stubish

I agree about market pricing. The new pricing model however distorts this, turning electricity into a subscription service for people with a large enough battery. This distorted market can create bad incentives. But switching to actual market pricing won't work for most customers who don't want or can't afford surprises in their energy bills (it is already available for those that want it). Short term, it seems a good policy to shave or remove peaks. Long term, in a world where every household has a suitably sized battery, it means several times more generation capacity than necessary because consumers have no incentive to reduce consumption (beyond ethics and peer pressure). I don't think this pricing model is a permanent solution. And I have no idea how many years it will remain viable and a good policy, or what sort of hot water system I should buy given 10-20 year warranty periods.

Your example is an excellent example of the sort of problem the AI could diagnose for regular users. Regular user might see their web browser acting flaky, blame their ISP, switch their ISP and find it doesn't help, try a different web browser once they learn they exist, get different problems... But it would hopefully be obvious to a diagnostics system if it got fed the system logs and details. Or maybe it would spit out some rubbish related to Windows 10 sourced from a forum post in 2018.

It has been standardized here, and we see articles about it in the papers for a few years. Yet only 2 or 3 cars on the market implement it and don't even advertise it, apparently still in trials or pushed aside for sexier features. I was under the impression it was not simple, as it requires more electronics and complexity in the car.

It would certainly make sense to sick it on all those crash reports and complaints. All the obscure 0x error codes that end up with you being punted to the forums for 'community support' and being told to reinstall everything.

'They' are not pushing age verification onto everyone. 'We' are pushing it onto ourselves. People want this. It is popular all over the world. If 'they' are doing anything, it is subverting what people want into something else. Which is the worry here, as people asked for age verification but didn't ask to be locked into the mobile phone duopoly. The system people want for age verification could be implemented as Firefox plugin. If it requires these attestation services for binary blobs provided by the government, it includes features someone else wants.

But it not entirely true. While renewables can cover well over 100% of daytime usage on most days in summer in my region, we are down to about 40% during winter. We need lots more solar panels and wind turbines and enough battery to get us through energy droughts, and installation and maintenance has economic and environmental costs. Much less than other forms of generation, but costs nonetheless. If everyone stops caring how much power they draw because it is 'free', the problem of supplying enough sustainable generation becomes harder and takes longer. The extra generation capacity needed is paid for by consumers in the form of connection fees and/or tax payers.

The smaller tank with heatpump will consume a lot less energy than the larger tank with resistive heat.

Economically to me, the larger tank is cheaper, because the appliance is cheaper, and I never pay for the power it uses.

Environmentally, yes, it is not obvious. The large tank requires many more solar panels to power it but no battery. The small tank and heatpump needs much less solar but battery for nighttime use.

But it is weird, because for decades heat pump tech has been pushed as the environmental choice and there are still a number of government subsidies to invest in heat pump hot water systems. And maybe that no longer makes sense, with the money saved buying cheaper and less efficient devices spent on more solar deployments.

Flat rate plans are still popular and the best choice if you can't shift your power usage out of peak times.

The new plans are mostly to charge the hundreds of thousands of household batteries that have been installed over the last few years, which are an economical way to store energy for night time usage (ROI about 8% over 20 years, probably more with the new plans).

The EVs with V2G are just big batteries, nothing special. You certainly can charge your battery on the free power and sell it back during peak periods, and people are doing just that today. Just mostly using their 50 kWh household batteries rather than their EVs though, because V2G is still mostly science fiction unless you buy one of the few models of car that actually support it and have a compatible charger and inverter.

The rich certainly benefit more, like anything where an investment needs to be made (I expect the new plans will be like the existing 'free' power plans and be a poor choice without a battery). In this case, the poor still benefit a little bit as it should drive down peak period prices and the cost of fixed rate plans.

The most popular batteries provide all the customization you need and more. Soo many features... it is exhausting. Even 'AI' modes trying to predict usage and solar generation using weather forecasts and top up from the grid at cheap rates if it thinks the power will probably be needed. A battery like Sigenergy's you can setup on a time based charging schedule (most popular for the free power plans), or have it pull Amber's live wholesale rates and put it into AI mode to avoid using their SmartShift VPP, or just hand over the keys to a VPP provider and let them drive.

Yes. With the 'free' power plans, you are better off not installing solar and investing the savings in a larger battery.

The change certainly brings in some weirdness too.

For instance, I'm looking at a new hot water system. Economically speaking, I'm better off buying an oversized tank using resistive heating that I only need to heat once per day. The grid provides free power and I buy a cheaper appliance. But environmentally it sucks, as more solar needs to be rolled out to cover the additional non-peak usage (guess about 6x the power usage of a smaller tank with heatpump).

