I think this is a good idea. Especially the part that allows those who can demonstrate a higher level of responsibility, complete additional safety courses and background checks, to own these banned firearms.

Bans are generally just bans for people who follow the law. So I like these exceptions for those who are willing to “extra follow the law.”

Obviously this assumes that the exceptions will actually be given, since it’s up to your local sheriffs discretion. Could be abused.

With you on that. This is a bit of a “bad example.”

And someone looking in from the outside could totally make the conclusion that “they (lemmy) are totally taking this out of context! They’re a felon!”

Like you say, there’s a menagerie of actions done by this administration that are dangerous and telling of their goals.

I agree with your sentiment.

The cartoon is clearly in extremely bad taste and dehumanizing.

However, the context that she had been previously convicted for fentanyl trafficking is important.

It’s tough though, because if we put the cartoon aside, this is technically what they should be doing. I don’t disagree with deporting felon immigrants.

But then you consider all the history of this administration that got us here… it’s really hard to agree with them.

Yea I think within the last year or so the fee was removed.

Here’s a great site to do exactly this!

https://www.thetruesize.com/

Nice Chat-GPT you got there

Been curious about deploying HA with docker. As I understand the only limitation is you can’t use add-ons?

I watched the same video!

I was right about to disagree and type “wait this only applies to light” but then I remembered: radio is light.

Crazy to think about that!

Similar, but I believe the strength addition is also because it changes the directions of the Z-axis layers.

Most filament is rather strong in tension. If you imagine printing a regular cube, without rotation, it’s going to be strongest stretching or compressing the sides of the cube.

But if you pulled the cube apart from its top and bottom, the only adhesive strength is the fused connection between layer heights. Which is super weak.

By printing at an angle, the layer heights may be in a direction that doesn’t receive tensile load, making it functionally stronger.

Yup, the US only regulates “guns.” Which is the part of the assembled firearm that has the serial number. Everything else is a “gun part,” which for the most part, are not controlled.

So if you can acquire/manufacture the “gun” you can buy the rest of the “gun parts” on eBay.

I used to be heading down this path as a teenager. For me, college was the eye opener. When I broke away from my normal bubble of people, I would have my opinions and biases challenged.

I like the travel suggestion as well. Also I went to some music festivals around that time that were pretty significant to my beliefs. I guess it depends on the type of music they prefer though.

Well the grid needs the most help late afternoon. Which is right when solar starts to ramp down and when people get home and load starts to ramp up.

During solar hours, prices sometimes even turn negative. Literally paying people to take your energy, since solar is so plentiful.

The issue is those late afternoon, early evening hours.

And it’s actually more difficult on power plants. Solar is great when the sun is out, but when it goes away, you need all your power plants running. Issue is, a lot of power plants don’t like to turn on and off. They’d prefer to just run at one speed, all the time. But when the sun is out, we have to turn off power plants, since we’d make too much power. And turning them back on can be a long and expensive process.

And that’s where some of this rhetoric comes from. From a power plant perspective, we go from no-load in the afternoon (all solar), to full load in the late-afternoon/early-evening (no solar). The grid was never designed for this, and it’s having a hard time adapting so rapidly.

Batteries are totally a solution but the technology is super green and not really at a grid scale yet.

I’ve been thinking of replacing my Synology with one of these!

To be fair 10 hours is either a pretty old or pretty massive unit. 2 hours might be a little more reflective of modern gas turbines. Especially combined cycles. But depending on how big the peak is, you need every available unit, both old and new.

Ultimately the issue is it’s very hard to meet that peak when all of your gas units have to go from 0 to 100% output. Much easier (and more reliable) to take them from 10% to 100%. Which is what grid operators do currently.

Yea an affordable battery in every home would be a slam dunk. This is kinda already happening with vehicle2grid (v2g) electric car protocols. But not everyone has an EV yet. And operators are still working out the kinks using this in the grid.

Plus the lithium batteries in cars have their own supply/recycling issues.

Gravity energy storage doesn’t scale well. I’ve replied to other comments with more detail on this.

There are more feasible energy storage technologies out there, but these are super cutting edge and are not ready for grid-level deployment yet.

