From techkoenig at protonmail.com Sat Feb 1 02:29:59 2025 From: techkoenig at protonmail.com (Ben Koenig) Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2025 02:29:59 +0000 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] keithl via gmail, until I upgrade my systems and fix outbound In-Reply-To: References: <00c201db72cb$452fa700$cf8ef500$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: On Thursday, January 30th, 2025 at 10:35 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > Thanks, but I hope to have Postfix running on my Debian machines Real Soon > Now. With access to the PLUG lists, I can ask occasional dumb questions > ... which I recall asking decades ago, when I set up Postfix and > Spamassassin and Mutt and vim on CentOS for the first time. Most of my > questions will be about certifications and similar required proofs of > civilized non-spammer intent. Woah there. I must inform you that Real Soon Now (TM) is trademarked part of the Slackware release cycle. If you insist on using it, you will have to install at Slackware on at least one computer. > > BTW, my new outside-facing mail relay will be a Debian virtual at > Rimuhosting (replacing an ancient CentOS instance). If I get stuck, their > team fixes simple stuff for free, and I can pay them USD $120/hr for > complex solutions. I presume there are expert PLUG members who can also > help, perhaps for $$$, but if they are "Keith Packard excellent", they will > charge more. My experience with most paid helpers is that they pee in the > soup until they like the flavor, instead of tailoring the user interface > the way I'm used to. > > I'm 71 yo. What I understand about aging memory is that "peels backwards" > towards earlier memories. Old dogs, old tricks. My M.D. wife will keep us > alive for a LONG time; her father is still alive at age 106. He can't use > a computer any more, but still uses his hand tools (note: his wedding > present for my wife was teaching her to operate a bulldozer). I ponder his > example when I plan my future. > > I've used vi (aka "ed" visual mode) since Bill Joy wrote it in the > computer lab across the hall from my lab in Cory Hall at U.C. Berkeley. I > expect that vi (and FORTRAN, sigh) will be the last skills to go. Hence vi > and mutt (plus well documented underlayers) instead of GUI mail browsers > and goddam top posting for life (I dislike the way this gmail interface > auto-tragically top posts), and doesn't have familiar vi keyboard control > key navigation). ed gets installed by default on all my computers :) root at cesium:~# slackpkg info ed NOTICE: pkglist is older than 24h; you are encouraged to re-run 'slackpkg update' PACKAGE NAME: ed-1.21-x86_64-1.txz PACKAGE LOCATION: ./slackware64/a PACKAGE SIZE (compressed): 64 K PACKAGE SIZE (uncompressed): 140 K PACKAGE DESCRIPTION: ed: ed (text editor) ed: ed: GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant implementation ed: of the standard Unix line editor. These days, full-screen editors ed: have rendered 'ed' mostly of historical interest. Nonetheless, it ed: appeals to a handful of aging programmers who still believe that ed: "Small is Beautiful". ed: Package: ed-1.21-x86_64-1 Repository: slackware64 Path: ./slackware64/a/ed-1.21-x86_64-1.txz Url: http://lodestone/mirror/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/a/ed-1.21-x86_64-1.txz > > But enough blather. I appreciate your offer; perhaps as you age we can > find an impressionable young geek helper to help each of us do our things > "our way". My current day job involves installing data center infrastructure and wrapping velcro around bundles of cat6 cable. As such it does not require any sort of cognitive investment which leaves my biochemical compute resources available for.... other... tasks. -Ben From keith.lofstrom at gmail.com Wed Feb 5 19:39:26 2025 From: keith.lofstrom at gmail.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2025 11:39:26 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] keithl via gmail, until I upgrade my systems and fix outbound In-Reply-To: References: <00c201db72cb$452fa700$cf8ef500$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: On Fri, Jan 31, 2025 at 6:30?PM Ben Koenig wrote: > Woah there. I must inform you that Real Soon Now (TM) is trademarked part > of the Slackware release cycle. If you insist on using it, you will have to > install at Slackware on at least one computer. > "Real Soon Now" was popularized by my "frenemy" Jerry Pournelle in Byte Magazine for more than a decade before Patrick Volkerding created Slackware in 1993. Jerry and I sometimes shared breakfast at science fiction conventions. We disagreed about many things, but we both agreed that slandering my views should be done with style and panache. He wasn't as flexible as some of my ideological sparring partners; my friend Chris R. and I would argue in front of friends, then seamlessly switch sides in the middle of the argument. This was part of a general program we called "freaking the mundanes". Sadly, my 71yo brain has grown too ossified for full-speed 180? turns; I must now rely on the kindness of strangers to perform such shenanigans stylishly and lovingly. I may have enough brain cycles left to "install at Slackware" on a spare computer after Debian is humming along; if the distros differ radically enough, the Slackware machine may still be functional after all the Debian machines are powned. BTW, I must ask ... is "Ben Koenig" your parent's idea, or is it a pseudonym inspired by M. W. Craven novels? Keith Hardy Lofstrom (last name inspired by Swedish L?fstr?m ancestors, middle name from my Texas grandfather, first name I never thought to ask. Past pseudonyms include "Cletus Nerd") From rshepard at appl-ecosys.com Wed Feb 5 19:57:06 2025 From: rshepard at appl-ecosys.com (Rich Shepard) Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2025 11:57:06 -0800 (PST) Subject: [PLUG-TALK] keithl via gmail, until I upgrade my systems and fix outbound In-Reply-To: References: <00c201db72cb$452fa700$cf8ef500$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 5 Feb 2025, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > "Real Soon Now" was popularized by my "frenemy" Jerry Pournelle in Byte > Magazine Yep. That's where I picked it up, too. Rich From keithl at keithl.com Sun Feb 9 23:45:05 2025 From: keithl at keithl.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Sun, 9 Feb 2025 15:45:05 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth Message-ID: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> Foolish politicians preach tariffs on China-manufactured goods, which presumably includes desktop and tower "P.C." motherboards. This is intended to promote US manufacture, although the only "manufacturing" most politicians can do is the production of fake "facts". The Trumpy proprietor of one local computer repair shop told me "there are plenty of idle factories ready to make motherboards." "PC" motherboards are COMPLEX. ALL (except PERHAPS military motherboards) are made with Chinese chips and components. Motherboards can fail; I keep spares, just in case. Only ONE motherboard manufacturer, Corvalent near Austin Texas, supposedly makes the circuit boards and populates them with those foreign chips, capacitors, etc. I purchased two used Corvalent motherboards for my spare supply. I counted 40 tiny surface mount VLSI components on the board, NOT counting the socketed Intel CPU and US sourced RAM sticks. ALL those components are Chinese, mostly but not entirely Taiwan. Most of the connectors (RAM sockets, power sockets, etc.) do not show manufacturer IDs, but those are presumably made in Asia, as they have been for decades. I've worked for (and consulted for) U.S. electronic system manufacturers for half a century, and watched them decay to nothing, not much better than the competitors that I could not help, due to onerous NDAs. Turning a potato chip factory into a computer chip factory is a decade-long project (for example Micron Semiconductor in Idaho), and requires the creation of hundreds of support companies and the training of thousands of technicians to /maybe/ produce a product, much less produce a profit and a return on investment. Intel in Hillsboro took decades to grow from their first factory in Aloha, and that was in "fertile soil" plowed by Tektronix, Floating Point Systems, and dozens of other established electronics manufacturing companies in Washington County. Today, Intel is struggling, and the 300 or so vendors feeding technology to Intel fabs are struggling as well. Many of the tasks Intel super-CPUs used to perform are now spread over a VAST number of handhelds, or are performed by graphics co-processors like nVidia (chips from PRC and Taiwan). So what will happen if 2025 tariffs follow the same course as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930? Those were supposed to encourage US manufacturing and remedy the 1928 stock market crash; instead, those idiotic tariffs extended that crash for another decade. World War II created demand, built new factories, and enlisted 12% of the US population in the armed forces. It also created nuclear weapons, so that World War III will NOT be an option for economic recovery. ( FEAR FACT: The incremental cost of one additional mass-produced nuclear warhead is 8 labor hours. ) Anyway - things could get BAD for the next few years. If the technology adepts of PLUG work their asses off, we might be able to help our Oregonian neighbors endure the rest of this decade with slightly less pain. I'd like to write "prosper", and share some product ideas that would create jobs and profits, but if I do so on this list (rather than private meetings at Intel and elsewhere), I expect that PRC entrepreneurs will implement them and corner the market first. I wish good things for those entrepreneurs, but I wish GREAT things for my friends and neighbors. If there are Intel people reading this, I'm ready to sign some "conditional" non-disclosure statements to share my ideas. Not "for free"; I don't need to get paid for my ideas, but I want my partners to train and pay hundreds of Oregonians to develop them. Not just more patents to suppress other potential employers and products. Been there, done that, lost startups to patent trolls. Conditional: if the conversations don't lead to action, I reserve the right to share my ideas with more aggressive companies elsewhere in the U.S. At least /some/ of that will help my friends and neighbors in Oregon. Does anyone else want to help build the connections and collaborations to do this? Learning and long hours required. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From tedm at portlandia-it.com Tue Feb 11 05:07:53 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:07:53 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> There's zero chance that any Trump tariffs are going to stimulate the growth of on-US-soil chipmaking. Any investor looking to drop 4-6B into a fab is going to expect at least a decade of returns. Probably longer. Their fab will start out making CPUs then as time passes and newer CPUs are made with newer tech they will make cheaper CPUs that get used in DVD players and Microwaves and so on and so on until a decade after construction they will be wringing the last drops out of their investment making chips for garage door openers. But, ALL the investors expect Trump & Co to burn out. They know that the biggest reason the MAGgots got elected was due to the inflationary spike after COVID. They know that there was nothing Biden could have done to prevent that spike because you had tons of people WFH and saving money on gasoline and such allowing that money to build up in savings and pay off credit card debt and so on - and when the pandemic abated people were like "Damn I've saved enough now I'm gonna SPEND" They know that Ma and Pa Kettle don't understand any of this they are just pissed off that the price of eggs jumped. And that happened during the runup to the 2024 election so the Democrats got blamed and the Republicans took advantage. And even the Republicans know this which is why they are just outright destroying stuff. The Billionaires expect in 4 years the MAGGots who voted for Trump will be burned by Trump & Co enough to throw them out of office - so any tariffs that are there to promote the US chip market growing - will be tossed aside. This is not an environment you need to re-grow US chipmaking. So it just isn't going to grow at all. It's been years since I bought anything from a local computer repair shop. They don't have the selection and Amazon's 2 days away. If anything the Trumpy owner of a local computer repair shop is just counting on motherboard prices skyrocketing so that people will try nursing their own crap a few more years. But I just don't see it happening. When I can go on Back Market and buy a generation 10 core i7 for $400 the entire business of wringing the last drop out of computer hardware goes out the window. Today I'm throwing away stacks of Core i5 generation 4 Small Form Factor gear that runs perfect with the exception that it's too slow for win 11. 16GB ram and everything. High end Elitedesks not that crap Lenovo or Dell stuff. Tariff's only apply to NEW pcs and the Fortune 500 are all on 3 year forklift turnaround schedules. They WILL pay the tariffs for the next 4 years because that will only be 1 cycle of desktops for their users. And the secondary market will continue to be flooded with off-lease gear that is ridiculously cheap because there's just too much of it out there. The reason Intel is struggling is simple and obvious. When Bill Gates (as he did last week) started singing the praises of Pat Gelsinger, you know for damn sure that this is why Intel is having problems - their board didn't move fast enough to fire Pat. If you really want to know who the morons are in High Tech - look at who Bill Gates is praising. Notice that the current Microsoft company really wants nothing at all to do with the guy. They are not stupid. People need to understand something critical about the computer market. It is the same thing that happened to the automobile market. Let me ask you all - how long was a typical model T expected to last? 30-50k miles, that is all How long is a typical car sold today expected to last? 200k miles that is how long. I have owned many cars since I was 20 years old and all of the modern "daily drivers" lasted 200k. Anything made in the 1900's in general - with the exception of outlier models - lasted that long. The automotive industry had to get used to product cycles that were longer and longer and longer. Do you honest-to-God expect that the average lifespan of a desktop computer will only ever be 3 years? Why is it that you think consumers will tolerate this? They will not. If the computer industry wants to keep selling PC's that only last 3 years they MUST make them cheaper. Otherwise if they can't - because of tariffs, or because their own business plans demand 3 year End Of Life - then they are GOING to get schooled by consumers. Microsoft figured this out. That's WHY they released Microsoft Office 2024 LTSC 4 months ago. That is NOT a subscription product - it's a FIVE YEAR lifespan product. Not 3 years. And LTSC's license IS PERPETUAL. So if you buy it today and you want to use it for the next decade - noproblemo. You can. Microsoft knows this. They know that people are STILL running Windows 10 on 10 year old hardware. They know people are running 8 year old copies of MS Office. They know that consumers won't accept this magical 3 year replacement scheme that Intel and Apple have been banking on. They know consumers won't accept continuous subscriptions. They are hedging their bets. Like Ford, when it watched the Model T disappear and be replaced by vehicles with engines that lasted longer - and it too redesigned their engines and got rid of the "Flatties" and made longer lasting engines - this is how things work in a mature industry. Tariffs are NOTHING. So OK the Trumpers and Magaoots are going to slap a 40% tariff on the new $1000 PC I buy. No big deal. I just won't get rid of it in 3 years. I'll get rid of my $1400 PC in 5 years. Not 3. Wow - I just dropped the 1 year cost of my PC from $333.00 to $280. If you don't understand how I did that you are as stupid about mathematics as the Magaots are. If you REALLY want to "bring back" the chip industry - then the Magoots need to be in power 20 years - and they need to institute 200% tariffs on chips. And there's no possible way that will happen. Even the Magots don't believe they will be in power that long. That's why they are doing a smash-and-grab on the government. Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG-talk On Behalf Of Keith Lofstrom Sent: Sunday, February 9, 2025 3:45 PM To: plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth Foolish politicians preach tariffs on China-manufactured goods, which presumably includes desktop and tower "P.C." motherboards. This is intended to promote US manufacture, although the only "manufacturing" most politicians can do is the production of fake "facts". The Trumpy proprietor of one local computer repair shop told me "there are plenty of idle factories ready to make motherboards." "PC" motherboards are COMPLEX. ALL (except PERHAPS military motherboards) are made with Chinese chips and components. Motherboards can fail; I keep spares, just in case. Only ONE motherboard manufacturer, Corvalent near Austin Texas, supposedly makes the circuit boards and populates them with those foreign chips, capacitors, etc. I purchased two used Corvalent motherboards for my spare supply. I counted 40 tiny surface mount VLSI components on the board, NOT counting the socketed Intel CPU and US sourced RAM sticks. ALL those components are Chinese, mostly but not entirely Taiwan. Most of the connectors (RAM sockets, power sockets, etc.) do not show manufacturer IDs, but those are presumably made in Asia, as they have been for decades. I've worked for (and consulted for) U.S. electronic system manufacturers for half a century, and watched them decay to nothing, not much better than the competitors that I could not help, due to onerous NDAs. Turning a potato chip factory into a computer chip factory is a decade-long project (for example Micron Semiconductor in Idaho), and requires the creation of hundreds of support companies and the training of thousands of technicians to /maybe/ produce a product, much less produce a profit and a return on investment. Intel in Hillsboro took decades to grow from their first factory in Aloha, and that was in "fertile soil" plowed by Tektronix, Floating Point Systems, and dozens of other established electronics manufacturing companies in Washington County. Today, Intel is struggling, and the 300 or so vendors feeding technology to Intel fabs are struggling as well. Many of the tasks Intel super-CPUs used to perform are now spread over a VAST number of handhelds, or are performed by graphics co-processors like nVidia (chips from PRC and Taiwan). So what will happen if 2025 tariffs follow the same course as the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930? Those were supposed to encourage US manufacturing and remedy the 1928 stock market crash; instead, those idiotic tariffs extended that crash for another decade. World War II created demand, built new factories, and enlisted 12% of the US population in the armed forces. It also created nuclear weapons, so that World War III will NOT be an option for economic recovery. ( FEAR FACT: The incremental cost of one additional mass-produced nuclear warhead is 8 labor hours. ) Anyway - things could get BAD for the next few years. If the technology adepts of PLUG work their asses off, we might be able to help our Oregonian neighbors endure the rest of this decade with slightly less pain. I'd like to write "prosper", and share some product ideas that would create jobs and profits, but if I do so on this list (rather than private meetings at Intel and elsewhere), I expect that PRC entrepreneurs will implement them and corner the market first. I wish good things for those entrepreneurs, but I wish GREAT things for my friends and neighbors. If there are Intel people reading this, I'm ready to sign some "conditional" non-disclosure statements to share my ideas. Not "for free"; I don't need to get paid for my ideas, but I want my partners to train and pay hundreds of Oregonians to develop them. Not just more patents to suppress other potential employers and products. Been there, done that, lost startups to patent trolls. Conditional: if the conversations don't lead to action, I reserve the right to share my ideas with more aggressive companies elsewhere in the U.S. At least /some/ of that will help my friends and neighbors in Oregon. Does anyone else want to help build the connections and collaborations to do this? Learning and long hours required. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG-talk mailing list PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk From keithl at keithl.com Wed Feb 12 02:54:41 2025 From: keithl at keithl.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:54:41 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 09:07:53PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > There's zero chance that any Trump tariffs are going to stimulate the growth > of on-US-soil chipmaking. > > Any investor looking to drop 4-6B into a fab is going to expect at least a > decade of returns. Probably longer. Their fab will start out making CPUs > then as time passes and newer CPUs are made with newer tech they will make > cheaper CPUs that get used in DVD players and Microwaves and so on and so on > until a decade after construction they will be wringing the last drops out > of their investment making chips for garage door openers. This isn't how bleeding edge chip factories (like Intel D1X) work. IF Intel factories continue to work. Today, Intel's products are "too capable" and much too expensive for the desktop or (more importantly) the "palmtop". Intel business is the tippy top end, which must grow huge and fast if they are to survive. There are plenty of "upper middle" companies like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor and clones) that make phone chips. The feeble chips in DVD players and microwaves are made in bottom-tier low-tech fabs using hand-me-down equipment (which might have been Intel fab equipment two decades and four owners ago). Piper Cub vs Airbus 380. In 2025, the glamor market is megascale Artificial Intelligence - whatever that really means. It will soon be big POWER THRIFTY artificial intelligence, because the limit to A.I. growth is the cost of gigawatts, not gigaflops. Intel's processes make very small transistors, which do not need many femtojoules to switch, but they must switch zillions of times per second to earn their exorbitant production cost. Switching is not thermodynamically thrifty. Data centers locate in Oregon because our power is cheaper than elsewhere, but it won't be for long, bidding for a fixed energy supply. Sometime soon, Oregon residential customers will notice their electric rates are rising and their air worsening (due to coal-fired generation) and realize that politicians pander to employee-lite server farms rather than households and "people employers". I imagine an election-winning slogan like "watts to the people, not to computers taking their jobs". Not entirely accurate, but when did accuracy matter in politics? Anyway, Intel's current products are overpriced for consumers (who consume handhelds), and too power hungry for the tasks current data centers perform. That said, Intel's superb chip technology can enable new kinds of data centers using new sources of energy - which is what I hope to discuss with them. As a chip designer and avid "Intel watcher", with a wife who worked for Intel 34 years ago, I can extrapolate where they are, and as an outsider I can see beyond the grindstone in front of their noses. There are vastly more opportunities than they seem to be aware of. I'll help them so I don't pay taxes for food stamps for their laid-off employees. Those employees are who I care about, not the suits in the C-suite. MANY decades ago, Howard Vollum (co-founder of Tektronix) took me aside and explained that my job was NOT to create brilliant inventions, but to create profitable products that could be produced with pride by thousands of Tektronix factory employees, earning the money that paid their mortgages. Not many "Howards" these days. Note that Howard did NOT explain that many oscilloscopes were sold to measure nuclear weapons tests, or that the scopes were disposed of after one test because they were radioactive, or that the part that turned radioactive was the decorative chrome trim around the case, which could have been discarded and the scopes used again. With thousands of families to feed, compromises are made. Intel has similar problems and obligations, and no doubt some unnecessary "chrome trim" that pays mortgages in expensive Washington county. I hope to turn that chrome trim into job security for Intel employees, like my wife used to be. BTW, her next "job" was medical school, a demanding task that demanding Intel prepared her for. I hope that Intel will be "preschool" for thousands more like her, decades into the future. ---- Regards the Trumpies, the drunken sailors will have hangovers sooner or later. As an engineer who designs for production by well-equipped PEOPLE, my job is not to wave fingers at them and tell them "I told you so", but to design the products and tools and procedures they will need to earn a salary in the future. MAGA hats aren't safety equipment, and slogans don't create silicon chips. Regards computers, my concern is watts. I figure a watt of extra average power consumption costs me $20 per decade (including summer air conditioning). My previous 24 port gigabit switch (2 or more wired ports in every room, many in the office and "bit shop") consumed 16 watts idle. I recently replaced it with a 24 port TP-Link ($86 from Amazon) that consumes 6 watts, saving $200 per decade. I worry that the TP-Link will Phone Home To China with some of my packets. I will soon deploy a better firewall computer, and will log the IP addresses it talks to. I hope a paranoid PLUGger can suggest a list of worrying IP addresses to compare those log files to. ---- If you made it down this far ... Cisco/Linksys SRW2024, free to good cause. I cleaned out the crud that caused fan noise. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From tedm at portlandia-it.com Thu Feb 13 18:22:40 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:22:40 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> There's far too much focus on the saving power mantra. People don't realize we are 10, maybe max 20 years away from cheap photovoltaics. A generation from now people will be wondering why our generation was so hyper focused on "green power" The only thing people will care about for power consumption is handheld mobile. And the software and hardware industry simply does not want the average person doing any kind of data processing on their handhelds. They want the average consumer's handheld to be a stupid terminal that sends as much data as possible about whoever is carrying it around back to the Robot Overlords. Geolocation data, yes. Biometric data, yes. They want to know how fast you go, they want to know if you break the speed limit, they want to know if your blood pressure is high. They want to know if you are boffing that cute married chick you met in accounting, how often, and where. They want to know how much marijuana you smoke and where you buy it. They want to know if you exercise or not, they want to know what you watch, how much porn you consume, what type it is, if you like girl on girl or guy on guy. They want to know every last thing about you. And every single mobile "advance" that has happened in recent years is designed EXACTLY to this goal. They believe "all your data belong to us" and they are building giant server farms that will digest that data and sell it to governments, religious institutions, insurance companies both auto and health, and law enforcement. And they will make sure your tax dollars will fund all of this stuff. I am NOT betting against power-hungry chips. Any chips that do more work, more sorting through the data, looking for bitcoin primes, looking for groups of people who like gay porn or shop at Nordstrom, and do it faster - our Robot Overlords will gladly pay whatever power costs are. Eastern Oregon is desert, full of wheat fields that were marginal producing 30 years ago but due to global warming today, are almost worthless. Those will be paved over by fields of cheap photovoltaics and electrical power will be cheap, abundant, and feeding data centers full of computers that will be digesting your data and selling it to the highest bidder. THAT is the future that the computer industry has planned for us. Ted -----Original Message----- From: Keith Lofstrom Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 6:55 PM To: Ted Mittelstaedt Cc: 'Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion' Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 09:07:53PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > There's zero chance that any Trump tariffs are going to stimulate the > growth of on-US-soil chipmaking. > > Any investor looking to drop 4-6B into a fab is going to expect at least a > decade of returns. Probably longer. Their fab will start out making CPUs > then as time passes and newer CPUs are made with newer tech they will > make cheaper CPUs that get used in DVD players and Microwaves and so > on and so on until a decade after construction they will be wringing > the last drops out of their investment making chips for garage door openers. This isn't how bleeding edge chip factories (like Intel D1X) work. IF Intel factories continue to work. Today, Intel's products are "too capable" and much too expensive for the desktop or (more importantly) the "palmtop". Intel business is the tippy top end, which must grow huge and fast if they are to survive. There are plenty of "upper middle" companies like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor and clones) that make phone chips. The feeble chips in DVD players and microwaves are made in bottom-tier low-tech fabs using hand-me-down equipment (which might have been Intel fab equipment two decades and four owners ago). Piper Cub vs Airbus 380. In 2025, the glamor market is megascale Artificial Intelligence - whatever that really means. It will soon be big POWER THRIFTY artificial intelligence, because the limit to A.I. growth is the cost of gigawatts, not gigaflops. Intel's processes make very small transistors, which do not need many femtojoules to switch, but they must switch zillions of times per second to earn their exorbitant production cost. Switching is not thermodynamically thrifty. Data centers locate in Oregon because our power is cheaper than elsewhere, but it won't be for long, bidding for a fixed energy supply. Sometime soon, Oregon residential customers will notice their electric rates are rising and their air worsening (due to coal-fired generation) and realize that politicians pander to employee-lite server farms rather than households and "people employers". I imagine an election-winning slogan like "watts to the people, not to computers taking their jobs". Not entirely accurate, but when did accuracy matter in politics? Anyway, Intel's current products are overpriced for consumers (who consume handhelds), and too power hungry for the tasks current data centers perform. That said, Intel's superb chip technology can enable new kinds of data centers using new sources of energy - which is what I hope to discuss with them. As a chip designer and avid "Intel watcher", with a wife who worked for Intel 34 years ago, I can extrapolate where they are, and as an outsider I can see beyond the grindstone in front of their noses. There are vastly more opportunities than they seem to be aware of. I'll help them so I don't pay taxes for food stamps for their laid-off employees. Those employees are who I care about, not the suits in the C-suite. MANY decades ago, Howard Vollum (co-founder of Tektronix) took me aside and explained that my job was NOT to create brilliant inventions, but to create profitable products that could be produced with pride by thousands of Tektronix factory employees, earning the money that paid their mortgages. Not many "Howards" these days. Note that Howard did NOT explain that many oscilloscopes were sold to measure nuclear weapons tests, or that the scopes were disposed of after one test because they were radioactive, or that the part that turned radioactive was the decorative chrome trim around the case, which could have been discarded and the scopes used again. With thousands of families to feed, compromises are made. Intel has similar problems and obligations, and no doubt some unnecessary "chrome trim" that pays mortgages in expensive Washington county. I hope to turn that chrome trim into job security for Intel employees, like my wife used to be. BTW, her next "job" was medical school, a demanding task that demanding Intel prepared her for. I hope that Intel will be "preschool" for thousands more like her, decades into the future. ---- Regards the Trumpies, the drunken sailors will have hangovers sooner or later. As an engineer who designs for production by well-equipped PEOPLE, my job is not to wave fingers at them and tell them "I told you so", but to design the products and tools and procedures they will need to earn a salary in the future. MAGA hats aren't safety equipment, and slogans don't create silicon chips. Regards computers, my concern is watts. I figure a watt of extra average power consumption costs me $20 per decade (including summer air conditioning). My previous 24 port gigabit switch (2 or more wired ports in every room, many in the office and "bit shop") consumed 16 watts idle. I recently replaced it with a 24 port TP-Link ($86 from Amazon) that consumes 6 watts, saving $200 per decade. I worry that the TP-Link will Phone Home To China with some of my packets. I will soon deploy a better firewall computer, and will log the IP addresses it talks to. I hope a paranoid PLUGger can suggest a list of worrying IP addresses to compare those log files to. ---- If you made it down this far ... Cisco/Linksys SRW2024, free to good cause. I cleaned out the crud that caused fan noise. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From russell at personaltelco.net Fri Feb 14 01:21:05 2025 From: russell at personaltelco.net (Russell Senior) Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:21:05 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] Oregon Dryland Wheat In-Reply-To: <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> (Ted Mittelstaedt's message of "Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:22:40 -0800") References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: <87ldu9nwxq.fsf_-_@husum.ptp> >>>>> "Ted" == Ted Mittelstaedt writes: Ted> Eastern Oregon is desert, full of wheat fields that were Ted> marginal producing 30 years ago but due to global warming Ted> today, are almost worthless. Oregon dryland wheat is really only grown in North Central Oregon, starting in about The Dalles and running east to Pendleton or so, and extending south of the Columbia River for ~40 miles. The rest of eastern Oregon is not terribly suitable for dryland wheat. The only thing that makes it viable where it is grown is glacial Loess, a wind-blow silt that holds moisture. It can store up enough water for a wheat crop about every other year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess The Palouse is a more famous, and perhaps more, extreme example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palouse I spent a lot of time driving through Oregon Wheat country in my youth, because my grandparents lived in The Dalles and my grandfather took me fishing a lot in places like Tygh Valley and the Deschutes. I only saw the Palouse a few years ago, and it was impressively fertile considering its location in the east-side rain shadow. Last autumn, I did a drive from Philippi Canyon through backroads to Condon, and there was still plenty of wheat growing there. There is a lot more of eastern Oregon that's really only suitable for cattle grazing because of the lack of water and really thin soils on top of Columbia River Basalt. That would be much more suitable for solar development than the wheat growing areas. Scrolling around Wasco, Sherman, Gilliam and Umatilla Counties in GoogleMaps satellite view you can see a lot of active dryland wheat farming. See also: https://smallfarms.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/assets/dryland-farming-in-the-northwestern-united-states.pdf Fun fact, Philippi Canyon is the site of an overtopping from ice-age catastrophic floods down the Columbia River into the Johnday River canyon. You can see the erosional scour scars in google maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qPBfb2iUHDohNJGX9 -- Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net From keithl at keithl.com Fri Feb 14 02:10:37 2025 From: keithl at keithl.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:10:37 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 10:22:40AM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > There's far too much focus on the saving power mantra. People don't realize > we are 10, maybe max 20 years away from cheap photovoltaics. > > A generation from now people will be wondering why our generation was so > hyper focused on "green power" The only thing people will care about for > power consumption is handheld mobile. Interesting planet you live on, Ted. Yes, almost everyone will be using a handheld mobile 24x7, conspiracy nonsense whispered into their earbuds ... while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower (50 kilowatt) SUVs. Electric SUVs, charged by coal power generated out in flyover territory. Solar photovoltaics won't charge the SUVs at night, but they will keep the decorative windmills spinning when there is no wind. Thems the watts what worry me. Demonstrating that most people don't care, and that some people play the rest in a board game that NOBODY really understands. Vast evil corporate conspiracies would be more intelligent than the frantic goal-free crank-yanking that almost everyone seems to be doing. Sadly, it is sleep-walking all the way up to (and including) the C-suite. As Gertrude Stein said, "there is no there there". I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences of Mass Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and sitting on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop screens narrow our thinking in time and breadth. He died in 2015. I can guess his opinion of handhelds; perhaps that's what killed him. Friends discuss the eventual replacement of the "tweet" by the one-bit "YO!". That frees more bandwidth for automated surveillance. Yes Ted, I can "out-cynical" you. However, I seem to be happier when I'm solving problems rather than kvetching about them. Next problem, migrating a heap of content from one-man-show MoinMoin wiki to MediaWiki. Eventually, that one man will get run over by an SUV, by which time I may be too aged and gorked to migrate anything. Curmudgeonly yours; Keith -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From tedm at portlandia-it.com Fri Feb 14 05:41:16 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:41:16 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> -----Original Message----- From: Keith Lofstrom >Interesting planet you live on, Ted. Yes, almost everyone will be using a handheld mobile 24x7, conspiracy nonsense whispered into their earbuds ... They already do THAT - where have you been? What do you think Tik Tock is? >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower (50 kilowatt) SUVs. Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. Let's see now - in the Portland Metro they have been adding speed cameras right and left. That's why City of Portland wanted to take over Powell from the State. Supposedly it was to make it "better" but City has put zero money into the road - they just added speed cams and dropped the speed limit to increase ticket revenue. And every other speed cam added in the last decade - NONE of them on residential streets. ALL on arterials that were already congested - and all followed by speed limit drops on those roads. Gotta make the congestion worse so that drivers go nuts and forget about the cam and put the pedal to the metal for the 3 blocks that are clear so they can be tagged for enhanced revenue generation. Eventually they won't even need the speed cams. They will just pick the speed out of your phone and mail you the ticket. > Electric SUVs, charged by coal power generated out in flyover territory. Solar photovoltaics won't charge the SUVs at night, but they will keep the > decorative windmills spinning when there is no wind. > Thems the watts what worry me. You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single day, don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your job. And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it in a battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in solar power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to be. But that is coming. >I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences of Mass Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and >sitting on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop screens narrow our thinking in time and breadth. Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. But, they don't narrow our thinking as much as a 1800's preacher in a pulpit did. And check out Amazon's prices for 4K monitors. 5 years from now your lappy won't have a 1080p screen anymore it will be 4K. Can fit quite a LOT of thinking in a 4K screen. > Friends discuss the eventual replacement of the "tweet" > by the one-bit "YO!". That frees more bandwidth for automated surveillance. YO is what people wrote on the back of their Toyota light trucks in the 1980's. > Yes Ted, I can "out-cynical" you. That I doubt. > However, I seem to be happier when I'm solving problems rather than kvetching about them. The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have been. Ted From tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com Fri Feb 14 15:42:07 2025 From: tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com (Tomas Kuchta) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:42:07 -0500 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] Oregon Dryland Wheat In-Reply-To: <87ldu9nwxq.fsf_-_@husum.ptp> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <87ldu9nwxq.fsf_-_@husum.ptp> Message-ID: On Thu, Feb 13, 2025, 20:31 Russell Senior wrote: > >>>>> "Ted" == Ted Mittelstaedt writes: > > ....snip.... > A lot of water all with boulders or all sizes can find their way through almost anything! It must have been a sight when that giant lake up north in WA breached out and formed what is now Columbia river gorge. > Fun fact, Philippi Canyon is the site of an overtopping from ice-age > catastrophic floods down the Columbia River into the Johnday River > canyon. You can see the erosional scour scars in google maps: > > https://maps.app.goo.gl/qPBfb2iUHDohNJGX9 > > > -- > Russell Senior > russell at personaltelco.net > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > From tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com Fri Feb 14 15:54:18 2025 From: tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com (Tomas Kuchta) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:54:18 -0500 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: For a while I ignored this thread ... Maybe it is a mistake to get involved.... You guys don't know the long established truth about liberals building the windmills everywhere to suck up all the power and causing hurricanes and raining frog apocalyptic events down south? I am shocked. The good news - this will stop, any minute now; the king twins are finally dealing out decisively with the deep state. -T On Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 00:41 Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Keith Lofstrom > > > >Interesting planet you live on, Ted. Yes, almost everyone will be using a > handheld mobile 24x7, conspiracy nonsense whispered into their earbuds ... > > They already do THAT - where have you been? What do you think Tik Tock is? > > >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 > horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs. > > Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. > > Let's see now - in the Portland Metro they have been adding speed cameras > right and left. That's why City of Portland wanted to take over Powell > from > the State. Supposedly it was to make it "better" but City has put zero > money into the road - they just added speed cams and dropped the speed > limit > to increase ticket revenue. > > And every other speed cam added in the last decade - NONE of them on > residential streets. ALL on arterials that were already congested - and > all > followed by speed limit drops on those roads. Gotta make the congestion > worse so that drivers go nuts and forget about the cam and put the pedal to > the metal for the 3 blocks that are clear so they can be tagged for > enhanced > revenue generation. > > Eventually they won't even need the speed cams. They will just pick the > speed out of your phone and mail you the ticket. > > > Electric SUVs, charged by coal power generated out in flyover territory. > Solar photovoltaics won't charge the SUVs at night, but they will keep the > > decorative windmills spinning when there is no wind. > > Thems the watts what worry me. > > You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single day, > don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your job. > And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it in a > battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in solar > power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to be. > But that is coming. > > >I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences of > Mass > Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and > >sitting > on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop > screens > narrow our thinking in time and breadth. > > Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. > > But, they don't narrow our thinking as much as a 1800's preacher in a > pulpit > did. And check out Amazon's prices for 4K monitors. 5 years from now > your > lappy won't have a 1080p screen anymore it will be 4K. Can fit quite a LOT > of thinking in a 4K screen. > > > Friends discuss the eventual replacement of the "tweet" > > by the one-bit "YO!". That frees more bandwidth for automated > surveillance. > > YO is what people wrote on the back of their Toyota light trucks in the > 1980's. > > > Yes Ted, I can "out-cynical" you. > > That I doubt. > > > However, I seem to be happier when I'm solving problems rather than > kvetching about them. > > The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have been. > > Ted > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > From refugia at zoho.com Fri Feb 14 17:02:25 2025 From: refugia at zoho.com (Patrick O'Connor) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:02:25 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] Oregon Dryland Wheat In-Reply-To: <87ldu9nwxq.fsf_-_@husum.ptp> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <87ldu9nwxq.fsf_-_@husum.ptp> Message-ID: <19505695c96.114fb25891508106.7742847833437238316@zoho.com> I love the soils tidbits. A geomorphology primer would do the plug list folks some good, thinking in geological time frames makes our current problems seem less significant. I took a gander at your personal telco site. I am kind of curious about the site next to arbor lodge park. That looks like the light pole proposal was quite a while ago. I work for parks. That park is in my portfolio. If you have interest in installing hardware there I can help. We do have electricity in the bathroom building there. I am curious what the coverage is like there. I have been thinking about trying to get internet connections at my parks for environmental sensors. I would like to get some soil moister sensors in to help make irrigation scheduling more precise. I talked to Vivek Shandas from PSU who does research on heat island effect and urban greenspace. He is working on a proposal to put out sensors for environmental data collection. I'm hoping to work with him at my parks. A connection is the prerequisite. best, Patrick ---- On Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:21:05 -0800 Russell Senior wrote --- > >>>>> "Ted" == Ted Mittelstaedt writes: > > Ted> Eastern Oregon is desert, full of wheat fields that were > Ted> marginal producing 30 years ago but due to global warming > Ted> today, are almost worthless. > > Oregon dryland wheat is really only grown in North Central Oregon, > starting in about The Dalles and running east to Pendleton or so, and > extending south of the Columbia River for ~40 miles. The rest of eastern > Oregon is not terribly suitable for dryland wheat. The only thing that > makes it viable where it is grown is glacial Loess, a wind-blow silt > that holds moisture. It can store up enough water for a wheat crop about > every other year. