then. Quite the opposite. The point is that people often defend their status quo ignorant of the fact that it itself is the result of many historical transformations. The institution of marriage is a good example. Another is behavior that is considered gender normative.
It’s quite interesting how even the wording echoes over time. Hawthorne’s belief that firelight is essential to discourse reminds me of the critiques of mass newspaper reading (that modern society would be ruined because everyone would have their face in a newspaper), or how novel reading would bring ruin to women.
The point being that the status quo today, or the status quo in the 1950’s, is itself the result of many changes that people at the time thought were ruinous, from mass reading, to bibles written in colloquial speech, to voluntary marriage.
This does not mean resistance to change is bad: it certainly seems like a useful reflex to keep chaos at bay. Your third point is quite apropos. A good example of that as well was the popular resistance to the automobile. People at the time saw the mounting fatalities, the congestion and pollution, all of which is so normalized today.
People definitely knew that coal soot was a health issue - the town I grew in exists because those who could fled NYC in the summer.
But a lot of the reaction was like today economic. If you owned mills or real estate around steams, the notion of some upstart putting you out of business with a steam powered facility was not well received. Lots of people rag on electric cars, because they are one of the millions of people making a living based on ICE cars who will find themselves redundant.
> Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote.
Unrelated to the main topic, but why does old English writing often have seemingly arbitrary capitalization of words -- like Years, Miles, Fewel (Fuel), Article, Expence, and Families? Ben Franklin was a newspaper editor and printer so I assume he knows what he's doing, but what's the rhyme or reason for it?
Thanks, I should have googled before spouting armchair wisdom. Looks like noun capitalisation was ad hoc until things became more standardised with the onset of dictionaries. It was inspired by German typography but much later on
Yeah, you have to add storage to the equation to make it work for solar. But since batteries for home use are commercially available, albeit still a bit expensive, it's more of an omission than a repudiation.
I don't have a problem with wind and solar, but I do have a problem with the enormous amounts of toxic waste produced making solar panels and wind mills. Then there is the problem of what to do with the huge amount of waste material once the wind mills and solar panels need to be replaced. It seems that no one is addressing these issues.
On a side note, eWaste is becoming a biger issue every day as we produce ever increasing "things" to make our life easier.
The argument being that when you just replace one type of pollution with another, I'm not sure you're benefiting as much as many people believe. I worry that some of the toxins produced with modern technologies may be worse than what we already have.
The millions of people who have suffered and died as a result of inhaling stuff like uranium from coal soot would probably disagree.
Electronics manufacturing has its risks and concerns, but is an easier problem to address as manufacturing is a centralized activity, easy to regulate.
Even if alternate energy sources were in equal footing with fossil fuels it would still be worth it to pursue them because of diversification. Fossil fuel extraction has been a driving force behind geopolitics for the last century. While the elements behind solar and batteries are similarly becoming strategic resources, at least the list of exploitable resources is growing rather than shrinking.
It's winter here New Zealand. Something like 30% of people in my region still burn coal in the winter to keep their houses warm. Most of the rest burn firewood.
> “I applaud your greenness,” Chris Landis, an architect and board member, told Preister at a meeting in October 2019, “but I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just—it upsets me.”
My blood boils, of all the things to be a busybody about what someone builds on the roof of their own property, you want to have them throw away free energy and keep burning fossil fuels because you are used to the current aesthetics of the roof, no doubt made that way out of practical choices made with the technology of the time but now frozen for the dubious benefits of nostalgia..
Yep. The decline of humanity will be at the hands of greater spotted fucking moron, of which Chris Landis is clearly a prime example of the species.
You can have both. But really the entire planet works on making negative side effects of solving a problem someone else's problem and this spans from globalisation of supply chains to energy supply. This attitude just enables it.
People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.
> People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.
This is a complete, unrealistic pipe dream. Yes, we've obviously seen a "deglobalization" occurring, and many countries are feeling the pain of being completely dependent on critical fuel and materials from one or a few other countries with shaky political systems.
But the idea that "local self sufficiency" is possible on a wide scale, without sending us all back to the stone age, is quite frankly nonsense. I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.
Saying "we should look at local self sufficiency" makes people think of planting a garden in their back yard, when in reality it would mean virtually all of the advances in human comfort, health and convenience over the past couple hundred years or so would have to be given up.
