Yes, any landfill of any size is going to clean this up a bit and run it through a generator. They can get contracts from the utility to use so much power per week (whatever the tank capacity iso and since the utility controls when it is on (that is when other renewables are low) they get a higher price. The details are complex, but thus is very valuable green renewable (we can debate how green and renewable eslewhere) energy to a utility.
At some sites, the methane is burned in gas engine to generate electricity. Some sites build a CHP and resales the heat for district heating. The engines may need more maintenance due to silicate in the gas.
There used to be a huge flare at a landfill near here but at some point they redirected it to energy generation, around 200-250kWe from gas that was just going to waste before then.
> If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation we instead target low positive inflation.
I don't think this is quite right. My understanding is that a low positive inflation would be targeted anyway, because it stimulates the velocity of money; i.e. there's a downside to hoarding, since you need to beat inflation to come out on top. So people will be willing to invest to at least some extent in risk assets, or to buy things now rather than later.
Which, yes, makes inflationary spirals possible, but they've proven less damaging. The inflation numbers seen in regimes that actually collapsed as a result are absolutely dizzying; whereas the deflation seen in the Great Depression was... significant, but not nearly comparable.
The main advantage to keeping inflation as low as possible but positive is also that it makes interest rates cheaper. Individuals are incentivized to spend when there's inflation, but banks have a harder time writing loans because the interest rate on the loan is the product of inflation and the bank's desired ROI.
Low interest rates are a good thing because they allow people to explore new ideas and new businesses - the entire modern tech industry would not exist without ZIRP because the scale of investments has only gone up as technology has advanced.
> Individuals are incentivized to spend when there's inflation
That's not what's happening currently. Inflation has driven up prices to the point where people can't afford to spend. They're forced to cut back on spending just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Inflation promises that things are cheaper now than they ever will be, but that just means that anything you can't afford you either have to go without or take an even bigger hit to your wallet after trying to save money at a rate faster than prices are increasing. That sort of thing leads to less spending.
Credit cards were the solution for many Americans for a very long time, but that was never sustainable and now the US has record amounts of household debt and homelessness.
Deflation makes things more affordable and so people buy more. Yes, they could horde all their wealth, but you can't eat money and it isn't much fun. When times are good why would anyone bother going without when they can easily get what they want today. Consumerism is strong enough to keep people buying things. Decreasing prices gives consumers confidence that they can make risky purchases and investments.
The text you quoted is not an example of the trope you highlighted. It genuinely comes across like you're calling it LLM generated purely because of the "em-dash", except it isn't even an em-dash.
> I wonder how well it would work to use AI as a front end to Band-in-a-Box?
Wow, I haven't heard that name since... well, since the software was relatively new.
I do like the idea of an AI music tool that lets you have that kind of workflow, choosing a level of granularity (and, presumably, being able to edit the intermediate results etc.).
Depends what you mean by "succeed". Commercial viability for anything remotely approaching the design intent of SO is probably impossible. But anyone can just start building a useful Q&A database and hope others stumble on it. The point is that experts, who have been through many years of trying to help beginners in the pre-LLM era, also know what questions to ask, and how to phrase them, and how to disentangle the concerns that beginners have.
Or at least they should. I think too many people get into a routine of letting themselves get angry about the repetitiveness of the questions they're answering, and then somehow getting addicted to that.
Yes, and it's good that you found some quick answers. That was the point of the expectations placed on questions. A good question that can help other people is often fundamentally hard to ask, even for trivial topics.
Question protection sets a barrier at 10 reputation, which you can get from a single upvote on an existing answer, or from five approved edits to existing questions or answers. Further, it would only be applied to questions that had already been answered repeatedly, specifically because the question was attracting redundant answers that weren't adding any more value.
I can absolutely say that "I couldn't answer the question first" is not a motive people had for closing questions. That would have been abusive and definitely something that moderators would follow up on and deal with to whatever tiny extent it happened.
I can say extremely confidently from years of experience that the people who were always "trying to be the first to answer your question" were, overwhelmingly, the ones trying hardest not to let anyone ever close anything, even harder than the most aggrieved newbies asking questions and not caring about the underlying community. Nobody sits around answering multiple questions a day for years on end, purely on intrinsic motivation. I joined in late 2010 and posted answers all the way until mid-2023, but fully half of those were before the end of 2012. There are reasons for that. Meanwhile, there are people with reputation scores in the seven digits, even though the site awards no further privileges past 25,000. The obvious conclusion is that we're primarily talking about people primarily motivated by Number Go Up, and closing questions is an impediment to Number Go Up, so it must be prevented at all costs.
Questions get closed for the reasons that are listed in the interface for closing questions, which are also described in the Help Center and also explained in detail on meta (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476). When questions don't meet the expected standards, it's important to close them as quickly as possible; because when people answer questions that should be closed, they are actively making the site worse (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808). And since there will always be people around who are motivated by Number Go Up, there was value in preempting them.
Really the system was poorly designed. The Staging Ground was the one shining beacon of hope, because it inherently prevented answers by default, providing only a comment thread with the explicit purpose of fixing issues with the question so that it could meet site standards.
You are complaining about counterfactuals. Nobody is bullying anyone; the people active on meta aren't "chasing away" users (almost no users actually come to meta in the first place, the big names don't do a lot of personal interaction and when they do they don't leave comments unless they can be exceedingly polite about it); all that's happening is that with LLMs people finally have the thing they wanted all along[0] so they no longer have to keep coming to SO demanding it to be that thing when it was very explicitly designed the entire time not to be that thing, specifically so that experts wouldn't have to waste their time when they try to make the world better on a volunteer basis[1].
But most importantly: the site does not even remotely in any imaginable way empower those users. It actively hinders them, the staff have berated them over the years over alleged "unfriendliness"[2] and they constantly dump their ideas on the meta site, then ignore all feedback and push their ideas through anyway.
The main site is noticeably slower now. As far as I can tell, this is because they've taken code paths that the beta uses (especially whatever it is they use to load the code boxes and put a little JS widget at the top of them) and applied them back to the main site that worked perfectly well before.
[0] Basically: a magic robot that can listen to them and try to suggest an answer one on one, without caring about whether literally anyone else on the planet could benefit from that exchange, because the robot can tirelessly do that for the next person.
[1] I.e., so that humans could say something once and actually have it be relevant to many people.
[2] I.e.: the company makes money from views and a lot of people don't want to view a site where they have to actually meet any kind of standard whatsoever to participate; so it's the fault of people who have an actual vision for the site being useful.
As someone who had a fast high engagement for some time and then have dropped away, asking very few questions in that time, I disagree. I have seen far to many marked as duplicate for things that aren’t, nagging about rules and unsuitable questions instead of helpfulness and general allowing of some users to despise beginners without any consequences.
When I ask someone for an example, 90% just can't provide even one. From the remaining 10%, about two thirds are cases where it's very clear why the question was moderated. In another third it's questionable and can go either way.
Can useful energy be recovered from this?
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