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loess > > The Palouse is a more famous, and perhaps more, extreme example: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palouse > > I spent a lot of time driving through Oregon Wheat country in my youth, > because my grandparents lived in The Dalles and my grandfather took me > fishing a lot in places like Tygh Valley and the Deschutes. I only saw > the Palouse a few years ago, and it was impressively fertile considering > its location in the east-side rain shadow. > > Last autumn, I did a drive from Philippi Canyon through backroads to > Condon, and there was still plenty of wheat growing there. There is a > lot more of eastern Oregon that's really only suitable for cattle > grazing because of the lack of water and really thin soils on top of > Columbia River Basalt. That would be much more suitable for solar > development than the wheat growing areas. > > Scrolling around Wasco, Sherman, Gilliam and Umatilla Counties in > GoogleMaps satellite view you can see a lot of active dryland wheat > farming. > > See also: > > https://smallfarms.oregonstate.edu/sites/agscid7/files/assets/dryland-farming-in-the-northwestern-united-states.pdf > > Fun fact, Philippi Canyon is the site of an overtopping from ice-age > catastrophic floods down the Columbia River into the Johnday River > canyon. You can see the erosional scour scars in google maps: > > https://maps.app.goo.gl/qPBfb2iUHDohNJGX9 > > > -- > Russell Senior > russell at personaltelco.net > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > From eldo at poningru.com Fri Feb 14 17:29:21 2025 From: eldo at poningru.com (Eldo Varghese) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:29:21 +0000 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <29d899b8-edf1-4942-8f8b-4e9c86810dbd@mtasv.net> Is this... is this poe's law in effect? I cant tell if this person is snorting Xitter/newsmax/fox everyday or just being sarcastic. Actual statistics regarding renewables: For LCOSS, we calculated that it varies from $55.00 per megawatt hour to $91.00 per megawatt hour without the ITC in the case of Phoenix and New York, and from $42.00 per megawatt hour to $69.00 per megawatt hour with the 30 percent ITC, again, from Phoenix to New York. These values are $23.00 per megawatt-hour to $39.00 per megawatt-hour higher than the standalone PV LCOE without the ITC, and $18.00 per megawatt-hour to $30.00 per megawatt-hour higher with that 30 percent ITC. [0] So that means solar + storage is the cheapest method of dispatchable new generation. Without storage solar is EVEN CHEAPER: `utility-scale PV having an LCOE range of US$29-92/MWh.` [1] Wind is EVEN cheaper: `onshore wind (US$27-73/MWh)` [1] Ofcourse these figures are WITHOUT federal subsidies. With govt ITC/PTC wind+storage comes in at under a penny per kwh. Here's the kicker, while we do need some battery storage, majority of the renewables' variability can be mitigated with things like DER and hydro. Getting to 80-90% renewables for ALL of our energy needs is a solved problem technologically and economically speaking, just a policy issue now. -Eldo [0] https://www.nrel.gov/news/video/lcoss-text.html [1] https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024.pdf page 9 On 2/13/25 6:10 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 10:22:40AM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: >> There's far too much focus on the saving power mantra. People don't realize >> we are 10, maybe max 20 years away from cheap photovoltaics. >> >> A generation from now people will be wondering why our generation was so >> hyper focused on "green power" The only thing people will care about for >> power consumption is handheld mobile. > > Interesting planet you live on, Ted. Yes, almost everyone > will be using a handheld mobile 24x7, conspiracy nonsense > whispered into their earbuds ... while they careen down > residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs. Electric SUVs, charged by coal power > generated out in flyover territory. Solar photovoltaics > won't charge the SUVs at night, but they will keep the > decorative windmills spinning when there is no wind. > Thems the watts what worry me. > > Demonstrating that most people don't care, and that some > people play the rest in a board game that NOBODY really > understands. Vast evil corporate conspiracies would be > more intelligent than the frantic goal-free crank-yanking > that almost everyone seems to be doing. Sadly, it is > sleep-walking all the way up to (and including) the > C-suite. > > As Gertrude Stein said, "there is no there there". > > I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The > Consequences of Mass Media in a Narcissistic World" by > Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and sitting on a shelf in > the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop > screens narrow our thinking in time and breadth. He > died in 2015. I can guess his opinion of handhelds; > perhaps that's what killed him. > > Friends discuss the eventual replacement of the "tweet" > by the one-bit "YO!". That frees more bandwidth for > automated surveillance. > > Yes Ted, I can "out-cynical" you. However, I seem to be > happier when I'm solving problems rather than kvetching > about them. Next problem, migrating a heap of content > from one-man-show MoinMoin wiki to MediaWiki. Eventually, > that one man will get run over by an SUV, by which time > I may be too aged and gorked to migrate anything. > > Curmudgeonly yours; > Keith > From tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com Fri Feb 14 22:24:21 2025 From: tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com (Tomas Kuchta) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 17:24:21 -0500 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <29d899b8-edf1-4942-8f8b-4e9c86810dbd@mtasv.net> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <29d899b8-edf1-4942-8f8b-4e9c86810dbd@mtasv.net> Message-ID: Thanks for taking the time to gather the data - it is much better response that my sarcastic piece. -T On Fri, Feb 14, 2025, 12:39 Eldo Varghese wrote: > Is this... is this poe's law in effect? > I cant tell if this person is snorting Xitter/newsmax/fox everyday or > just being sarcastic. > > Actual statistics regarding renewables: > For LCOSS, we calculated that it varies from $55.00 per megawatt hour to > $91.00 per megawatt hour without the ITC in the case of Phoenix and New > York, and from $42.00 per megawatt hour to $69.00 per megawatt hour with > the 30 percent ITC, again, from Phoenix to New York. These values are > $23.00 per megawatt-hour to $39.00 per megawatt-hour higher than the > standalone PV LCOE without the ITC, and $18.00 per megawatt-hour to > $30.00 per megawatt-hour higher with that 30 percent ITC. [0] > > So that means solar + storage is the cheapest method of dispatchable new > generation. > Without storage solar is EVEN CHEAPER: > `utility-scale PV having an LCOE range of US$29-92/MWh.` [1] > > Wind is EVEN cheaper: > `onshore wind (US$27-73/MWh)` [1] > > Ofcourse these figures are WITHOUT federal subsidies. > With govt ITC/PTC wind+storage comes in at under a penny per kwh. > Here's the kicker, while we do need some battery storage, majority of > the renewables' variability can be mitigated with things like DER and > hydro. > > Getting to 80-90% renewables for ALL of our energy needs is a solved > problem technologically and economically speaking, just a policy issue now. > > -Eldo > > [0] https://www.nrel.gov/news/video/lcoss-text.html > [1] https://www.lazard.com/media/gjyffoqd/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2024.pdf > page 9 > > On 2/13/25 6:10 PM, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 10:22:40AM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > >> There's far too much focus on the saving power mantra. People don't > realize > >> we are 10, maybe max 20 years away from cheap photovoltaics. > >> > >> A generation from now people will be wondering why our generation was so > >> hyper focused on "green power" The only thing people will care about > for > >> power consumption is handheld mobile. > > > > Interesting planet you live on, Ted. Yes, almost everyone > > will be using a handheld mobile 24x7, conspiracy nonsense > > whispered into their earbuds ... while they careen down > > residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower > > (50 kilowatt) SUVs. Electric SUVs, charged by coal power > > generated out in flyover territory. Solar photovoltaics > > won't charge the SUVs at night, but they will keep the > > decorative windmills spinning when there is no wind. > > Thems the watts what worry me. > > > > Demonstrating that most people don't care, and that some > > people play the rest in a board game that NOBODY really > > understands. Vast evil corporate conspiracies would be > > more intelligent than the frantic goal-free crank-yanking > > that almost everyone seems to be doing. Sadly, it is > > sleep-walking all the way up to (and including) the > > C-suite. > > > > As Gertrude Stein said, "there is no there there". > > > > I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The > > Consequences of Mass Media in a Narcissistic World" by > > Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and sitting on a shelf in > > the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop > > screens narrow our thinking in time and breadth. He > > died in 2015. I can guess his opinion of handhelds; > > perhaps that's what killed him. > > > > Friends discuss the eventual replacement of the "tweet" > > by the one-bit "YO!". That frees more bandwidth for > > automated surveillance. > > > > Yes Ted, I can "out-cynical" you. However, I seem to be > > happier when I'm solving problems rather than kvetching > > about them. Next problem, migrating a heap of content > > from one-man-show MoinMoin wiki to MediaWiki. Eventually, > > that one man will get run over by an SUV, by which time > > I may be too aged and gorked to migrate anything. > > > > Curmudgeonly yours; > > Keith > > > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > From plug at the-wes.com Fri Feb 14 23:06:47 2025 From: plug at the-wes.com (wes) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 15:06:47 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <29d899b8-edf1-4942-8f8b-4e9c86810dbd@mtasv.net> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <29d899b8-edf1-4942-8f8b-4e9c86810dbd@mtasv.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 9:39?AM Eldo Varghese wrote: > Is this... is this poe's law in effect? > I cant tell if this person is snorting Xitter/newsmax/fox everyday or > just being sarcastic. > > he's from germany. their sarcasm sounds completely serious to everyone else. -wes From keithl at keithl.com Sat Feb 15 05:29:49 2025 From: keithl at keithl.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:29:49 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> > From: Keith Lofstrom > >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 > horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs. On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout misanthropic hallucinations instead" argument. I'm sorry you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland. TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single day, TM> don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your job. TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it in a TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in solar TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to be. TM> But that is coming. So many claims, so little time. I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me. Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, increasing from 15% to 16% over two decades. Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China. Concentrator system efficiency has more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not. In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of greenhouse gas CO? back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper. Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, but I've done the physics and the math, and I'm afraid they are mostly correct. I take comfort in the fact that they are entirely mistaken about systems and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone. Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have 4% of the lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting that lithium creates a LOT of pollution. ---- I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to energy storage. A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we use power generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus. http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop demo maglev systems. The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and mutual cooperation. I'm not holding my breath, sigh. DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said they should find energetic younger researchers to do the work. I explained that the system capacity scales as the square of the cost; double the cost, quadruple the delivered value. Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and sorta useless. A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times the expense, but a million times the productivity and usefulness. Still not global scale. That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks who haven't ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to tera-transistor solid state memories. I expect thousands will understand it, out of billions who've never wielded a wafer probe. Anyway ... A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more expensive, 10,000 times more productive, but damned difficult to protect from sabotage in parts of the world that "we" don't control. It would serve billions of people around the Pacific Rim. Probably five or ten giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. But as always, billions of resentful people will be left out. It doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes into skyscrapers, or depth-charge undersea energy systems. The principal construction materials would be iron (for the rotor) and aluminum (for the wiring). Plus a shit ton of electronics; a small but costly silicon mass fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire and rotor. Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year. Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds of millions of stationary and mobile batteries, or any of the other green technologies relying on constrained resources and giant mining and giant factories that we haven't started building yet. This isn't as easy as a blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet. And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side effects requiring costly mitigations. The world is way too crowded to throw our shit over the fence; the people on the other side will fire artillery shells back IF WE ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we AREN'T lucky. ------------------------------------ KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences of Mass KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and >sitting KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop screens KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth. TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved for 360 degree awareness, combining saccades of our retinal fovea into a much larger gestalt "image" of the landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T. It isn't the screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and the brain regions they drive, and how those affect us semi-evolved social apes and our cooperative skills. Or lack thereof, fellow geeks! Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a large fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly cooperative humans. Shane was a media consultant; his job was to peddle media effectiveness, but his avocation was asking "What does this mean? What might happen?" Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation. More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate) such skills, even if they have fewer of them. The mind blind, not so much. I tend toward the latter, sigh. Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.) TM> The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have been. And the most important problem is that crazy person I see in the mirror, darkly. Apostle Paul referenced that mirror before Star Trek. We may never learn where Paul plagiarized it from. "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso) Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism. Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment. Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From tedm at portlandia-it.com Sat Feb 15 16:40:22 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:40:22 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <016a01db7fc8$4ed4fe90$ec7efbb0$@portlandia-it.com> -----Original Message----- From: Keith Lofstrom >I'm sorry you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland. Actually I don't dislike them as much as you think - I know right where they are, they don't move, and I can apply the brakes right outside of their radar range, drop to the artificially low speed, then apply accelerator after getting past them. I dislike the moral implications of using them since the people who get picked up by them are usually the poor, and often don't drive that much. You will note the high prevalence of the traffic cams in the poorer neighborhoods. The most expensive neighborhoods (around Intel for example) don't have cams on THEIR feeder arterials. It's the poor neighborhoods that do. Oh I forgot, "poor" isn't a socially acceptable term anymore. Unlike you, I care about what affects the entire society not my own little personal space. I also walk - and run - on city streets - probably much more than you in fact (I'll stack up my yearly running miles on city streets against your walking miles any day) I have learned to look both ways before crossing and I do not have this inflated ego that believes I have the moral right to cause all traffic to stop on the street just because I can't wait a minute for an open spot in the traffic. Causing traffic to stop burns up fuel on brakes, increasing carbon pollution which then affects me. Most peds are too short-sighted to see beyond their own nose and will happily cause many additional pounds of pollution to be dumped into the atmosphere for them to save 30 seconds not waiting for an open spot to cross the street. >I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me. Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, increasing from 15% to >16% over two decades. Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China. Concentrator system efficiency has more than doubled, >but the watts per hectare has not. I think your PV researchers sound like retired old farts who haven't done any research in the last 20 years, or even bothered to look on Amazon where you can buy 25% efficient panels at consumer prices: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMT2WTC8?th=1 And of course, the actual -certified- efficiency cells are not far behind: https://scitechdaily.com/new-world-record-breakthrough-cigs-perovskite-tandem-solar-cell-achieves-24-6-efficiency/ There is also intriguing research such as the following https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4206 Where the claim is "In addition, the photoresponse from SBC222 is 1000 times higher than that from BTO," I think we will see much MUCH higher efficiencies in the next decades. The simple reality is that the smartest and best researchers go where the money is, and cheap fossil fuel energy has made the money go far away from solar cells. That has changed and no amount of drilling is going to bring down fossil fuel energy prices in any significant manner. Regardless of how you conservationists want it, where everyone is huddled around under blankets with their thermostats set to 65 - we simply cannot continue to use fossil fuels to run the society at the previously cheap prices they were at. Trump's minions will push coal but by the time that any coal projects get out of the planning stage, he will be gone and the next Democratic President will shut all of that down. There IS still plenty of oil out there - but it's NOT as easy to get at. Thus, it will be more and more expensive. That doesn't mean gasoline is going to disappear. What it means is that gasoline prices will rise until alternative fuels - which are more expensive - start to compete. Then gas prices will stop rising because further price rising makes alternative fuels cheaper and cheaper and stimulates their production and thus decreases fossil fuel market share. This is how the laws of economics work. Trump is stupid he does not understand this. He does NOT understand that the ONLY thing that keeps oil prices under control is that further rises in oil price means less market share because the alternative energy sources - wind, PV, wave, etc. - now become economically possible. When the electric bill charges you a 10% premium for "green power" most people are "meh" When it gives you a 10% discount for "green power" then fossil fuel market share will drop to almost zero. OPEC's only option to avoid bankruptcy will be to drop oil prices 10%. Then green power finds another 10% price decrease via new discoveries and the cycle starts all over again. Eventually OPEC's cost to produce will be too high - and that will be the end of fossil fuels. This is how economics will take care of the problem of fossil fuels. What this means for research is that any researcher that can do a game-changer will "be in the money" There's no game changers left for fossil fuels because it's not a question of increasing efficiency of extracting them - we have done all the easy stuff like injecting steam into old oil wells in Texas to get the last dribs and drabs of oil. It's a question of GETTING AT THEM because while they are there, they are just more inaccessible. And that inaccessibility makes them more expensive. You can convert coal into gasoline - after a long, involved process that is expensive - that merely represents that coal is a form of fossil fuel that is much more inaccessible. But there are LOTS of game changers left for PV cells. Your tired old "experienced' friends who are close to retirement don't really give a damn anymore - they are happy patting themselves on the back claiming "we hit the practical maximum" Someone younger, without a name for themselves, without a string of published articles or books - they don't have those blinders on. They will shoot for 50% efficiency conversion. Most won't make it - but some will. Some are working towards that now - as the links I posted illustrate. That is how science works. NEVER FORGET that everything you know - that you take as "fact" - was discovered by some human. And another human can come along and throw that "fact" out the window. Humans have been doing this for a long, LONG time now. > In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of > greenhouse gas CO? back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper. We have LOTS of unproductive land that isn't doing this. It's remote, yes. Maybe very cold. Maybe very hot. But it's there, just waiting to be used. You sound EXACTLY like the people who claim WE MUST BUILD RACK STACK AND PACK LOW INCOME APARTMENTS BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF HOUSING. People who have NEVER driven 15 miles East of Portland - where the Mt. Hood Freeway was supposed to go - and seen the hundreds if not thousands of empty acres out near Boring OR and places like that where there are NO HOUSES no farms, no nothing. Just scrub, unproductive forest. There's PLENTY of land out that way - lots even in the Urban Growth Boundary - unbuilt on. Because, short sighted people are convinced the homeless need apartments overlooking the Willamette instead of single-family homes that THEY OWN out near Boring. Homes that would give them financial security and retirement instead of being renters and dependent and beholden to the government for the rest of their lives. > Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, Of course - because - GW is a function of population. To put it simply - tell everyone to STOP SCREWING EACH OTHER and producing so many babies and ...poof...GW will disappear. This is what Trump and the MAGAoots are doing although most of them don't realize it. Trump is pushing immigrant population back to Mexico. Let Mexico be overpopulated and see their standard of living run into the ground because of it. Maybe then the Catholic Church which is so strong in Mexico will stop railing against Birth Control and start pushing condoms and start advocating for SMALLER families. Immigrant population is where US population growth has come from in recent years. So, in the US we are short housing. We have a homeless crisis. We have it so that young people can't buy homes since none are available. Very very simple solution. Let the population fall. Let births decline below deaths. There will be PLENTY of homes available as the population drops. See how that works? And at the same time the population is declining - fuel used is declining, carbon production output is declining. GW is solved. It's called carrying capacity. It's still out there. Every time someone tries talking about it the clowns come out of the woodwork claiming "you just want to kill people" No. We want to STOP MAKING MORE PEOPLE. We have enough people. We don't need more. The world got along JUST FINE for thousands of years with a global population of under a billion people. We can return to that again and still get along just fine. We can slide the idea of families with 14 kids into the history books labeled "screwy things that Bible-thumpers convinced people to do in the 1800's and 1900s" Then no more global warming and a pollution load low enough that the Earth's natural systems can deal with it without us having to build giant production facilities that suck carbon out of the air. >Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. >That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have 4% of the >lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting that lithium creates a LOT of >pollution. I got more news for you there. Efficiency and energy density storage in batteries only matters for ONE use - mobile. Who said we need lithium batteries for cloudy-day storge for EVs? Who said we NEED lithium batteries for ON SITE storage? Nobody - but stupid people. APC by Schneider Electric has been pushing Lithium UPSes for some time now. They are a commercial failure. Why? Because NOBODY gives a tinkers damn how heavy a UPS is that sits in a rack bolted to the wall all day long. Lithium replacement battery packs for those APC UPSes are double the cost of the lead acid batteries. So, people go to buy a UPS and say "screw that. I want the UPS with the cheaper batteries I don't care how heavy it is" If you put solar cells on your roof IT DOES NOT MATTER if the batteries holding power from them are a series of Leyden jars that are the most inefficient supercapacitors you can find, occupying triple the space of even typical marine batteries - as long as your bank of them stores up all the power you collect in a day. What matters with on-site battery systems IS NOT efficiency. That's why the focus on lithium batteries is completely wacked for on-site solar systems. The ONLY reason it's happening is because mostly up til now those systems were purchased by taxpayer dollars via heavy subsidies so when Ma and Pa Kettle looked at a solar system for their house - they could get a government-subsidized Lithium one for $20 or an "old-school" unsubsidized lead acid one for $20,000 - which do you think they will go for? It doesn't matter that the Lithium one is going to cost 3 times more to replace the batteries in 10 years or that we need the Lithium in EVs not sitting in someone's garage storing the output of their solar cells. This is why we need to get the government out of the business of subsidizing these systems. The government's agenda was jumpstarting EV car production and Lithium batteries are currently the best option due to power-to-weight ratio, they wanted to ramp up Lithium battery production - so yes, let's subsidize lithium batteries in EVERYTHING even on-site power storage systems that do not need the light weight. So, less-energy-dense electrical storage systems - like carbon nanotubes which are NOT chemical, can be used forever without degrading - got ignored and languished on the vine while the Lithium drums kept beating. And you -like everyone else - fell for it. Your "analysis" is all based on what someone else wants you to believe not what is logical. It's NOT logical to use a scarce resource - lithium - for PV energy storage. So WHY claim that PV energy storage is a non-starter based on the shortage of lithium? > I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to energy storage. Ah yes, NOW we are injecting some logic. Your brain isn't ossified after all. > A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we use power > generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus. > http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop Moving electricity long distances involves transmission line losses, forget interhemispheric energy transfer. > Probably five or ten giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. And there's the hole. Once more, you focus on large generation projects. This isn't the future. The future is millions of small generation projects scattered everywhere. Large projects just perpetuate central control and make it easy for the government to control people. Give someone an EV scooter, and a large solar cell to charge it. They are free. They can go where they want when they want they don't have to pay anyone for power. They just need space for the solar cell. And that is a factor of how efficient the cell is. Which is WHY the smartest researchers - the ones who want the fame and fortune for the game changer - are focusing on cell efficiency. You build one of your giant expensive systems and I come out with a solar cell 50% efficient - and I will put your giant system out of business by undercutting what you are selling power for. And, if you and your giant system are owned by the government - the government will fight me tooth and nail to suppress my cell. Why do you think China is pushing fusion - which is probably the most expensive ridiculous large central power generation system ever devised. They want a working