I'm not suggesting that we send ourselves back to the stone age. I'm suggesting that we stop shipping resources half way around the planet and then send the trash back because it's cheaper. The last 50-80 years at least has been a race to the lowest cost with no consideration for any consequences such as the environment, security and stability.
UK is a fine example. We had a great steel industry here. But it's cheaper to buy it from China and India and it helps us hit our pollution targets not processing it here. But we just pushed the problem to where the side effects aren't immediately visible. The real issue is our consumption and use of materials.
If you had non polluting shipping and the costs were still cheap enough there would be nothing intrinsically wrong with this.
The problem is the market externalities of the pollution of our current shipping methods, and likely the imbalances in the labor markets and regulation.
If you fixed those, then it would probably no longer make sense to do that, but you can't fix those systemic problems by banning the symptoms of them.
>a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.
I know you are just giving an example - I get your concept - but frankly all the ingredients for a darn good cheeseburger are produced within a two hour drive of where I live, on an industrial scale. Maybe I'm just really lucky, but on the other hand if you go back just a bit more than 50 years ago, most small towns had their own dairies, bakers, butchers, local farmers and rancher, they had various kinds of factories and industrial producers - and maybe this is one place where we need to go back in history.
> I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.
I'm the article was informative but I know where a few cows are and I know how to at least field dress a carcass, so I bet I can wrangle me some hamburger.
A cheeseburger is much more than just beef. The article highlighted that getting beef, cheese, fresh lettuce, tomato, etc., a bun, seasonings and condiments all at the same time is what required a larger supply chain.
Sure, but >90% of people don’t have whatever upbringing (or interests/hobbies) that led you to have that knowledge, so at a population scale the point stands.
I'm sure you can, but it doesn't scale. The only way we eat is industrialised agriculture.
You will be fighting your neighbours for that cow and wasting most of it.
Similarly with "backyard plots" and that other great modern stupidity, the vertical indoor garden. Like anybody will be lazily reaching over to pick a tomato from their indoor vertical garden instead of the monstrous greenhouses that most tomatoes come from these days.
If I take the local example - the city was built where it is due to the local conditions being good, including great, volcanic soil.
Then the city grew and houses were built all over the good soil, pushing agriculture further out. The last market garden in the area became a housing subdivision about 5 years ago.
Their Guyra tomato farm is an enormous undertaking that produces all year round. I'm sure in WWII Britain it was easy to double vegetable production because while the UK is covered in farms, they are relatively tiny and unproductive and only survive through subsidies.
> In WWII home gardens roughly doubled fresh vegetable production.
This is obviously not true in any meaningful sense. I assume this is based on "fresh" restricting the numbers to a meaninglessly small fraction of total production. It doesn't even make sense within an order of magnitude.
In the US it was 18 million victory gardens out of a population of 140 million people. They really did represent a lot of land and a lot of labor.
In absolute numbers they allowed a 50% increase in total vegetable production over farms alone in the US. Fresh in this context referred to the amount of canning going on. So they made a very significant difference to diets of people domestically.
“The US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 20 million victory gardens were planted. Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables.” https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html
That’s 3 pounds per person per week, or 1/3 of the total 12lb of vegetables per person consumed per week.
I agree with you that we rely on industrial agriculture and the amount of space someone needs to fully feed themselves is larger than most peoples available space, but I and others totally reach for the shit we grow before resorting to buying in a store, I don’t know why you think that can’t subsidize some need for shipping food
For basics like potatoes, carrots, onions etc. this is possibly doable but it isn't going to replace a families worth of food. For an individual or a couple, maybe. But certainly not all year. If you use the old-school Australian "quarter acre block" you might do a families vegetables for part of the year.
As a supplement, it's worthwhile. As a substitute it's non viable.
I am here to tell you that these food miles and industrial material miles, were of deep concern and in the public discourse fifty years ago; and that my grandmother's brother told me that suburban housing patterns were of deep concern and in the public discourse seventy five years ago. The "markets" decided this course of action? many, many business people competitively won over others doing it differently. It was the winning by competition that was elevated. The results of the competition were "oh thats how it worked out".
A deep philosophical skepticism of central planning, a lust for industrial-scale profits, and the lessons of warfare where certain kinds of weapons won and the loser was dead forever; all contributed to this kind of decision-making contest. We live amidst the results now.
