I'm in Perth. Our feed in tariff changed in July to 10c/kWh between 3pm and 9pm, and 2.5c/kWh at other times. Use tariff is 26.2c/kWh. I'm pretty sure our solar will pay itself back in under 5 years, but we have a 25 year warranty on the panels.
My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.
2.5c isn't great, but 5 years is. Shows its definitely worth it if you've got any kind of load during the day. Are you able to make any use of the peak rates after 3 over there?
From what I hear SA is one of the best places in the country to generate. Optimal temperature for the panels plus lots of sunlight. 8 years seems like nothing with the genny and battery. We tried but couldn't make the numbers work with any kind of decent backup, this was 3 years ago.
Dunno if your geographic size argument holds much water. Australia is about the same size as the continental US, but we always get lumped in as one entity. Canada appears to get the same treatment.
Population is a factor. Canada has slightly less population than California. Australia has less than Texas.
As I understand it the US states also have more legal autonomy and thus a lot wider divergence in local laws and policies compared to the internal divisions of most other countries (but I’m not an expert on that).
But my point was mostly psychology… whether they ought to or not, most Americans think of the state they live in as an important distinction, while my experience is that in most other countries that isn’t seen as very important.
You are right, it's OK to criticize the system, it's just frustrating for me as a Bitcoin holder to be criticized for Bitcoin using 0.1% of the worlds energy while for example for video gamers not getting the same criticism.
Take away Netflix, my car or social media from me, I don't care, I will live fine without them. But take away my Bitcoin and my life gets devastating, just like for other people who realized that their savings are done (I'm not afraid of Bitcoin going away though).
As for NFTs, sure, right now they are useless, but I see them as experiments for the future of digital ownership accounting in the future.
Bitcoin mining is a colossal waste of energy (given it's at about 1.2MWh currently to confirm a single transaction, and that number is basically nondecreasing). People playing video games are at least deriving some enjoyment from it. There are less wasteful methods of exchange than BTC.
> People playing video games are at least deriving some enjoyment from it
not that i believe in bitcoin, but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment? after all, enjoyment is subjective.
The problem with people claiming mining btc is a waste, is that they are attributing a set of moral and ethical rules that they themselves see as absolutely correct, and anyone who do not ascribe to those rules are scums.
>The problem with people claiming mining btc is a waste
It takes ~1.2 MWh to confirm a single transaction right now. My fridge at home consumes approx 300 kWh/year. Are you saying that a single BTC transaction verification provides anywhere near the utility as refrigerating food for four years?
Even comparing it to gaming, my desktop at home has a 650W PSU. It would take ~76 days of full power for that to consume as much energy as a single BTC transaction. There's orders of magnitude more energy being used by BTC, but I don't think there's orders of magnitude more benefits.
>but why can't they equivalently claim that mining bitcoins would derive enjoyment?
> Are you saying that a single BTC transaction verification provides anywhere near the utility as refrigerating food for four years?
judging by the price, yes it does apparently.
And that's where your opinion differs from mine - i don't place a utility judgement on the use of energy. If somebody is willing to pay for their use of electricity, they deserve to use it. As an outsider, i don't get to police anyone else's use of their electricity they pay for, no matter what i think of the actual use.
Of course, this presumes that the cost of the electricity is not somewhat externalized. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case today.
The transaction price does not reflect the true cost of the energy, nor does it reflect the negative externalities. When ~1/3 of BTC mining is powered by coal in Xinjiang, it's horrific for climate change (source: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env...). The power is cheap, in part because it does not include the externalities of the extreme CO2 emissions used to generate it.
>i don't place a utility judgement on the use of energy.
Attitudes like this are why staying under 2C of global warming is going to be a long shot at best.
>If somebody is willing to pay for their use of electricity, they deserve to use it.
A nice idea, but energy use affects us all. More fossil fuel burnt = more extreme climate change. For where I live, it means cyclones will hit land further away from the equator (and closer to larger population centres), overall rainfall will drop and bushfires will be more severe and frequent.
I feel justified in denigrating BTC because its colossal waste of power is a significant contribution to climate change. This has tangible harms to everyone on this planet.
It's absurd. repeating what I said elsewhere - my desktop at home has a 650W PSU. It would take ~76 days of full power for that to consume as much energy as a single BTC transaction.
>Please support this with data. It doesn't literally burn for it; fires are down, what, 90% from a century ago?
Got a source for the "fires are down 90%" statistic?
I think it's pretty clear that GP was referring to climate change, which wastes of energy like NFTs and BTC exacerbate. A side note - climate change means that bushfires are more common and their severity is worse than in the past. I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that the world burns for it.
Modulus (division) is slow and the length should be pow2 and the operation "& (len-1)". If you do %len, you have far greater issues. I have pretty extensive experience writing hashmap/cyclic buffers and the like. If you have auto-grow structs (and you almost always want that), you want pow2 length arrays. e.g.
This is entirely orthogonal to whether you do "prev+1 & len-1" or "(prev & len-1) + 1". (In fact, the latter gives a more natural construction if you fill downward.)
Adding/advancing is indeed easier. What about going backwards (insert before head or remove from tail), i.e when 0, then length. One way to do it is something like that, assume 2 compliment and there is negative shift left available. Not straightforward:
int h = ( -(--head) >>> 31) ^ 1;//if head was equal to 1 (and only 1), h = 1, otherwise zero
head += h * len; //or shift left, if there is log2 len available; still, mul is a fast operation, unlike div
Of course, it can implemented via branching but that would be a major downside for 1-based idx.
Labour theory of value contends that the value of an object depends on the "congealed human labour" in that object (e.g. a chair is worth more than its constituent timber because the chair requires you exert additional labour on that timber).
Intrinsic theory of value says that some objects have some objective value, inherent in the object (or as a property of that object, like mass).
Subjective theory of value basically says "value is in the eye of the beholder".
There is also exchange theory of value, which is similar to subjective value. An object has a value decided by what it can be exchanged with (e.g. 2 square metres of linen might be worth the same as 1 coat, even though the coat only has 1 square metre of linen in it)
Surely there are many factors that would drive that. Widespread availability of inexpensive guns being only one. Punishments for unlawful possession being another that vary wildly across the globe.
My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.