They do because they can do two things that you and I do not:

• High frequency trading on servers that can process new information and use it before anyone else on the market can. These servers are located as close as possible to the trading exchanges, because the extra milliseconds from speed of light travel will make a difference.
• Trump personally telling them when he’s about to make a big policy change

For the rest of us, timing the market is dumb. I’ll even say that you might be right about today. You might not be right about tomorrow, or the next. The sum of those moves may even be profitable overall, but not enough to beat someone who stuck with the sp500 with transaction costs taken into account.

I learned a long time ago to never try to time the market. It’s served me very well.

Normally, I do give the benefit of a doubt for the first year or so of economic news under a new President no matter which party. Policies do not usually have time to have that kind of effect so quickly. It’s great when you can point to a President you don’t like and say “see, the economy went down”, but it usually doesn’t work that way.

Not this time. Trump moved so fast to break so much that he gets to own the whole thing. Doubly so when the Fed’s predictions had been pointing downward when they had been pointing upward before Trump took office.

When it comes to attacks on the Internet, doing simple things to get rid of the stupid bots means kicking 90% of attacks out. No, it won’t work against a determined foe, but it does something useful.

Same goes for setting SSH to a random port. Logs are so much cleaner after doing that.

Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It’s designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn’t work very well.

The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.

Drive to get groceries? You’re dependent on most of those same factors.

Water? Same. Even if you have a well, you still don’t want that well to be polluted by people around you.

Shelter? You presumably don’t want a neighbor’s rickety structure to fall over on yours during a storm.

This kind of independence is a farce.

Years ago, I was in the mall in Dearborn, MI. It has most of the stuff you’d find in any other American shopping mall. There’s the Gap, American Eagle, and Spencer’s Gifts. It’s mostly full of teenagers doing things that teenagers do in a mall.

Then there’s a random antique shop full of Edwardian furniture. I didn’t see anyone in there besides a sales guy or two, and it seemed completely out of place. Dearborn is also fairly close to the Canadian border. I swear it’s gotta be a money laundering front.

Capitalism does solve it. Eventually. It takes the information in steps and gets to a solution that experts were talking about decades before. This is not a good way to do things.

It tends to overinvest in the thing that has the most immediate ROI. That’s been solar. Wind/water/storage/long distance distribution are all important pieces of this, too, and this has been known in climate and civil engineering fields for a while. Solar can’t do it all by itself.

A sensible system would even out the investment in each. The wind often blows when the sun isn’t shining, so you don’t need as much storage to do the in between parts. Water not only provides an easily adjustable baseload (nuclear does not adjust very well), but it also doubles as storage. In fact, if we could link up all the hydro dams we already have to long distance transmission, we wouldn’t need any other storage. Though that isn’t necessarily the most efficient method, either.

What capitalism does is invest in solar, find that causes negative prices, and then invest in the next best ROI to solve that. Perhaps it’s storage. That results in a lot more storage than would otherwise be needed than if wind/water/long distance distribution were done alongside it. Or maybe the next best ROI is wind, but there are still lulls lacking in both sun and wind–as well as periods where you have too much of both–so you still need storage.

And what capitalism really doesn’t want to do long distance transmission. It’s not just big, but it’s horizontal construction. That means rights to the whole route have to be purchased. It means environmental concerns along the entire route have to be thought out. It means soil has to be tested for stability and footings made to suit for the entire route. Capitalism almost has to be beaten into submission for anyone to build anything horizontally. (See also: trains and highway systems, both of which came with substantial government investment and incentives).

You missed my point. What you assumed the article said was completely off base.

No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well.

Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society. This kind of independence from others is an illusion and is not compatible with how humans have evolved.

And before anyone bothers you about the impact of turning fields into solar farms, I’ll add that we (the US) already have more farmland dedicated to energy production (ethanol corn) than would be necessary to provide our whole electricity demand.