-- looking at their website I can see why this is his mindset - they appear to be extremely traditional - and his bio - well - the dude is ooolllddd --
After using the term spotted fucking moron, I don't mind anything else as I now have a new phrase I can borrow/steal/use to describe people of a certain type that couldn't be more appropriately named.
Why Federal? Under which Constitutional Authority would such a Federal law be placed?
Frankly a HUGE part of the problem we have today, including the ever increasing division is the federal government expansion in areas (like property use) never envisioned or authorized by the US Constitution
I would actually love for Congress to try that, it would give the Supreme Court a prime opportunity to Roll back the commerce clause or even completely undo Wickard like they did Roe...
I would love beyond all measure to see Wickard reversed
never envisioned or authorized by the US Constitution
Oh FFS. It's not religion, that's why it includes an amendment process. Constitutional fetishists are as bad as Marxists, having some good long-lasting principles is not the same as being right about everything and isn't a good excuse to overlook centuries' worth of additional insights because they don't fit neatly into the original codebase.
Sorry try again, 14th simply puts the same limits on state governments as the federal government, granting the people (all people) the more rights under their states then previously allowed since the federal constitution only applied to the federal government
The 14th amendment DID NOT expand the power of the federal government, it simply grated the federal courts authority to strike state laws using the federal constitution
No where in the 14th amendment does it claim what you imply
Let’s flip it. How do localities have the authority to prevent property owners to put solar on their own property? Why do local bullies have authority to remove freedom, but the state or feds don’t have the authority to protect freedom?
The tenth amendment to the US Constitution says that all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people.
So, under the US Constitution, state and local authorities can enact laws that the federal government cannot do anything about. The state governments absolutely have the power to prevent local governments from restricting the installation of solar panels.
Wait, what about “the people” part? The people just don’t have rights as long as there’s a local bully that wants to remove them? That doesn’t seem consistent or reasonable.
In our federalist system, outside the power granted to the federal government by the constitution, the State governments hold the most power
So a local government would have to be granted regulatory authority over solar by the State government, which could also remove that authority.
State governmental power are dictated by the State Constitutions, those things that people have largely forgotten about has a federal government as swallowed more and more power and authority. Each State has it own binding constitution granting it authority and powers over the people of that State.
> Imagine being so selfish that you are opposed to something that is objectively good for the world
A randomly selected house being covered in solar panels is not "objectively good for the world". Please do some research into energy production and distribution economics before having such a strongly-held opinion.
I don't think most solar & wind maximalists realize how little of the world is both optimal for solar panels AND located near a urban centre.
Having solar in the middle of the Sahara is utterly worthless because transmission makes it comically inefficient (beyond how inefficient solar is to begin with), and then you take another inefficiency tax storing it in batteries. Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas. Who knew humanity doesn't like living where the sun is baking them 18 hrs / day year round?
If only there were a very efficient, clean, and geographically-independent source of energy we could use that didn't depend on the weather or sun, and could be placed trivially near urban centres.
Like 90-95% of the world population lives at latitudes that get better solar resource than Northern Europe, such as Germany and most of the UK, etc.
The seasonality isn’t that great and you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars for my household of five.
And with tandem Si-perovskite cells commercialized over the next couple decades, etc, that amount could climb to ~20-30kW for the same roof, taking care of seasonality effects, etc, except at very high latitudes.
I love nuclear, too, but if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs, I don’t want any part of that.
> if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs
If this is the level of your discourse, why would you expect people to take your claims seriously?
> 15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars
You are aware that solar panels do not work at night? I.e. the time during which you would be most likely to heat your home and charge your car?
I mean, storing the solar in Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries in bulk only add a few cents to the cost of electricity. I even mentioned it earlier in my post, which you ignored:
> …you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.
But no point in doing that while solar penetration is low, which it still is in my area.
As far as level of discourse, yeah, that’s precisely my point. Claims like this are so far from true for the vast majority of the world that it lowers the level of discourse to misinformation and slander:
> … Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas.
We are counting the specific efficiency of the solar panel now to malign solar? And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible?
The proof is in the pudding. Even with all the structural headwind, people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power. Who is going to give you the $15B+ it takes to build your nuclear power plant that needs to run 50+ years when that's what is possible today? That's why no one is building them anymore - it's not plausibly ever going to make money.
> And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible
Why are you swearing - are you upset about this?
