It is a double edged sword - the U.S. manufacturers no longer have to compete with potentially better products from overseas, they can push lower quality to the local market for the same price.
This is correct. But this creates an opportunity for other domestic manufacturers to offer a better deal. Look at the Chinese car manufacturers. It was Chinese policy to say basically "sorry, you just have to buy shitty domestic cars or pay massive tariffs." Now their domestic manufacturers have gotten good enough that they are exporters themselves.
I have 4 crowns, 2 done using moulds, 2 using the 3d scanner. Same doc, same office. The moulded ones were ok with some adjustments, but the 3d scanned ones were perfect since day 1. I'm happy with the progress in dentistry.
Assuming this is fiction... A good friend of mine is a professional writer. I learned from her that most of what is presented to us, readers, as fiction is really not so far removed from what really happened.
Great! and if enforcement were consistent, rule-breaking behavior would probably decline:
> Quick, clear and consistent also works in controlling crime. It’s not a coincidence that the same approach works for parenting and crime control because the problems are largely the same. Moreover, in both domains quick, clear and consistent punishment need not be severe.
> In fact, I think in near future it will be the norm for MLLMs to "think" and "reason" without outputting a single "word".
It will be outputting something, as this is the only way it can get more compute - output a token, then all context + the next token is fed through the LLM again. It might not be presented to the user, but that's a different story.
In my experience, no matter how many panels you install, Solar can cover power consumption 30-40% of its max capacity. Winter, night, bad weather will eat the rest. To go beyond the 30-40% you will need energy store or alternative sources.
At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day.
Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, where solar farms across a wide geographic area experience different weather systems. It wouldn’t be cost effective but with absolutely zero storage the US could get 70+% of its electricity from solar. Add wind and hydro to the mix and you can get quite far without grid storage, but adding options lowers costs so there’s an optimal amount of grid storage for any given energy mix.
> A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night.
Utility companies gave away streetlights, security lights, etc., because they would raise the electricity usage generated at times of lower demand. This minimized the need to spin up and spin down generating plants and let them make money on what would have been otherwise wasted power.
Nighttime lighting doesn't consume all of the excess power generated at night. Utilities have cleverly shifted power consumption loads to later times through TOD pricing for residential and industrial customers.
It's no secret that I'm a big advocate for turning down lights at night. Increasing dependency on solar and batteries would make running electricity-intensive processes and industries cheaper during the daytime and reduce the need for baseload power at night.
> Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day.
I sometimes think about a sci-fi world in which there is a globally interconnected power grid, so solar panels in daylight India can provide power to Spain. And then when the sun shines in Spain, it can generate solar power for California
This model prioritizes generation [0] over storage, by dramatic reliance on transmission systems. That's not inherently a stupid thing to do, but given the reality of global and even national politics, most places are prioritizing storage [1] over generation and limiting transmission goals to national needs.
[0] because India would need to generate not just it's daytime requirements, but also Spain's overnight requirements, and so forth.
[1] because each nation/grid system would need to store significant excess generation to make it through the night/storm systems etc.
Most people who care about independence should be concerned with having a system that can run in island mode but at least 90% of systems installed today are grid tied and cannot function as an island
I care about indepedence, but I also care about scale.
It makes absolutely zero sense for me, a homeowner in New Mexico, to have my own storage facilities capable of getting me through a winter heating season (using air-source heat pumps). It makes much more sense for the storage to be centralized, scaled and managed, while my own PV array contributes to it during the summer time.