The future of grid level energy storage is almost certainly not going to be gravity based. At least not on a large scale.

You can’t have 100% of load be renewable/solar and have gas units online on top of that. That’s over generation. You have to match the supply exactly with the demand. If you mismatch, you destabilize the grid. Undersupply causes blackouts, oversupply melts power lines.

If a unit takes 10 hours to start, solar hours are from 6am to 6pm, and peak load is at 7pm with 0% solar; when do you recommend we start this unit? At the minimum, we’d have to order it on at 7am. Units have to run at a minimum load, let’s say 100MW for this unit. So now you can’t 100% solar from 7am to 6pm, you have to leave 100MW of room for this base loaded unit.

This doesn’t even factor in regulatory requirements like flex, spinning reserve, and other balancing and reliability requirements. Grids are required to have emergency units available at an instant to prevent mass destabilization if parts of the grid fail.

Yea, more control over the panels will help with the overgeneration issue.

But there’s other issues like ramping supply to meet peak demand and general generation during non-solar hours that still have to be addressed.

Each have interesting proposals on how to solve them, but they haven’t been developed to the point that they’re ready to be put onto the grid at a large scale.

Yes, pumped storage is definitely an existing technology that serves this need. I live near a massive one as well. However, large-hydro recently has not been considered as renewable form of generation due to the disruptive impact it has to local ecosystems.

I know in the US, new projects do not get approved due to permitting and water board issues. So I don’t think we’re going to see any new construction.

Piggybacking on your grid stability point, another issue I don’t see getting addressed here is ramp rate.

If we install enough solar where 100% of our daytime load is served by solar, that’s great. But what about when the solar starts to drop off later in the day?

A/Cs are still running while the sun is setting, the outside air is still hot. People are also getting home from work, and turning on their A/Cs to cool off the house, flipping on their lights, turning on the oven, etc.

Most grids have their peak power usage after solar has completely dropped off.

The issue then becomes: how can we serve that load? And you could say “just turn on some gas-fired units, at least most of the day was 100% renewable.”

But some gas units take literal hours to turn on. And if you’re 100% renewable during the day, you can’t have those gas units already online.

Grid operators have to leave their gas units online, running as low as they can, while the sun is out. So that when the peak hits, they can ramp up their grid to peak output, without any help from solar.

There are definitely some interesting solutions to this problem, energy storage, load shifting, and energy efficiency, but these are still in development.

People expect the lights to turn on when they flip the switch, and wouldn’t be very happy if that wasn’t the case. Grid operators are unable to provide that currently without dispatchable units.

I think a more feasible potential technology for the grid are flow batteries.

They work through some kind of ion-exchange. Where they have two liquids, one charged and one not. By running power through a catalyzer, they move charges into one tank. Then you can apply a load across the catalyzer, and remove the charge as power.

I’m by no means an expert, but these are already pretty popular in Japan, and have started to make their way into the US.

Still definitely an expensive technology, but I’m hopeful that scale and investment can drive the cost down.

One of their biggest advantages over other technologies like Li-Ion is that their duration is independent of their capacity. Because the duration is only determined by the size of your tanks and the amount of liquid you have.

Meaning that you can take an existing 50MW, 4 hour plant and upgrade it to an 8 hour plant by doubling the size of the tanks and filling them up with the electrolyte. All without having to upgrade the catalyzer.

Edit: also worth mentioning they don’t have the same supply/environmental/recyclability concerns that lithium batteries do. I believe the electrolyte is relatively inert and does not degrade over time.

I hesitate on

that work on the scale needed to support large sections of electrical grid

That first link is for a 10MW, 8 hour battery. 10MW is on the smaller end of generators, you’d need quite a few of these to start making an impact. For example, a small gas turbine is like 50MW, a large one is over 250MW.

And you could say “just build a lot of them” but the capacity per unit of area tends to be pretty low for these types of technologies.

Building them where we have ample space is okay. But now this power has to be transmitted, and we are already having a lot of problems with transmission line congestion as-is. The real advantage of energy storage is when it’s done local, no need for transmission lines.

Plus there’s permitting/stability issues as well. These wouldn’t work if the area was prone to earthquakes or other natural events.