It's 0kW/m^2 at night.
> people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power
The key here is "majority". The remaining 20% or whatever is disproportionately expensive, and people who are using solar while connected to the grid are externalizing the vast majority of the negative costs of using solar to other grid participants.
If you need to generate 100% of your energy using solar, you need to significantly over-allocate and spend a huge amount on batteries. People who generate "most" of their power using solar would need to spend multiple times as much to go to 100% solar, so A) the approach doesn't scale and B) they're imposing a much higher marginal cost on the grid per joule consumed than a "normal" customer.
They will get more and more efficient. Now imagine someone saying Apple I / personal computers are close to useless because they are inefficient and only IBM datacenters can run serious programs and solve real world problems.
Preventing any house from utiliising solar has a direct and specific negative impact.
Even individual-choice solar deployments at small scale have benefits from a testing-and-development standpoint, increasing technical understanding of installation, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning.
> Preventing any house from utiliising solar has a direct and specific negative impact.
Domestic solar has an extremely tenuous value proposition. If you don't have batteries in your house, you're using the grid as an extremely inefficient subsidy for solar production/load mismatch (externalizing many costs). If you do have batteries in your house, it's more expensive (and less efficient) than using grid power.
Domestic solar is usually not a good thing compared to grid power, and any small marginal benefit may easily be outweighed by aesthetic costs.
In absolute magnitude, it's roughly equivalent to total built area, and dual-purposing land that's already dedicated to human use rather than appropriating crop or wild landscapes has its benefits.
Not all structures can be readily retrofit, but again, blanket prohibitions on aesthetic grounds seems exceedingly short-sighted and petty.
Are we talking about randomly selected houses? I believe the conversation is around large groups of houses utilizing solar and at that scale, it is objectively good.
No, it's not. Why would you make such a strong statement when you clearly haven't researched it? There are only a small number of climates where solar installations on homes already on the grid have an expected net positive social externality.
I remember how weird and out of place the first metal roof in the neighborhood looked. By the third, I didn't think anything of it. I assume solar panels become normal after a while in the same way.
The cheap metal roof types look bad the long sheets with high fastening ridges. But you can get metal rooves that look indistinguishable from slate or other materials.
It's a great idea to get a metal roof first then solar. Even the cheap ugly metal roof since the large ridges are great for attaching solar panels. Then in 20 or 30 years you don't have to remove the solar panels if you need to upgrade the shingles if you have metal roof.
I honestly wonder whether or not they should have named Landis in this article, because he could easily end up the target of a lot of abuse due to this article (and how it demonstrates that he is a complete knuckle dragging moron).
This is the incorrect response to this. A better response is how can you make architecture with solar panels more aesthetically pleasing. The half covered roof is objectively ugly. Leaf-like, self-standing panels look much better.
I bet early stoves were ugly too but kitchen appliances do have styles and they've gotten better with updates.
I don’t 100% disagree with this, but what was aesthetic today relied in part on the practical technology of the past. The instinct that everything should “look like what I am used to” is causing real harm for dubious benefits here. Roofs are infrastructure. Imagine if someone said that about bridges, preferring stone arches to steel cables and limiting us from making longer and safer bridges on those grounds.
I actually think the solution here is to have the people who care about this buy the roofs they want to look at, (possibly through the state if need be), pay to subsidize some kind of aesthetic compromise, or stop complaining.
I don't buy this. Tasteses are informed by what is common and what is common is so because of technical reasons, most of the time. Getting stuck in what is the current taste is myopic, we should focus on function.
Bias up front, I've signed a contract to have a Tesla solar tile roof go in later this summer at a significant premium and I do care about my house design while not denying the critical importance of getting the move to renewables happening as fast as possible. That said:
>Tasteses are informed by what is common and what is common is so because of technical reasons, most of the time.
I think you're making a mistake here in going to generalities over the specific area we are talking about: roofs on homes. And we have literally thousands and thousands of years of examples of lots of humans caring quite a bit about the look of bulk surfaces on their homes. All modern roofing materials properly installed will do the core job of keeping out the elements. But there are wide varieties of colors, styles, and types, not for technical reasons but because lots of humans care. They care about the siding material, about stain/paint and trim color details. Having nice patterns even just with concrete. Not everyone of course, but many. We've been decorating surfaces since we lived in caves! I think you're the one being myopic with your view of "function" that entire ignores form and a significant artistic impulse across our entire species.
