If this was a pure advertising piece, I might agree. In this case, it's more "hey I wrote a book on this, these are other books that are great". That's kinda different at least in my mind.
While I generally do not trust information from "advertisements", in this case I don't see how this is any worse than including a list of sources in the bibliography. What this could be is an attempt to use those other books to sell the author's through some reflected glory (or SEO-fu) but in that case, the author is still incentivized to recommend good books.
Just to note, I made the site to interview authors and get their 5 favorite books on something they are passionate about. And I promote their book alongside the list to help them bump into readers. Authors generally just want to share something they are passionate about; it isn't about money, as nobody is writing a book to make money.
> Our electricity is unmetered and included in our rent. My unit has an individual circuit breaker box, but how would solar power be fed into such a system
I don't understand. These systems just plug into wall outlets. The big difference is that, instead of saving yourself money, you'd be saving your landlady money on the bill.
Agreed. It's just a sub panel off the main. Could be 10 sub panels deep and it wouldn't play havoc with anything. The inverter syncs with the line frequency then boosts its voltage just enough to see it push current into the grid which is a few hundred mV. I would even hazard a guess that the impedance between the panels is enough to say that the current is likely being pulled directly by the closest loads: the tenant's loads.
I'm thinking that the landlady's "NO!" is based on: (1) You can't save yourself any money by doing this, so why are you interested?, and (2) Complex stuff that she doesn't know or understand about electricity and her property's wiring and whatever you might end up doing might end with her property burned down.
> Complex stuff that she doesn't know or understand about electricity and her property's wiring and whatever you might end up doing might end with her property burned down.
What wiring? Literally connect the setup to the regular power outlet, no fuzzing with wires or otherwise, probably any human who've connected some electrical gadget/device to a socket before could get these solar setups going in a couple of minutes.
Can't there can be over-current issues if you are not using a dedicated wall outlet for backfeeding the solar?
Consider a situation where the plugged-in solar inverter is capable of providing 15 amps into the circuit, but so is the breaker feeding the circuit from the panel. If you plug in something that can consume 30 amps, it will be able to do so by pulling 15 amps from each source without tripping the breaker, so you can end up with 30 amps traveling in your building wiring that is only sized for 15.
At least that's how I understand it. I don't know if any of the grid-tied inverters that can plug into a wall have some way of detecting and compensating for this. Clearly other countries have been able to come to a decision to allow it. I vaguely remember someone explaining that the 230V systems in Europe somehow mitigate the issue but I don't remember how.
If you've got normal residential power outlets, then you've got wiring inside the walls. Those wires are sized for the number of amps that the individual circuit's fuse or breaker allows, plus some limited safety margin.
Depending on hidden-in-the-wall details of how a circuit's wiring is run, and where you plug in panels and electrical loads, it might be quite easy to overload those wires - without blowing the fuse or tripping the breaker.
Overloaded wires can get very hot, and electrical fires starting inside walls really is a thing.
Yeah, so I guess when both the renter and the landlord doesn't understand the solution (or renter does understand, but didn't explain properly), it'll be a hard sell indeed.
Thanks for clearing that up. Sorry to muddy the waters, but the solar backpack was an experiment unrelated to my request to place actual solar panels on the balcony.
I would say that it is not out of ignorance that my landlady denied my request. Rather, when you're dealing with tenants who live in an apartment along with hundreds of other tenants living in identical apartment units, you become quite averse to any unique snowflake situations like this.
The maintenance crew is really good at maintaining a fleet of refrigerators, toilets, and ranges that are the same model and hook up in the same way. They offer a standard set of appliances and fixtures that are provided in each unit, and they are serviced uniformly! Imagine if you had a fleet of 500 Supermicro 1U servers, and one of your colocation clients wanted to hook up a custom Ethernet switch made in Outer Mongolia. You'd probably say "no" too.
Regardless of how these panels hook up to the "grid" inside here, it would be nonstandard. The cord itself would snake through the door, onto the floor, somehow, without a dedicated conduit, and it'd be subject to damage, and the door would never close properly. The panels themselves would cover and conceal some part of the railing, and that is considered unsightly and unwanted; they don't want tenants up there with concealed balconies, much less clothes or junk hanging off of them.
The uniformity and conformity of each unit is key. It's like living in an HOA. When we sign the lease, we agree to keep our exteriors neat, tidy, and uniform. There are no flags or signs or stickers that we can put outside. It reduces controversy as well as easing the burden of maintenance and cleaning.
Many years ago, I was renting a very modern 2BR unit and I decided that one of the rooms really needed a ceiling fan (it was a hot summer in a chilly climate!) so I went to Home Depot, purchased a kit, and installed the ceiling fan where a dome light had been. I didn't... ask anyone... and I have no electrician's expertise, nor did I check whether the structure could support it. It must've been quite a surprise when they found it after I moved out!
It's not as though people intentionally made these endangered because they have insufficient love for penguins. We have unintentionally done it because we have insufficient love (care) for them and many, many other things, creatures, people, etc.
It's because the people who get rich off of fossil fuels are in control, and they are willing to continue this damage as long as it adds to their personal fortunes.
We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.
It's not a shallow dismissal; it's a dismissal for good reason. It's tangential to the topic, but not to HN overall. It's only curmudgeonly if you assume AI-written posts are the inevitable and good future (aka begging the question). I really don't know how it's "sneering", so I won't address that.
The fact that the whole thread has basically devolved into debates over if it is or isn't an LLM written article is proving well enough that it doesn't really matter one way or another
It is a witch hunt with no evidence whatsoever, all based on intuition. It is distraction from the main topic, a topic that enough people find interesting to stay on the top page. What was intellectually interesting has now become a bore fest of repeated back and forth. That’s disrespectful and inconsiderate. Write a new post about why do you think AI writing is dangerous. I don’t mind that. I’d upvote it.
The key line "I’m getting a similar sense for the recent US foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work slightly better than they should."
There is no measurement of efficacy here. It feels like these things are working better because the US military is now doing big public things, but that is not necessarily a good change over not-doing-big-public-things.
Yeah, that was exactly where he lost me. The US military doesn't need a remarkable amount of luck for these operations to be tactical successes, tactical risk wasn't the reason previous administrations didn't do them. The element that was missing was a complete disregard for second order consequences, and Claude has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
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