Boomers grew up in a world with a 91% top-tier income tax rate that drove businesses to spend their excess income on products and services, which became their parents’ paychecks.

I never got beyond proof of concept, and definitely didn’t keep any documentation.

I used voip.ms as a VPN trunk provider. They handled the incoming and outgoing calls to/from the PSTN, connecting them to my server.

If you’re not familiar with Tasker, I wholeheartedly endorse it. I thought it was a little unintuitive at first, but I use it for all kinds of things now.

I had a setup with a remote Asterisk server, and a Tasker app on my phone.

If I pressed a button on the phone, it placed a call to the Asterisk server, which dumped the call into a recorded conference room.

That was simple enough. The fun part happened next. The cops are always shown telling stopped subjects to stop recording and hang up phones. They’ll take the phone out of your hand, and attempt to delete recordings. I wanted to address that.

I worked out a script on the Asterisk server where if the phone hung up, it would immediately dial back, and dump the call right back in the recorded conference room. Tasker on the phone would silently answer a call from that number.

That was about as far as I got. I had planned on some way of the asterisk server dialing a contact list and adding them to the conference.

I didn’t even know I needed to edit my prompt, but now I don’t know how I have lived with it for so long.

You can even add a search plugin directly in the client.

Huh. Well, that’ll make things easier.

Not all providers deserve your business.

Try Briar.

Are there any car infotainment systems that aren’t complete shit?

Absolutely.

The infotainment system in my car consists of a glass-mount phone holder that turns the in-panel display from a worthless piece of glass into a convenient spot to rest my phone while I drive. A+, 10/10, would highly recommend.

(I did mount it on the corner of the display, but I don’t actually use the built-in system. Haven’t even bothered to get the backup camera replaced since it stopped working.)

All those old games: Wolf3D, Mario Bros…

I found this: https://bluewallet.io/watch-only/

Since it doesn’t use the wallet’s private address, you should be able to use any public address, and not just an address for your own wallet.

I believe you mean “Black-Breasted Yellow Tit”

does mean that you shouldn’t give him a pass

Understood, and agreed. Not giving him a pass at all.

Energy generation: The sunlight isn’t changing nor is the solar installation’s size.

I do not accept the premise that the “solar installation’s size” is not changing. Quite the contrary, I am calling for it it increase. A lot. (All of this applies to wind as well, but for simplicity, I’m going to focus on solar alone. We need more wind, and more wave, tidal, etc.) One of the factors I am trying to address is suboptimal generation conditions: overcast skies and seasonal variations reducing expected output. Overbuilding solar production relative to demand means that normal demand can still be met under less than ideal conditions.

you’d still need the factories to be willing to take on the increased energy costs associated with moving into the more expensive energy window.

I do not accept the premise that the new window is more expensive. We are already regularly experiencing negative rates in these windows because demand is not high enough to match existing production, let alone the increased production I am calling for. These negative rates are extraordinarily bad for continued solar development; they cannot be allowed to continue. That means we either slow/stop expanding solar, or we drive existing and/or new demand to daylight hours.

Slowing solar rollout is not at all an option, so we are left with some variety of demand shaping.

It is important to note that the underlying reason rates are actually going negative is because baseload generators can’t roll back their output to match daily demand curves. They have to stay online, and at high output levels to be able to meet (artificially inflated) overnight demand. If they tried to roll back, they would not be able to roll forward fast enough. Removing that excess overnight demand would allow them to lower their total output. The least efficient baseload generators are coal-fired; with less overnight demand, some of these remaining coal-fired plants can be retired.

Making the change you and OP are referring to works in a bubble but not in the way you are envisioning it.

The missing component is elastic demand. Bitcoin has some serious negative connotations, and I am not recommending this as a specific example of what we should be adding. Rather, I ask you consider only the nature of the load: they are turning electricity into money, and they can only do that profitably at certain price points.

Consider massive data centers on highly variable rate plans. They fall well below the rates that regular consumers would pay when there is a surplus. But, they also rise far above market rates when there is a shortage. A Bitcoin miner operating on such a plan would shut down when their instantaneous costs rise above their expected returns.

Consider a data center with its own solar facility supplementing the power they draw from the grid. What will this facility do when the instantaneous price of power exceeds their rate of return? Will the continue to draw power at a loss? Will they reduce their demand and continue operating solely on their own solar generation? Or, will they shut down their miners entirely, and use their solar to backfeed the grid at that high price point?

Another possible flexible load is desalination: don’t try to store the power; use the power when it is available, and store the desalinated water instead.

Hydrogen electrolysis is another option. It’s not particularly efficient, but when you can get the power at a heavily discounted rate, the effective economic efficiency may be high enough to justify it. Don’t try to store the power; store the hydrogen instead.

Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon synfuel production is yet another option: don’t try to store the power; store the generated fuel.

AI is another (controversial) option. Perform the energy-intensive training operations when power is cheap, and suspend processing when rates rise.

All of these operations may need to be under the control of the grid provider, to provide sufficient incentive for them to be shut down when production falls unexpectedly.

Uh huh. But here, you’re burning down the house because it has a leaky faucet.

Authoritarian bullshit is a completely unreasonable response to this problem.

But you did understand the “burn down the house” part, right? Because that’s all I really need from you.

Trying to fix the climate with authoritarianism is roughly comparable to fixing a leaky faucet by burning down the house.

Op believes that energy storage shouldn’t be necessary. At all.

Yes, that is one of the ludicrous arguments that I acknowledged OP is making.

Storage - or a buffer if you will - is simply a requirement of many systems.

Agreed. As I said: “Yes, we need storage to match the imbalance between generation and demand. But it is far more important that we minimize that imbalance first.”

Demand shaping when we’re taking about the grid is largely the result of seasons,

No. You are describing one type of demand shaping, but it is not the only one, and it is not the type I am referring to. “Time of use” plans are another type that consumers are more aware of. I’m referring to the industrial version of TOU rate plans.

I am saying that these varieties of demand shaping are currently setup to support traditional nuclear/coal baseload generation, rather than solar/wind. They are currently designed to increase the minimum, overnight load on the grid. They are currently used lower peak demand, and raise the trough.

Those TOU plans need to shift to driving consumption to daylight hours: To maximize the amount of power consumed as it is generated, and thus minimizing the need for storage.

for them to be right we’d need to live in some utopia with vastly different technologies that we have presently.

Only if we are trying to get every consumer to participate. We don’t actually need to do that.

This is just factually ridiculous.

Filling a reservoir during the day to run a steel mill overnight is a complete waste of a reservoir: move the steel mill to daytime hours and you don’t need the reservoir.

This isn’t a logical comparison.

Dude. We are already doing exactly that. We have grid storage facilities being charged by solar power during the day and discharging overnight. We also have steel mills and aluminum smelters paying lower rates to operate overnight rather than during the day, to meet the needs of baseload generators.

But ultimately, the solar, nuclear/coal, storage, and steel plants are all on the same grid. So we are, effectively, doing exactly what I said: running the steel mills with stored solar power. Yes, there are legitimate reasons for doing it this way, but those reasons are ultimately based on legacy issues.

To continue the shift from traditional coal/nuclear baseload generation to solar/wind, we either need enough storage to run the steel mills overnight, or we need to shift the mills to daytime operation.

Again: Storage is important, yes. But, demand shifting is far more important.

further: the above statement doesn’t clearly understand or solve for over generation vs under generation.

Filling a reservoir during the day to run a steel mill overnight is a complete waste of a reservoir: move the steel mill to daytime hours and you don’t need the reservoir.

And yet, we are doing this now: We are driving consumption to overnight hours that can’t possibly be met by solar. We are offering cheap “off peak” power, and incentivizing overnight consumption.

We do have good reason for it: we need that excess overnight demand to improve the efficiency of our base load generation. But, those same incentives are killing solar/wind efficiency and artificially increasing the need for storage.

Yes, we need storage to match the imbalance between generation and demand. But it is far more important that we minimize that imbalance first.

Shifting demand to time of production (demand shaping) is much more efficient than shifting production to time of demand (storage).

OP’s position is rather ludicrous for a number of reasons, but they are not wrong on this particular point.

We need an authoritarian figure

No. We absolutely do not need that.

Mechanical energy storage, like pumped hydro or flywheel. Thermal energy storage, like molten salt.

Electrochemical isn’t entirely off the table either: less-volatile chemistries are available, and better containment methods can reduce risks.

Non-electrical chemical storage methods are available: electrical energy can be used for hydrogen electrolysis, or Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbon fuels. Fuel cells, and traditional ICE generators can recover the energy put into those (relatively) stable fuels, or we can export it from the electrical generation industry to the transportation industry.

There’s also avoiding (or minimizing) the need for storage at all, with “demand shaping”. Basically, we radically overbuild solar, wind, wave, tidal, etc. Normally, that would tank energy prices and be unprofitable, but we also build out some massive, flexible demand to buy this excess power. Because they are extremely overbuilt, the minimal output from these sources during suboptimal conditions is more than enough to meet normal demands; we just shut off the flexible additional demand we added. We “shape” our “demand” to match what we are able to supply.

Nobody’s ever died from a dam collapse.