So no, I think plain solar panels on roofs go against pretty fundamental instincts. They all look the same for starters, and they cannot be decorated or made individual in any significant way (obviously painting over them would largely defeat the purpose!). People certainly can tolerate stuff they don't like, or even outright hate, in the name of functionality. Lots of people live in architecture they dislike or even conditions they dislike because that's what they can afford (or that's what their job demands or whatever else). But I don't think you can honestly look at the vast array of buildings that are built and continuing development of design and then just claim all of that going away in favor of big uniform silicon panels on everything is simply "taste".
Also, there isn't in fact a technical reason for it. Highly customizable solar shingles are clearly technically possible and could be produced in bulk. It's not as if they require platinum group metals or something inherently expensive. If you really care about this as I do, then if aesthetics would accelerate tolerance of mass installation of solar power then that is absolutely something plans should take into account. On the scale of the kinds of subsidies we give to fossil fuels and the costs we're looking at for global warming impact effects, tens or even hundreds of billions down to speed things up and help with the human factor can be quite justifiable.
I think you have a some very good points, even if with some I don't agree with. I never claimed looks are not important, my claim is merely that functional design informs tastes, and things that are "ugly" can become pretty merely by being common and tastes changing. My stance is a bit shakier, nu I still think the underlying claim stands.
See also: the invention of “jaywalking” to criminalize pedestrians and elevate car traffic over foot traffic[1], and the successful effort to dismantle the US’s streetcar systems[2].
Jaywalking is an example of this power being used for good. Traffic flow is more important than being able to cross anywhere you want when we have crosswalks.
In New York and many other pedestrian-oriented cities around the world, more people get around via walking than driving for intra-city trips — the cars are the ones blocking traffic flow there.
Nevertheless, I’m of the persuasion that people who live in a neighborhood/city/region should be prioritized more for quality of life purposes than those merely passing through on a commute. Thus I would argue a pedestrian-hostile six lane road has no purpose going through a residential area, and in the same way I think there’s as many places where pedestrians should be prioritized highly above cars, such as neighborhoods, school zones, and dense commercial corridors.
There's a crosswalk at every intersection in New York. It would be unecessary and inefficient for the streets to be constantly crowded by pedestrians. The pedestrian's trip would be marginally faster while traffic would be backed up considerably.
"Traffic" has no inherent right to not be backed up.
If you are able to walk and you aren't carrying cargo, you should be walking. (EDIT: cyclists who can cycle at pedestrian-safe speeds are welcome, too!) The overwhelming majority of a city's residents fit into this category and the ridiculous amount of square footage allocated to car-asphalt is in defiance of this. And every able-bodied person who drives into the city for an office job should be dissuaded by geometrically increasing parking costs for increasing that unnecessary traffic load.
I live in on the edge of the suburbs and my car's gotten sixteen thousand miles on it in the last five years. Almost all of which is going to Home Depot and back or visiting people significantly outside of the city.
This is the sort of language we’re talking about: pedestrians aren’t (and rightfully wouldn’t be) “crowding” anyone. Pedestrians have been crowded onto sidewalks, to the advantage of a relatively small (and substantially less dense) class of drivers.
Driving in NYC should be a matter of necessity, not pure expedience. If and when our policies match that fact, those drivers that need to drive will find that they’re stuck in less traffic as a result.
Jaywalking has been exported to the rest of the world, but Tokyo is not a great example: they’ve successfully applied just about every urban design technique that allows cars and other traffic to coexist, to the uniform detriment of cars.[1]
In other words: the restrictions that Tokyo places on urban car traffic would make the average American driver scream bloody murder.
One could just as easily say that "[foot] traffic flow is more important than being able to [drive] anywhere you want", and in some locales that attitude may serve to benefit more people than the inverse. It's not a given that cars must be the default mode of transportation, but the idea that this _is_ a given is ingrained in the public conversation about infrastructure due to precisely the sort of propaganda the original commenter in this thread was talking about.
Nobody thinks that traffic flow isn’t important. What’s striking is the prioritization of one form of traffic over another, largely at the expensive of neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
I have seen it in action, though. PG&E bought enough propaganda to convince Yolo County not to switch to a public utility. They convinced everyone to take a worse deal that would cost more money, by repeating the lie so many times that the other side cost more. Most human brains are not equipped to make rational decisions, but simply make social decisions based on perception of group opinion.