fusion reactor that powers the entire country - so that everyone in China is scared to death of speaking out because if they do the government cuts their power off. "off-grid" is where it's at. Lots of people with RV's have discovered this. > Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count. And beyond your screen, too. Your and my posts, here in this forum. Precisely!!! Doctors - invalidate thyselves! :-) Ted From tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com Sat Feb 15 19:05:55 2025 From: tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com (Tomas Kuchta) Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:05:55 -0500 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: Here is some hard data from a north state. I drive EV almost daily for the last 2-ish years. So is my skiing/kayaking buddy. He has solar on his modest 2k-ish sq. feet house. I don't because I don't own my town house condo roof. His solar roof produces more electricity than he can use in his heat pump + car, averaging over the year. The way it works over here, he can offset/supply generated surplus power with nearby address - his son who does not have favourable roof orientation. That lowers his son bill by about 1/3 during the summer last year. I do not have more details. He has ordinary market solar cells, not some crazy efficient space type ones. I am told that his year output is about 15MWh. Obviously more on sunny and summer days than in the winter and cloudy days. I have no heat pump (20+ year old AC) - my yearly hosehold power consumption for the whole house + EV is about 10MWh. EV accounting for about 2.5MWh at about 12k miles driven. This is the reality I live in - not a dream - 4.3 miles per kWh without a rack, or 3.4 miles per kWh with sea kayak on the roof. Give or take. I wish I could get 1MWh delivered for wholesale $70-$100. I pay $360 per MWh delivered. Best, Tomas On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 00:29 Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > From: Keith Lofstrom > > >while they careen down residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 > > horsepower > (50 kilowatt) SUVs. > > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. > > No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout > misanthropic hallucinations instead" argument. I'm sorry > you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who > dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when > I go east to Portland. > > TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every single > day, > TM> don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from your > job. > TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store it > in a > TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in > solar > TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need to > be. > TM> But that is coming. > > So many claims, so little time. > > I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers > like me. Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to > practical maximum, increasing from 15% to 16% over two > decades. Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC > factories in China. Concentrator system efficiency has > more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not. > > In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed > natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will > emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of greenhouse > gas CO? back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper. > > Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global > warming, but I've done the physics and the math, and > I'm afraid they are mostly correct. I take comfort in > the fact that they are entirely mistaken about systems > and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone. > > Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. > That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, > Chile, China, and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the > world supply, though we have 4% of the lithium brine > reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day > storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting > that lithium creates a LOT of pollution. > > ---- > > I've published journal papers about an entirely different > approach to energy storage. > > A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy > storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; > On winter nights, we use power generated by summer day > PV in Australia (at other times South America or China > or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus. > > http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop > > The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop > demo maglev systems. > > The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and > mutual cooperation. I'm not holding my breath, sigh. > > DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said > they should find energetic younger researchers to do the > work. I explained that the system capacity scales as > the square of the cost; double the cost, quadruple the > delivered value. Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and > sorta useless. A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times > the expense, but a million times the productivity and > usefulness. Still not global scale. > > That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks > who haven't ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to > tera-transistor solid state memories. I expect thousands > will understand it, out of billions who've never wielded > a wafer probe. Anyway ... > > A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more > expensive, 10,000 times more productive, but damned > difficult to protect from sabotage in parts of the world > that "we" don't control. It would serve billions of people > around the Pacific Rim. Probably five or ten giant systems, > for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. > > But as always, billions of resentful people will be left > out. It doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes > into skyscrapers, or depth-charge undersea energy systems. > > The principal construction materials would be iron (for > the rotor) and aluminum (for the wiring). Plus a shit > ton of electronics; a small but costly silicon mass > fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire and rotor. > > Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year. > > Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds > of millions of stationary and mobile batteries, or any > of the other green technologies relying on constrained > resources and giant mining and giant factories that we > haven't started building yet. This isn't as easy as a > blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet. > > And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side > effects requiring costly mitigations. The world is way > too crowded to throw our shit over the fence; the people > on the other side will fire artillery shells back IF WE > ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we AREN'T lucky. > > ------------------------------------ > > KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The Consequences > of Mass > KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, and > >sitting > KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that laptop > screens > KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth. > > TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. > > The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved > for 360 degree awareness, combining saccades of our > retinal fovea into a much larger gestalt "image" of the > landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T. It isn't the > screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and > the brain regions they drive, and how those affect us > semi-evolved social apes and our cooperative skills. > > Or lack thereof, fellow geeks! > > Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a > large fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly > cooperative humans. Shane was a media consultant; his > job was to peddle media effectiveness, but his avocation > was asking "What does this mean? What might happen?" > > Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation. > More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate) > such skills, even if they have fewer of them. The mind > blind, not so much. I tend toward the latter, sigh. > > Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge > of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count. > > "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, > than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.) > > TM> The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have > been. > > And the most important problem is that crazy person I > see in the mirror, darkly. Apostle Paul referenced > that mirror before Star Trek. We may never learn > where Paul plagiarized it from. > > "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso) > > Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism. > Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment. > > Keith L. > > -- > Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > From tedm at portlandia-it.com Sun Feb 16 01:13:52 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:13:52 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> Message-ID: <003701db8010$0b07bc50$211734f0$@portlandia-it.com> Around 15 years ago when SolarWorld was running around trying to give people solar setups I had them eval my house. I have a sloped south facing roof. They said based on their calculator it would be worthwhile for me to do it. However, my roof does not use the standard King Post trusses or Howe trusses. It uses attic trusses. So - yeah. I got 2 rooms up there. We raised 2 kids in them. But...the downside is...the roof is not strong enough to hold PV panels because of this. I'd have to gut out the upstairs, demolish everything down to the studs - and rebuild the attic (which actually wouldn't be that hard nor that expensive - an afternoon with a compressor, nail gun, saw and pile of 2x4's would do it) to gain the strength in the roof for panels. I'd probably lose at least 1 room. One of these days. Sigh. Kids - the gift that keeps on taking...lol Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG-talk On Behalf Of Tomas Kuchta Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 11:06 AM To: Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth Here is some hard data from a north state. I drive EV almost daily for the last 2-ish years. So is my skiing/kayaking buddy. He has solar on his modest 2k-ish sq. feet house. I don't because I don't own my town house condo roof. His solar roof produces more electricity than he can use in his heat pump + car, averaging over the year. The way it works over here, he can offset/supply generated surplus power with nearby address - his son who does not have favourable roof orientation. That lowers his son bill by about 1/3 during the summer last year. I do not have more details. He has ordinary market solar cells, not some crazy efficient space type ones. I am told that his year output is about 15MWh. Obviously more on sunny and summer days than in the winter and cloudy days. I have no heat pump (20+ year old AC) - my yearly hosehold power consumption for the whole house + EV is about 10MWh. EV accounting for about 2.5MWh at about 12k miles driven. This is the reality I live in - not a dream - 4.3 miles per kWh without a rack, or 3.4 miles per kWh with sea kayak on the roof. Give or take. I wish I could get 1MWh delivered for wholesale $70-$100. I pay $360 per MWh delivered. Best, Tomas On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 00:29 Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > From: Keith Lofstrom >while they careen down > > residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower > (50 > > kilowatt) SUVs. > > On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. > > No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout misanthropic > hallucinations instead" argument. I'm sorry you dislike traffic > cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the > increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland. > > TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every > TM> single > day, > TM> don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from > TM> your > job. > TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store > TM> it > in a > TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in > solar > TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need > TM> to > be. > TM> But that is coming. > > So many claims, so little time. > > I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me. > Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, > increasing from 15% to 16% over two decades. Cost has plummeted, but > that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China. Concentrator system > efficiency has more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not. > > In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural > biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an > inadequate fraction of greenhouse gas CO? back into oxygen and trees > and toilet paper. > > Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, but I've > done the physics and the math, and I'm afraid they are mostly correct. > I take comfort in the fact that they are entirely mistaken about > systems and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone. > > Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. > That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, > and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have > 4% of the lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide > cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting that > lithium creates a LOT of pollution. > > ---- > > I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to > energy storage. > > A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage > combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we > use power generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times > South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a > surplus. > > http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop > > The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop demo maglev > systems. > > The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and mutual > cooperation. I'm not holding my breath, sigh. > > DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said they should > find energetic younger researchers to do the work. I explained that > the system capacity scales as the square of the cost; double the cost, > quadruple the delivered value. Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and > sorta useless. A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times the expense, > but a million times the productivity and usefulness. Still not global > scale. > > That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks who haven't > ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to tera-transistor solid > state memories. I expect thousands will understand it, out of > billions who've never wielded a wafer probe. Anyway ... > > A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more expensive, > 10,000 times more productive, but damned difficult to protect from > sabotage in parts of the world that "we" don't control. It would > serve billions of people around the Pacific Rim. Probably five or ten > giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. > > But as always, billions of resentful people will be left out. It > doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes into skyscrapers, or > depth-charge undersea energy systems. > > The principal construction materials would be iron (for the rotor) and > aluminum (for the wiring). Plus a shit ton of electronics; a small > but costly silicon mass fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire > and rotor. > > Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year. > > Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds of millions of > stationary and mobile batteries, or any of the other green > technologies relying on constrained resources and giant mining and > giant factories that we haven't started building yet. This isn't as > easy as a blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet. > > And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side effects > requiring costly mitigations. The world is way too crowded to throw > our shit over the fence; the people on the other side will fire > artillery shells back IF WE ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we > AREN'T lucky. > > ------------------------------------ > > KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The > KHL> Consequences > of Mass > KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, > KHL> and > >sitting > KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that > KHL> laptop > screens > KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth. > > TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. > > The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved for 360 degree > awareness, combining saccades of our retinal fovea into a much larger > gestalt "image" of the landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T. It > isn't the screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and the > brain regions they drive, and how those affect us semi-evolved social > apes and our cooperative skills. > > Or lack thereof, fellow geeks! > > Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a large > fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly cooperative humans. > Shane was a media consultant; his job was to peddle media > effectiveness, but his avocation was asking "What does this mean? > What might happen?" > > Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation. > More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate) such skills, > even if they have fewer of them. The mind blind, not so much. I tend > toward the latter, sigh. > > Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, > regardless of screen pixel count. > > "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt > of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.) > > TM> The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have > been. > > And the most important problem is that crazy person I see in the > mirror, darkly. Apostle Paul referenced that mirror before Star Trek. > We may never learn where Paul plagiarized it from. > > "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso) > > Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism. > Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment. > > Keith L. > > -- > Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG-talk mailing list PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk From keithl at keithl.com Sun Feb 16 10:06:57 2025 From: keithl at keithl.com (Keith Lofstrom) Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2025 02:06:57 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] Asian Shore Crab picker-bot Message-ID: <20250216100657.GA5880@gate.kl-ic.com> While I am a vegetarian tending towards vegan (oddball physiology, not Bambi protection), invasive animal species deserve to be eaten by omnivores, and invasive plants by me. I stumbled across http://eattheinvaders.org/ tagline: Fighting Invasive Species, One Bite At A Time ---- One exemplar, recently showcased in a national newspaper, is the Asian Shore Crab, spreading around the world in the chain lockers of ships. http://eattheinvaders.org/blue-plate-special-asian-shore-crab/ These are tiny little devils, not the sort of thing worth picking apart in a restaurant, unless the ma?tre d' lets you linger all day doing thousands of fillet-ings with a magnifier and tiny forceps. However, that is what ROBOTS are for; I can imagine a shoebox-sized robot processing "factory" on top of a small refrigerator that spends all day extracting milligrams of mini-crab meat ... while cleaning and sorting the shells for processing into pharmaceutical grade chitosan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitosan Tidal Vision in Bellingham https://www.tidalvision.com/ might be a good customer for chitosan, IF a post-picking processing stage can sort out toxic from clean shells. They also hope to replace toxic(?) PFAS (polyfluoralkyl) plastics ... some claim a lifetime eating off nonstick cookware leaves a plastic spoon's worth of PFAS in your brain. I'm skeptical, but that could be a PFAS effect. Robot adepts, get to work! Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com From tedm at portlandia-it.com Sun Feb 16 17:11:21 2025 From: tedm at portlandia-it.com (Ted Mittelstaedt) Date: Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:11:21 -0800 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <016a01db7fc8$4ed4fe90$ec7efbb0$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> <016a01db7fc8$4ed4fe90$ec7efbb0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: <004a01db8095$cd386830$67a93890$@portlandia-it.com> Interesting article across my feed today: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-024-00705-y "...Recently, BaZrS3, a chalcogenide perovskite has received attention due to its optimal band gap, non-toxicity, and superior stability...." "...The models by Nishigaki et al.5 suggests that a 2000 nm thick absorber layer is needed to reach a maximum efficiency of 35%, however with as little as 5% Ti-alloying, the c-Si tandem efficiency can reach 38.7% at a thickness of only 550?nm..." We still have plenty of efficiency gains to be made in PV solar cells. 38.7%! Fascinating! Ted -----Original Message----- From: PLUG-talk On Behalf Of Ted Mittelstaedt Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 8:40 AM To: 'Keith Lofstrom' Cc: 'Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion' Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth -----Original Message----- From: Keith Lofstrom >I'm sorry you dislike traffic cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland. Actually I don't dislike them as much as you think - I know right where they are, they don't move, and I can apply the brakes right outside of their radar range, drop to the artificially low speed, then apply accelerator after getting past them. I dislike the moral implications of using them since the people who get picked up by them are usually the poor, and often don't drive that much. You will note the high prevalence of the traffic cams in the poorer neighborhoods. The most expensive neighborhoods (around Intel for example) don't have cams on THEIR feeder arterials. It's the poor neighborhoods that do. Oh I forgot, "poor" isn't a socially acceptable term anymore. Unlike you, I care about what affects the entire society not my own little personal space. I also walk - and run - on city streets - probably much more than you in fact (I'll stack up my yearly running miles on city streets against your walking miles any day) I have learned to look both ways before crossing and I do not have this inflated ego that believes I have the moral right to cause all traffic to stop on the street just because I can't wait a minute for an open spot in the traffic. Causing traffic to stop burns up fuel on brakes, increasing carbon pollution which then affects me. Most peds are too short-sighted to see beyond their own nose and will happily cause many additional pounds of pollution to be dumped into the atmosphere for them to save 30 seconds not waiting for an open spot to cross the street. >I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me. Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, increasing from 15% to >16% over two decades. Cost has plummeted, but that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China. Concentrator system efficiency has more than doubled, >but the watts per hectare has not. I think your PV researchers sound like retired old farts who haven't done any research in the last 20 years, or even bothered to look on Amazon where you can buy 25% efficient panels at consumer prices: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMT2WTC8?th=1 And of course, the actual -certified- efficiency cells are not far behind: https://scitechdaily.com/new-world-record-breakthrough-cigs-perovskite-tandem-solar-cell-achieves-24-6-efficiency/ There is also intriguing research such as the following https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe4206 Where the claim is "In addition, the photoresponse from SBC222 is 1000 times higher than that from BTO," I think we will see much MUCH higher efficiencies in the next decades. The simple reality is that the smartest and best researchers go where the money is, and cheap fossil fuel energy has made the money go far away from solar cells. That has changed and no amount of drilling is going to bring down fossil fuel energy prices in any significant manner. Regardless of how you conservationists want it, where everyone is huddled around under blankets with their thermostats set to 65 - we simply cannot continue to use fossil fuels to run the society at the previously cheap prices they were at. Trump's minions will push coal but by the time that any coal projects get out of the planning stage, he will be gone and the next Democratic President will shut all of that down. There IS still plenty of oil out there - but it's NOT as easy to get at. Thus, it will be more and more expensive. That doesn't mean gasoline is going to disappear. What it means is that gasoline prices will rise until alternative fuels - which are more expensive - start to compete. Then gas prices will stop rising because further price rising makes alternative fuels cheaper and cheaper and stimulates their production and thus decreases fossil fuel market share. This is how the laws of economics work. Trump is stupid he does not understand this. He does NOT understand that the ONLY thing that keeps oil prices under control is that further rises in oil price means less market share because the alternative energy sources - wind, PV, wave, etc. - now become economically possible. When the electric bill charges you a 10% premium for "green power" most people are "meh" When it gives you a 10% discount for "green power" then fossil fuel market share will drop to almost zero. OPEC's only option to avoid bankruptcy will be to drop oil prices 10%. Then green power finds another 10% price decrease via new discoveries and the cycle starts all over again. Eventually OPEC's cost to produce will be too high - and that will be the end of fossil fuels. This is how economics will take care of the problem of fossil fuels. What this means for research is that any researcher that can do a game-changer will "be in the money" There's no game changers left for fossil fuels because it's not a question of increasing efficiency of extracting them - we have done all the easy stuff like injecting steam into old oil wells in Texas to get the last dribs and drabs of oil. It's a question of GETTING AT THEM because while they are there, they are just more inaccessible. And that inaccessibility makes them more expensive. You can convert coal into gasoline - after a long, involved process that is expensive - that merely represents that coal is a form of fossil fuel that is much more inaccessible. But there are LOTS of game changers left for PV cells. Your tired old "experienced' friends who are close to retirement don't really give a damn anymore - they are happy patting themselves on the back claiming "we hit the practical maximum" Someone younger, without a name for themselves, without a string of published articles or books - they don't have those blinders on. They will shoot for 50% efficiency conversion. Most won't make it - but some will. Some are working towards that now - as the links I posted illustrate. That is how science works. NEVER FORGET that everything you know - that you take as "fact" - was discovered by some human. And another human can come along and throw that "fact" out the window. Humans have been doing this for a long, LONG time now. > In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an inadequate fraction of > greenhouse gas CO? back into oxygen and trees and toilet paper. We have LOTS of unproductive land that isn't doing this. It's remote, yes. Maybe very cold. Maybe very hot. But it's there, just waiting to be used. You sound EXACTLY like the people who claim WE MUST BUILD RACK STACK AND PACK LOW INCOME APARTMENTS BECAUSE WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF HOUSING. People who have NEVER driven 15 miles East of Portland - where the Mt. Hood Freeway was supposed to go - and seen the hundreds if not thousands of empty acres out near Boring OR and places like that where there are NO HOUSES no farms, no nothing. Just scrub, unproductive forest. There's PLENTY of land out that way - lots even in the Urban Growth Boundary - unbuilt on. Because, short sighted people are convinced the homeless need apartments overlooking the Willamette instead of single-family homes that THEY OWN out near Boring. Homes that would give them financial security and retirement instead of being renters and dependent and beholden to the government for the rest of their lives. > Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, Of course - because - GW is a function of population. To put it simply - tell everyone to STOP SCREWING EACH OTHER and producing so many babies and ...poof...GW will disappear. This is what Trump and the MAGAoots are doing although most of them don't realize it. Trump is pushing immigrant population back to Mexico. Let Mexico be overpopulated and see their standard of living run into the ground because of it. Maybe then the Catholic Church which is so strong in Mexico will stop railing against Birth Control and start pushing condoms and start advocating for SMALLER families. Immigrant population is where US population growth has come from in recent years. So, in the US we are short housing. We have a homeless crisis. We have it so that young people can't buy homes since none are available. Very very simple solution. Let the population fall. Let births decline below deaths. There will be PLENTY of homes available as the population drops. See how that works? And at the same time the population is declining - fuel used is declining, carbon production output is declining. GW is solved. It's called carrying capacity. It's still out there. Every time someone tries talking about it the clowns come out of the woodwork claiming "you just want to kill people" No. We want to STOP MAKING MORE PEOPLE. We have enough people. We don't need more. The world got along JUST FINE for thousands of years with a global population of under a billion people. We can return to that again and still get along just fine. We can slide the idea of families with 14 kids into the history books labeled "screwy things that Bible-thumpers convinced people to do in the 1800's and 1900s" Then no more global warming and a pollution load low enough that the Earth's natural systems can deal with it without us having to build giant production facilities that suck carbon out of the air. >Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. >That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have 4% of the >lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting that lithium creates a LOT of >pollution. I got more news for you there. Efficiency and energy density storage in batteries only matters for ONE use - mobile. Who said we need lithium batteries for cloudy-day storge for EVs? Who said we NEED lithium batteries for ON SITE storage? Nobody - but stupid people. APC by Schneider Electric has been pushing Lithium UPSes for some time now. They are a commercial failure. Why? Because NOBODY gives a tinkers damn how heavy a UPS is that sits in a rack bolted to the wall all day long. Lithium replacement battery packs for those APC