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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Same reason I don’t trust it - imagine rating fking BBC (the literal pro-state violence, austerity supporting, anti-immigration governmental mouth piece as “left-center”)

    It just distorts people’s perception of what political biases are and makes them complacent by relying on an automated bot to do the important work of using your own judgment for what constitutes as moral or justified.

    By letting it platform itself on lemmy, it’s basically inserting itself as the de facto expert on the topic - so for example, people overseas might see BBC rated as left-center and highly factual and start believing that wanting to “secure your borders” is a thing that UK leftist want. Well excuse me if I don’t want a privately owned (even if open source) US company deciding what political views others should have.




  • Here’s some math on that “revolutionary” idea to put things into perspective, as it turns out, it’s pretty underwhelming:

    • If we used ALL the aluminum produced globally in a year (about 65 million tons), we’d get around 7.30 million tons of hydrogen.
    • While that might sound like a lot, it really isn’t… That hydrogen would contain about 8.30 x 10^14 BTUs of energy.
    • Meanwhile, our annual global methane production is sitting pretty at 1.14 x 10^17 BTU.
    • Doing the math, and our “amazing” aluminum-to-hydrogen process gives us a whopping 0.73% of the energy we get from methane…

    And remember, this is assuming we use EVERY SINGLE BIT of aluminum we produce globally!

    Obv hydrogen is “cleaner” than gas, but the point is the scale - this method is a drop in the ocean compared to current energy usage.

    TL;DR: Using ALL the world’s annual aluminum production to make hydrogen would only give us 0.73% of the energy we get from natural gas…

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    For the math nerds, here’s more detail on the chemistry and energy calc:

    • The reaction: 2 Al + 6 H2O → 2 Al(OH)3 + 3 H2
    • Global aluminum production: ~65 million metric tons/year
    • Molar mass of Al = 26.98 g/mol
    • Moles of Al = 65,000,000,000 kg / 0.02698 kg/mol = 2.41 x 10^12 moles
    • H2 produced = (2.41 x 10^12 moles Al * 3) / 2 = 3.62 x 10^12 moles H2
    • Mass of H2 = 3.62 x 10^12 moles * 2.016 g/mol = 7.30 x 10^12 g = 7.30 million metric tons

    BTU Calculation:

    • Energy content of H2 = 113,738 BTU/kg
    • Total energy from H2 = 7.30 x 10^9 kg * 113,738 BTU/kg = 8.30 x 10^14 BTU

    Methane Comparison:

    • Annual natural gas production ≈ 4,000 billion cubic meters
    • Assuming 80% methane content: 3,200 billion cubic meters of methane
    • Energy content of methane ≈ 35,663 BTU/m^3
    • Total energy from methane = 3,200 x 10^9 m^3 * 35,663 BTU/m^3 = 1.14 x 10^17 BTU
    • Ratio: (8.30 x 10^14) /(1.14 x 10^17) = 0.0073 or 0.73%



  • This post was maybe referring to agrovoltaics?

    The largest instillations in the US are in the middle of the fucking desert.

    Still this is obviously worse right? We’re taking untouched wilderness and turning it into a wasteland of blue silica. Deserts are pretty unique biomes with their own set of diverse animal and plant wildlife.

    Farm land is already void of most biodiversity and usually used to grow corn or some other form of unnecessary cattle feed - yeah ideally both get rewilded - but it feels better to reuse an already existing bio wasteland instead of creating new ones…








  • So saying “wipe Gaza off the face of the Earth” followed by almost continuous bombardment isn’t in your eyes evidence of specific intent and action, because they haven’t wiped them out yet? Therefore, by your own definition, the colonizing Europeans never commited genocide against the indigenous American population, because there’s still native Americans left and they have their own nature reserves to reside in?


  • In a coop setting you would agree on collective individual responsibilities so everyone has to contribute and spread the burden in a way that doesn’t silo people into unequal jobs.

    As someone who lived in a condo - the main issues were that because people individually own their flats - I feel there’s a distinct line between private and shared ownership, making it easy to disregard communal duties.

    Furthermore, because existing residents have little say in who gets to live in their building - you can end up in situations where someone can repeatedly break rules and norms (ie had a person smoke in the elevator for years despite being told not to) and nothing can really be done apart from trying to sue them which isn’t an effective way of dealing with problems.

    In a coop setting people can democratically discuss and as a last resort even decide to part ways with individuals who won’t contribute (from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs obv) since on a hyper-local level everyone is immediately involved with the living conditions of everyone else around them.



  • Depends on your region, but in general if you can find at least 3 people you want to live with, you can apply to establish a cooperative.

    Do note that securing a mortgage would probably be a bit harder than buying on your own, but with more people you can acquire a larger space and split the costs that way.

    Fundamentally, it’s unlikely it will be cheaper than buying outright - however you’ll have a community of people to rely on if at any point you become temporarily unable to pay your installments, which can make it safer than self-ownership.

    But the biggest plus comes when the mortgage is paid off, as then the coop can decide if you’d rather slash prices to include just bills, or keep the same monthly amount but put the extra towards a shared coop fund that can be used to convert more landlord owned properties into cooperative housing.

    In my area - non-mortgaged coop properties have about 40% lower monthly payments.