The more households that buy them, the less peak power generation is needed and less large scale battery deployments. If the ROI of a household battery was just 4%, you are better off economically paying higher power bills and sticking that money in an index fund. But if subsidies increase that ROI, more people buy batteries. The money the government contributes hopefully ends up less than they would need to spend on large scale battery deployments or on legacy power generation to power peak usage times. It also has the side effect of getting more citizens (literally) invested in sustainable power usage, and people get more interested in insulating their homes, buying more efficient appliances, moving away from gas etc.

Hello from the 80s! It is now 9 and 3. This changed due to airbags and too many people learning what 'degloving' means.

https://www.autonocion.com/us/tower-china-wind-farm-power/ claims it is the first commercial one. I can't find others that are not either prototypes, trials or failed commercially. This design looks to be rolling out in several countries already, which is pretty good as these things go considering their prototype was built in 2020.

My parents spend a huge chunk of their day doing their laundry and soon won't even be able to handle that. Age sucks. Being disabled sucks too. Lots of tasks people think are trivial are mountains to climb.

Yes, like most things you can certainly get a cheaper service that provides less. As you say, the price is merely competitive if you only make use of the service twice a week. But for anyone who needs daily service, such as in-home aged care or disabled support, it is a bargain.

$450 USD / month to have a human turn up every day? $15 USD per day, including weekends? Around here you might just about get the minimum of 1 hour/day for 10 times that.

This will be life changing for the elderly and disabled if they can pull it off. If you have socialized care, the government would even probably pay since it will be cheaper than aged care facilities.

I think that is backwards. If you are replacing full time staff you need a system that works just as fast for the same or less money. For home use, you don't care if it takes 3 hours to make your bed or just stops for a while when waiting for a teleoperator to become available.

There is likely no benefit over 2 legs if you need to step over things. And if you don't, wheels are just fine. Maybe stairs changes this.

I doubt it will ever be cheaper than doing it yourself, like most things in life. The market is for people unable or unwilling to do it themselves.

Outsourcing can be difficult and expensive in many regions. The lack of an actual human might even be considered a benefit in some cases, such as nursing homes (although you have to weigh the benefits of human contact with the benefits of fewer humans spreading plagues).

Suspiciously absent: a rough idea of what percentage of tasks need the assistance.

This will almost certainly depend on the customer and residence. I don't think subscription pricing will be fair, but it can at least be budgeted for out of pensions and such for the people needing to pay for assistance.

Hopefully they can pull this off. Aged care is already a problem in many countries, and getting worse with an aging population and lack of workers such as cleaners. Even just laundry could keep people living in their own homes for a few extra years.

Absolutely nothing will prevent this. The situation is the same, and the same policing and laws about fraud and impersonation and 'enabling an underage person to...' will apply.

What is interesting is that checking physical ID places a burden on the bar. Bars get fined or worse if they do a poor job, or even just take the fall if the kids are more capable than the bouncers. With these attestations though, the government is takes responsibility. The connection is attested by gov to be legal, the gov can't turn around and claim it was illegal. They can't go after you, just the person who enabled the fraud.

This is why age verification cannot be implemented by the vested interests. Rollout in Australia involved making the laws, but leaving the implementation up to the vested interests, and is a mess because of it. A privacy nightmare uploading government documentation to strangers, and companies just just punting responsibility to a designated fall guy ('3rd party trusted verification service'). And most of them don't want to implement things this way, because they don't want to be the next company taking a hit in the stock market because of a public data breach, but have no choice. When governments and societies want age verification, they need to actually take responsibility for it. Which seems to be what the EU is trying to do.

This already happens with the existing system. Even before the internet, drivers licenses would get shared so under aged people could buy beer. The same laws, punishments and policing apply and really the best we can do unless you want to start tattooing id on people at birth.

So not a perfect system, but an improvement over the status quo.

The attestation should be at least the same level of security as access to your government services. ie. you trust it as least as much as you trust a scan of a passport.

The trick is that you don't need to prove anything. The government hands out an attestation that the holder meets criteria required to meet a government regulation. The government has taken responsibility. It is why you would require an EU attestation from EU users, and a US attestation from US users.

Sure. At the heart of it, the system just attests that a document is true. That document might say 'the holder of this token is over 18' or 'the holder of this token is a meat popsicle' or 'the holder of this token should look like this photo and is licensed to drive'. It could even attest your actual identity, which might be useful for banking purposes. The trick to preserving privacy is to only reveal the minimum necessary information.

It is an interesting idea you bring up. These sort of disinformation campaigns are making news everywhere, over and over, and this mechanism easily adapted. Like a blue check mark but actually useful, being able to tell social media posts written by a bot farm apart from social media posts written by an arsehole.