Oh hell yes. 40% of the corn is grown in the US for ethanol, and it’s a complete and utter waste. Even with extremely optimistic numbers the amount of improvement is close to zero. It might be the worst greenwashing out there; sounds like you’re doing something, but its benefit is likely negative.

We have the land. That’s so not a problem.

It’s one of the solutions, yes.

But let’s look at this more broadly. The idea of combining wind/water/solar/storage with long distance transmission lines isn’t particularly new. The book “No Miracles Needed” by Mark Z. Jacobson (a Stanford Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering) outlined the whole thing in 2023, but was the sum total of the author’s insight that he had had over a decade prior. Dumping all the money in one was never going to get us there.

Capitalism does sorta figure this out, but it takes steps of understanding as it focuses on one thing at a time. The first step dumps money into the thing that’s cheap and gives the best ROI (solar). Then there’s too much of that thing, and the economics shifts to covering up the shortfalls of that part (be it wind or storage or whatever). That makes it better, but there’s still some shortfalls, so then that becomes the thing in demand, and capitalism shifts again.

It does eventually get to the comprehensive solution. The one that advocates in the space were talking about decades before.

The liberal solution–the one that leaves capitalism fundamentally intact–is to create a broad set of government incentives to make sure no one part of the problem gets too much focus. Apparently, we can’t even do that.

That’s not the problem the article gets to. The capital is there. Capital is being dumped into solar at breakneck speed. That’s the problem.

As more solar gets built, you get more days when there’s so much excess solar capacity that prices go near zero, or occasionally even negative. With more and more capacity around solar, there is less incentive to build more because you’re increasing the cases of near-zero days.

Basically, the problem is that capitalism has focused on a singular solution–the one that’s cheapest to deploy with the best returns–without considering how things work together in a larger system.

There are solutions to this. Long distance transmission helps areas where it isn’t sunny take advantage of places where it is. Wind sometimes blows when the sun isn’t shining, and the two technologies should be used in tandem more than they are. Storing it somewhere also helps; in fact, when you do wind and solar together, they cover each other enough that you don’t have to have as much storage as you’d think. All this needs smarter government subsidies to make it happen.

As a side note, you seem to be focused on solar that goes on residential roofs. That’s the worst and most expensive way to do solar. The space available for each project is small, and it’s highly customized to the home’s individual roof situation. It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well. Using the big flat roofs of industrial buildings is better, but the real economies of scale come when you have a large open field. Slap down racks and slap the solar panels on top.

If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility, then I suggest looking into co-op solar/wind farms. If your state bans them–mine does–then that’s something to talk to your state representatives about.

And people probably will.

For the most part, the US has staple foods covered internally. We import stuff like coffee, but grains and potatoes and chicken/pork/beef are all here. I expect that when people see the shelves for electronic trinkets go bare at Walmart, they will panic buy food. This will end up like covid food shelves; a bunch of scary videos of food shelves being empty, but then restocked within a week.

That’ll mean you may not be able to get things at the grocery store when you want them for a while.

I had happened to buy a small chest freezer just before covid, and that ended up being such a good investment just then. Looks like it will be again.

The last car I had with that was a 2004 Ford Focus, and those things were made cheap. Like afraid it would snap off on a cold winter day kind of cheap. In fact, the gas cover did exactly that one very cold morning.

This thing is built very cheap, so I wouldn’t get too excited.

Best as a supplementary power source for charging your phone on a trip. If it gives you enough range to go to the grocery store and back on a sunny day, that would be a lot.

Was it an autobiography?

“We did things this way, therefore Democrats must be, too” - the furthest any Republican has thought about this.

Occam’s Razor comes from a 14th century priest who studied logic. It’s been gone over by philosophers in the centuries since and is generally considered valid.

Hanlon’s Razor comes from a joke book published in 1980.

Is there reason to believe that Hanlon’s Razor is correct?

A 150-200mm drone frame wouldn’t have that kind of range in its battery, anyway. There are useful drones in the war that are even smaller than that.