As long as it’s possible for individuals to decide things via voting, there will be an incentive to convince those individuals to vote in particular ways.
I don’t get why this is hard to understand^W communicate.
Corporations have tens of billions to spend on marketing. To put things in perspective: what do regular people have in terms of a propaganda budget in order to target corporations?
The very fact that corporations have these kinds of budgets to just point at regular people—and regular people have no recourse other than “don’t be stupid”—betrays the fact that ours are democracies in name only.
If a nation had a population of millions and a handful of billionaires who just bought off the politicians then the real fundamental problem would be the massive wealth disparity, not the fact that the billionaires could de jure buy off politicians (they could have done that de facto if there was no such explicit law).
Am I supposed to respond to the collective opinion drift caused by a new person responding to me in this thread at every sub-level?
The original claim was that our brains are broken because we respond to propaganda. I don’t have the inclination to address the opposite claim as well.
One spectacular failure doesn't disprove the argument. If advertising weren't effective businesses and campaigns wouldn't spend money on it. You might as well argue that commerce isn't real because some products bomb and lose money.
Sure there are exceptions...to a degree. I never said money was the only factor. But those are poor examples because the other factors are unusual.
Trump was absolutely loathed, such that getting him out by any means far outweighed Biden's personal popularity for most people. Biden's slumping poll numbers indicate that he has little support in his own right.
AOC is unusually charismatic and youthful, in contrast to a somewhat dull middle-aged opponent that she defeated. But there were 3 other factors at play in that race: Crowley, the incumbent, had won his seat 20 years before in an open race following a retirement, the political equivalent of easy mode; the demographics of the district had changed during his tenure; and the DSA are decent organizers who took advantage of the general low turnout in NY Congressional primaries.
There are certainly lots of ways to overcome the influence of money on politics, but understating its influence is as naive as throwing in the towel when outfunded. Again, if things like advertising didn't work candidates wouldn't spend so much on it; and if money didn't matter political operators wouldn't put effort into pushing the legal envelope to allow more into a race.
Consider a recent case, in which Ted Cruz successfully sued the FEC to get rid of limits on the use of post-election fundraising to retire personal campaign debt (ie where a candidate loans money to their own campaign, which is not subject to campaign contribution limits). Cruz 'overpaid' by exactly $100, incurred a fine, and litigated the case. Previously, the limit of $250k in post-election fundraising put a ceiling on the amount of money a candidate would typically be willing lend to their own campaign; now you can raise any amount from your supporters after the election.
Going back to your first post, you could argue that bloomberg threw vast amounts of money into the race because he wasn't worried about being paid back. But that's kind of the point; Bloomberg spent $1 billion and people laughed, because there was wide public awareness that he's worth $82 billion so losing one of his 82 giga-bucks was not a big deal. He had big name recognition because of his news business, but not big personality recognition outside of NY, and his extreme willingness to self-fund ended up looking even more crass than Trump. This was the political equivalent of an army provisioned with a million swords but only 5000 swordsmen.
Corporations are run as command economies by a small handful of people. Corporations indirectly run society. Hence a small number of people run society. Which means that democracies are not run by the people. Hence democracy in name only.
Given the incentive structures of society, they pretty much do.
Employee tries to go against the flow? Management replaces them
Management tries to go against the flow? Ceo replaces them. Ceo tries to go against the flow? Board replaces them. Board member tries to go against the flow? They are outvoted or stock price crumbles.
Corporations? That hardly the case. People make up their own minds about green energy and make decisions about about voting themselves. People are seeing the affects right now of what happens when they vote for politicians that are doing their best to shut down oil - $6 a gallon gas.
It's amazing how stuck up people here on Hacker News are.
You've provided info on how Green Energy isn't green, as requested. You went far and beyond what they asked for and now they downvote you because it's inconvenient information.
Obvious China Shill is Obvious.
(China is the #1 beneficiary of Green Energy policy in the US, they buy off politicians to push this agenda so we are forced to buy Green Energy products that are only made in China currently)
Wow. I’m supposed to do a PHDs worth of work on a topic? I gave multiple arguments because the OP appeared to not now about the externalities of EV and the renewables in general. Love this site. The site of “science”.
Anyway, always found that interesting.