UPSes are double the cost of the lead acid batteries. So, people go to buy a UPS and say "screw that. I want the UPS with the cheaper batteries I don't care how heavy it is" If you put solar cells on your roof IT DOES NOT MATTER if the batteries holding power from them are a series of Leyden jars that are the most inefficient supercapacitors you can find, occupying triple the space of even typical marine batteries - as long as your bank of them stores up all the power you collect in a day. What matters with on-site battery systems IS NOT efficiency. That's why the focus on lithium batteries is completely wacked for on-site solar systems. The ONLY reason it's happening is because mostly up til now those systems were purchased by taxpayer dollars via heavy subsidies so when Ma and Pa Kettle looked at a solar system for their house - they could get a government-subsidized Lithium one for $20 or an "old-school" unsubsidized lead acid one for $20,000 - which do you think they will go for? It doesn't matter that the Lithium one is going to cost 3 times more to replace the batteries in 10 years or that we need the Lithium in EVs not sitting in someone's garage storing the output of their solar cells. This is why we need to get the government out of the business of subsidizing these systems. The government's agenda was jumpstarting EV car production and Lithium batteries are currently the best option due to power-to-weight ratio, they wanted to ramp up Lithium battery production - so yes, let's subsidize lithium batteries in EVERYTHING even on-site power storage systems that do not need the light weight. So, less-energy-dense electrical storage systems - like carbon nanotubes which are NOT chemical, can be used forever without degrading - got ignored and languished on the vine while the Lithium drums kept beating. And you -like everyone else - fell for it. Your "analysis" is all based on what someone else wants you to believe not what is logical. It's NOT logical to use a scarce resource - lithium - for PV energy storage. So WHY claim that PV energy storage is a non-starter based on the shortage of lithium? > I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to energy storage. Ah yes, NOW we are injecting some logic. Your brain isn't ossified after all. > A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we use power > generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a surplus. > http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop Moving electricity long distances involves transmission line losses, forget interhemispheric energy transfer. > Probably five or ten giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. And there's the hole. Once more, you focus on large generation projects. This isn't the future. The future is millions of small generation projects scattered everywhere. Large projects just perpetuate central control and make it easy for the government to control people. Give someone an EV scooter, and a large solar cell to charge it. They are free. They can go where they want when they want they don't have to pay anyone for power. They just need space for the solar cell. And that is a factor of how efficient the cell is. Which is WHY the smartest researchers - the ones who want the fame and fortune for the game changer - are focusing on cell efficiency. You build one of your giant expensive systems and I come out with a solar cell 50% efficient - and I will put your giant system out of business by undercutting what you are selling power for. And, if you and your giant system are owned by the government - the government will fight me tooth and nail to suppress my cell. Why do you think China is pushing fusion - which is probably the most expensive ridiculous large central power generation system ever devised. They want a working fusion reactor that powers the entire country - so that everyone in China is scared to death of speaking out because if they do the government cuts their power off. "off-grid" is where it's at. Lots of people with RV's have discovered this. > Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, regardless of screen pixel count. And beyond your screen, too. Your and my posts, here in this forum. Precisely!!! Doctors - invalidate thyselves! :-) Ted _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG-talk mailing list PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk From eldo at poningru.com Tue Feb 18 19:04:00 2025 From: eldo at poningru.com (Eldo Varghese) Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:04:00 +0000 Subject: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth In-Reply-To: <003701db8010$0b07bc50$211734f0$@portlandia-it.com> References: <20250209234505.GA11150@gate.kl-ic.com> <018601db7c42$e7e6f400$b7b4dc00$@portlandia-it.com> <20250212025441.GA25628@gate.kl-ic.com> <01d201db7e44$44e02de0$cea089a0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250214021037.GA27728@gate.kl-ic.com> <003f01db7ea3$10c4bee0$324e3ca0$@portlandia-it.com> <20250215052949.GB14880@gate.kl-ic.com> <003701db8010$0b07bc50$211734f0$@portlandia-it.com> Message-ID: I have the same issue! answers inline On 2/15/25 5:13 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > Around 15 years ago when SolarWorld was running around trying to give people solar setups I had them eval my house. > > I have a sloped south facing roof. They said based on their calculator it would be worthwhile for me to do it. > > However, my roof does not use the standard King Post trusses or Howe trusses. It uses attic trusses. So - yeah. I got 2 rooms up there. We raised 2 kids in them. > > But...the downside is...the roof is not strong enough to hold PV panels because of this. Did you have an engineer come evaluate this? This is solar installers being overly cautious, if you have a structural engineer sign off on the load bearing capabilities you CAN add solar panels. The secret is that some of these old dimensional lumber are made of old growth wood with higher strength than today's. See the solar worksheet from portland [0] page 10 - 13. Unfortunately, the estimate for this structural evaluation was around $3k for my house. I havent gone through with it because I have multiple large trees shadowing my roof so solar wont be worth it on my house anyway. -Eldo [0] https://www.portland.gov/ppd/documents/solar-worksheet/download > > I'd have to gut out the upstairs, demolish everything down to the studs - and rebuild the attic (which actually wouldn't be that hard nor that expensive - an afternoon with a compressor, nail gun, saw and pile of 2x4's would do it) to gain the strength in the roof for panels. > > I'd probably lose at least 1 room. > > One of these days. Sigh. > > Kids - the gift that keeps on taking...lol > > Ted > > -----Original Message----- > From: PLUG-talk On Behalf Of Tomas Kuchta > Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2025 11:06 AM > To: Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion > Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth > > Here is some hard data from a north state. > > I drive EV almost daily for the last 2-ish years. So is my skiing/kayaking buddy. > > He has solar on his modest 2k-ish sq. feet house. I don't because I don't own my town house condo roof. > > His solar roof produces more electricity than he can use in his heat pump + car, averaging over the year. The way it works over here, he can offset/supply generated surplus power with nearby address - his son who does not have favourable roof orientation. That lowers his son bill by about 1/3 during the summer last year. I do not have more details. > > He has ordinary market solar cells, not some crazy efficient space type ones. I am told that his year output is about 15MWh. Obviously more on sunny and summer days than in the winter and cloudy days. > > I have no heat pump (20+ year old AC) - my yearly hosehold power consumption for the whole house + EV is about 10MWh. EV accounting for about 2.5MWh at about 12k miles driven. > > This is the reality I live in - not a dream - 4.3 miles per kWh without a rack, or 3.4 miles per kWh with sea kayak on the roof. Give or take. > > I wish I could get 1MWh delivered for wholesale $70-$100. I pay $360 per MWh delivered. > > Best, Tomas > > > On Sat, Feb 15, 2025, 00:29 Keith Lofstrom wrote: > >>> From: Keith Lofstrom >while they careen down >>> residential streets at 50 mph in their 700 horsepower > (50 >>> kilowatt) SUVs. >> >> On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 09:41:16PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: >> TM> Ah yes the old "it's the children" baloney argument. >> >> No, its the old "I will ignore what you wrote and spout misanthropic >> hallucinations instead" argument. I'm sorry you dislike traffic >> cameras, but I'm the pedestrian who dodges speeding cars on the >> increasingly rare days when I go east to Portland. >> >> TM> You do realize you don't actually have to charge your EV every >> TM> single >> day, >> TM> don't you? At least, not when you live in the city 4 miles from >> TM> your >> job. >> TM> And your solar panels can generate power during the day and store >> TM> it >> in a >> TM> battery for nightly charging of your EV. There's a LOT of energy in >> solar >> TM> power. We just don't have the efficiencies yet up where they need >> TM> to >> be. >> TM> But that is coming. >> >> So many claims, so little time. >> >> I know many PV researchers; they are solid state engineers like me. >> Crystalline silicon efficiency is close to practical maximum, >> increasing from 15% to 16% over two decades. Cost has plummeted, but >> that is mostly GIGANTIC factories in China. Concentrator system >> efficiency has more than doubled, but the watts per hectare has not. >> >> In most places, those hectares feed people, or feed natural >> biodiversity (where your next superdrug will emerge), or convert an >> inadequate fraction of greenhouse gas CO? back into oxygen and trees >> and toilet paper. >> >> Note: I dislike many people who prattle about global warming, but I've >> done the physics and the math, and I'm afraid they are mostly correct. >> I take comfort in the fact that they are entirely mistaken about >> systems and engineering ... but that includes nearly everyone. >> >> Batteries are an entirely different kettle of electrons. >> That's lithium supply; continental brines in Australia, Chile, China, >> and Argentina. The US extracts 1% of the world supply, though we have >> 4% of the lithium brine reserves; that isn't nearly enough to provide >> cloudy-day storage for millions of electric vehicles. Extracting that >> lithium creates a LOT of pollution. >> >> ---- >> >> I've published journal papers about an entirely different approach to >> energy storage. >> >> A very large scale expansion of "maglev" kinetic energy storage >> combined with "interhemispheric" energy transfer; On winter nights, we >> use power generated by summer day PV in Australia (at other times >> South America or China or Indonesia), and they use ours when we have a >> surplus. >> >> http://launchloop.com/PowerLoop >> >> The technology isn't too difficult; I've built desktop demo maglev >> systems. >> >> The principal change required is Pacific rim peace and mutual >> cooperation. I'm not holding my breath, sigh. >> >> DARPA offered to fund my research, but at age 70, I said they should >> find energetic younger researchers to do the work. I explained that >> the system capacity scales as the square of the cost; double the cost, >> quadruple the delivered value. Thus a 100 meter demo is expensive and >> sorta useless. A 100 kilometer demo is a thousand times the expense, >> but a million times the productivity and usefulness. Still not global >> scale. >> >> That kind of scaling sounds like pie-in-the-sky to folks who haven't >> ridden the Silicon Wave from RTL NOR gates to tera-transistor solid >> state memories. I expect thousands will understand it, out of >> billions who've never wielded a wafer probe. Anyway ... >> >> A mature 10,000 kilometer system would be 100 times more expensive, >> 10,000 times more productive, but damned difficult to protect from >> sabotage in parts of the world that "we" don't control. It would >> serve billions of people around the Pacific Rim. Probably five or ten >> giant systems, for redundancy and ongoing system upgrade. >> >> But as always, billions of resentful people will be left out. It >> doesn't take many resentful people to fly planes into skyscrapers, or >> depth-charge undersea energy systems. >> >> The principal construction materials would be iron (for the rotor) and >> aluminum (for the wiring). Plus a shit ton of electronics; a small >> but costly silicon mass fraction controlling a mega-shit-ton of wire >> and rotor. >> >> Anyway ... it won't be ready next week or next year. >> >> Neither will the megatonne lithium supply for hundreds of millions of >> stationary and mobile batteries, or any of the other green >> technologies relying on constrained resources and giant mining and >> giant factories that we haven't started building yet. This isn't as >> easy as a blog post, or increasing an exponent in a spreadsheet. >> >> And NONE of it will be costless, or without serious side effects >> requiring costly mitigations. The world is way too crowded to throw >> our shit over the fence; the people on the other side will fire >> artillery shells back IF WE ARE LUCKY, and engineered pathogens if we >> AREN'T lucky. >> >> ------------------------------------ >> >> KHL> I recently finished reading "Disconnected America: The >> KHL> Consequences >> of Mass >> KHL> Media in a Narcissistic World" by Ed Shane. Published in 2001, >> KHL> and >>> sitting >> KHL> on a shelf in the PSU library ever since. Shane claimed that >> KHL> laptop >> screens >> KHL> narrow our thinking in time and breadth. >> >> TM> Well, 2000's laptop screens WERE pretty small and low-res after all. >> >> The point is that our brains and visual systems evolved for 360 degree >> awareness, combining saccades of our retinal fovea into a much larger >> gestalt "image" of the landscape and PEOPLE around us, in 3D+T. It >> isn't the screen pixels that matter, it is our retinal pixels and the >> brain regions they drive, and how those affect us semi-evolved social >> apes and our cooperative skills. >> >> Or lack thereof, fellow geeks! >> >> Shrivel that megayear-evolved process, and you shrivel a large >> fraction of what makes us civilized, aware, mostly cooperative humans. >> Shane was a media consultant; his job was to peddle media >> effectiveness, but his avocation was asking "What does this mean? >> What might happen?" >> >> Yes, billions of people don't have that avocation. >> More neurotypical people are aware of (and appreciate) such skills, >> even if they have fewer of them. The mind blind, not so much. I tend >> toward the latter, sigh. >> >> Practically everything in the world is beyond the edge of your screen, >> regardless of screen pixel count. >> >> "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt >> of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, W.S.) >> >> TM> The problems aren't tech. The problems are people and always have >> been. >> >> And the most important problem is that crazy person I see in the >> mirror, darkly. Apostle Paul referenced that mirror before Star Trek. >> We may never learn where Paul plagiarized it from. >> >> "Good artists copy, great artists STEAL" (Picasso) >> >> Implying Picasso's self-awareness and self-criticism. >> Criticizing others is not the path to enlightenment. >> >> Keith L. >> >> -- >> Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com >> _______________________________________________ >> PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org >> PLUG-talk mailing list >> PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org >> https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk >> > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG-talk mailing list > PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org > https://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk