The petrochemical industry has significant economies of scale, making it difficult to dethrone. Also, there are some shady political shenanigans to ensure its continued existence. Getting rid of oil is going to require some radical changes.

You wo⌧ld ⌧nly ge⌧ a f⌧w pa⌧ts h⌧re ⌧nd the⌧e.

Would love to see them try this with the Message In a Bottle protocol. Would probably take a few centuries, but still…

“Hi, I’d like to hear a TCP joke.”

“Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?”

“Yes, I’d like to hear a TCP joke.”

“OK, I’ll tell you a TCP joke.”

“Ok, I will hear a TCP joke.”

“Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?”

“Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.”

“Ok, I am about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.”

“Ok, I am ready to get your TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have an explicit setting, and ends with a punchline.”

“I’m sorry, your connection has timed out. Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?”

You can totally have a “socialist worker’s party” that is actually anti-Marxist. You can also privatize some state-owned enterprises to maximize profits while still calling it a socialist party. Might as well abolish the unions while you’re at it. These labels are just marketing baits for luring in the working class.

The blueprint is out there, just look up the history of NSDAP, and you’ll see what I mean.

On the downside, they probably ended up spending more money and receiving less in return. If they bought their junk from Amazon, they also contributed to upholding poor labor practices. Nobody wins in this situation except for the corpos.

That is just amazing. How the human mind works is so bizarre at times. Even when there’s a good deal, people just don’t take it? Wasn’t it enticing enough?

Either way, some companies exploit the same mechanics to sell trash for a high price. It’s so weird and pretty dark.

Others might call it straight-up lying, deception or even misleading. Calling it “Amazon sales policy” just makes it sound nicer.

If you’re really good at customer service (i.e. manipulation), you’ll say the price just went up 10% this morning, but you’ll get a discount of the same amount, because you’re such a great pal. Basically just the normal price, but it feels nicer.

Here’s another exploit. You and your academic buddies could each have their own Journal and use them for publishing without any suspicious traces leading back to you. Let’s say Sally starts SPLAT, the Studies in Pointless but Laughable Academic Topics. Nelly starts NOPE, the Journal of Nonsensical Observations an Preposterous Experiments. Meanwhile Pete starts POOP, the Proceedings of Outlandish and Outrageous Postulations.

Nelly can be an editor of SPLAT, while Pete can publish all his papers there. Likewise, Pete would be an editor of NOPE and Sally can publish her papers there. Finally, Sally would be an editor of POOP and Nelly would publish her papers that way. It’s a happy love triangle where everyone wins.

That’s how you play the game!

Can confirm. For example, Egypt made university education free (or very cheap) for all Egyptians. Nowadays, they are pumping out countless medical doctors who get employed all across the Middle East. Probably not the highest quality medical care, but it’s still better than nothing.

Now that I think of it, many countries offer free or very affordable university education for their citizens. What’s wrong with America? Even poor African countries make education accessible.

That’s like using a mining bot in Minecraft. You just go AFK, and when you come back you have a stack of diamonds.

But wouldn’t that mean you end up with as much debt as a small country?

Paul Erdős found an exploit in the end game. All you have to do is collaborate with everyone you come across. It doesn’t even matter how small your role is in each paper as long as your name appears somewhere in it.

How do you choose when every major’s terrible? That’s the thing — you don’t. Gotta catch them all, amarite?

What could possibly go right.

Most processes were built very large to reap the benefits of the economies of scale. This means that after each shutdown it may take days for things reach optimal temperature, concentration, speed or some other metric. For example, when baking bread or freezing vegetables, the relevant machine would need to reach a particular temperature before it can actually start producing. Larger the machine, longer it takes. This is the fundamental problem why startups take so much time.

If you went really small scale, the startup time would be cut to a fraction. If you’ve ever made ice cream at home, you’ll know it only takes about 30 minutes for the machine to get cold enough and about 60 min for the ice cream to be ready. If all industry happened at this scale, you totally could shutdown every night. It’s just that small scale production is woefully inefficient. The amount of energy and materials it requires is just absurd when compared to industrial scale.

I wonder what would it take to get the best of the both worlds. No idea if that’s even possible.

Sure is. Animals can drop to various kinds of low activity states such as sleep or even hibernation. Sleep occurs every night, and animals seem to be pretty good at it.

In an industrial context though, frequent shutdowns and startups are avoided, because they’re really complicated to carry out. It also takes a while to get product quality back to normal, so you’ll be wasting materials and energy in the meanwhile. Shutdowns are needed though, because machines wear down and require maintenance, filth builds up and requires cleaning.

If only factories were built that way.

In reality, the amount of adjustable load is rather small. Currently, we’re using that in the reserve market to balance the grid a little bit. It’s enough to deal with some frequency deviations, but nowhere enough to handle intermittent energy production.

Generally speaking, factories are designed to run 24/7, and it’s not easy way to drop production rate without causing some strange problems. That’s why you need grid energy storage.

But if factories could drop to 10% at night, and gradually ramp up to 100% in the noon, that would be ideal from the energy perspective. Storting energy is hard and comes with all sorts of issues, so factories like that could avoid all those issues. Would be great, but that’s not the world we live in.

I really like the idea of having my own server, where I could have a bunch of cool stuff like email, VPN, Nextcloud, and so much more. The primary reason why I don’t have a server like that, is because I can’t trust myself to follow the best practices. For a while now, I’ve been thinking that I should hire a proper professional to take care of all that.