If farms would choose to do solar instead of crops, I would assume that's because they can get more $/acre, but that could cause food prices to rise. At the same time, energy prices would drop if there was a surplus, so I wonder where it would level out. Lower energy cost could have a small affect in reducing the price of processed foods, but I imagine it would be very small (but I don't really know the energy cost of most processed foods).
This can be confounded heavily by the riding “agrivoltaics” trend of finding ways to use solar panels while continuing to farm the same land. The most common example are ranching (e.g. letting sheep enjoy the shade under panels) but some crops actually benefit from lower sun intensity.
However, that’s probably unnecessary: just converting the land used to produce ethanol to solar farms would produce an enormous amount of electricity with no impact on food production.
> Through spatial analyses, we determined that converting just 3.2% of land currently used for corn ethanol would increase the share of utility-scale solar energy in the US from 3.9 to 13%.
I sometimes wonder what would happen to our other resources if energy was abundant and "free". For example desalination plants running for free could perhaps be used to refill an aquifer.
Of course there are markets and balances in the real world. The idea that energy is always scarce and that we shouldn't produce more than I as an individual need always feels a bit like maintaining scarcity.
often energy storage has a lot of losses in the the conversion. but if you produce 10x of what you need for "free". Would that really matter? I'm sure we will get there at some point.
This is why we have to invest so much more into solar. Any kind of fossil fuel or even nuclear energy is constrained by scarcity.
You put in a natural gas power plant, now you are reliant on someone going out and digging for oil, shipping it back, you burning it, and repeat indefinitely.
I put Nuclear in this group because firstly it’s incredibly expensive to build and operate nuclear plants. And you are still consuming water and fuel, and producing waste. That’s a huge production chain just to keep it operating.
There is scarcity at every step to operate these plants. Scarcity of labor, scarcity of fuel that you’re going to burn, scarcity of water, scarcity of waste storage, scarcity of parts to maintain the plants. There is a limit to how cheap it can get.
With solar, you can buy a panel for cheap, leave it on the grass, and get power for 30 years with practically no maintenance. Even wind or hydro have moving parts to service. For solar, the most you ever have to do is the equivalent of cleaning a window.
There is practically no scarcity. Even if it’s just being able to buy a panel… well, the supply of panels only ever increases. They are increasingly recyclable. They are not consumable, complicated products that you burn up or which break apart in a couple years.
Yes, if farms went 100% from agriculture to solar we wouldn't have enough food :-) And we'd have anywhere from 100x to 1000x the entire power demand of the planet in energy. Solar has a $/acre value (which at the moment is pretty high in California) but as more Solar came on line that would go down. And like any crop they would figure out what they needed to maximize profits.
It might also spur the development of 100% electric Farm vehicles (tractors, planters, combines etc) as the Farm could make it own electricity and not have to pay diesel costs for fueling that. At the extreme, if you have enough 'free power' on your farm you can use it for electrolysis of Ammonia to make nitrates. (fertilizer). That would be because you could make money offsetting the other costs of farming to make your cost of goods lower than your neighbors farm and increase your total $/acre.
So the short summary is "no" is isn't going to change how much food is available. Farmers pick crops all the time that aren't "food" for you, they are exports or added to some other product (corn syrup, cotton), because they are in demand. That balances out by regular market dynamics.
In my original comment I linked the nature study that looked at farmers doing both. The "but if we don't plant crops we'll starve!" argument is just silly for a number of reasons, one I pointed out which is if we used all land arable land just in California for solar panels + batteries we'd have 1,000 times as much power available as the entire world demand today. Who would even buy that power? Nobody. The thing that keeps this from happening is that as more solar power comes online its cost goes down and it becomes uneconomical to add more (farmer's won't put it in because they can make more money growing beans or something). So no, allowing farmers to put in solar instead of crops will never lead to a famine due to nobody growing food. People are too greedy :-). There is a large ConAgra farm in the central valley that lobbies a lot (they want more water for Almonds because $$) and a back of the envelope calculation shows they could convert half their acreage to solar, use that to desalinate water off the coast of Point Magu, and pump it to the other half of their acreage and not need any water delivered from the California watershed. It sounds crazy but its the new reality of what you can do with solar and batteries. China (as a government policy directive) has figured this out before anyone else btw.
Title is not misleading, you're just misinterpreting what they mean by command line. It's not a terminal game (in that you don't play it on your terminal and it's not limited to ASCII), it's a game where all the actions are carried out by typing out the commands for what actions you want to happen in a simulated terminal in the game.
I have another comment on this post which goes into more detail about what those commands look like if that's interesting to you at all.
I found the original game to be quite fun. It's mostly about solving logical puzzled about how to safely navigate the wrecks, and given you have very limited signals about what's going on, can be stressful and engrossing.
It's been a while since I played, but I've picked it back up a few times, let's see how well I can explain it.
Duskers is at its core a puzzle game. It could be executed just as well with an ASCII rogue/nethack style UI.
At its core, you have a few different drones that have some basic capabilities, and you can outfit them with a few additional capabilities (modules) each if you find components. You choose derelict space hulks to salvage, and once you enter them, some rooms/doors will be locked, or unpowered. You have to choose what rooms to go to to unlock and power other rooms. Some rooms may have unknown in them, which may attack you at some point when you're in the room, or if you leave the door open move to other rooms. Some drones can detect movement, some can't (IIRC). Sometimes you need to herd those lifeforms between rooms by remotely opening and closing different doors. The drones look for scrap in rooms to gather, which is used to build modules.
The rooms are all numbered, the doors are all numbered the drones are all numbered. You control the drones and parts of the ship you have access to through command line options, which have shorthand equivalents. e.g. (the below is mostly from google/gemini since I didn't want to go look them all up to remember)
navigate 1 r2 — Moves drone 1 to room 2.
navigate all r1 — Sends all active drones back to room 1 (the docking bay).
move 3 r4 — Uses the shorthand move instead of typing out navigate.
d12 — Toggles (opens or closes) door 12.
a2 — Toggles airlock 2.
close d1 d2 — Explicitly closes doors 1 and 2.
close all — Closes every single powered door on the ship immediately.
close r3 — Closes all doors attached to room 3.
gather — Tells the active drone to harvest nearby scrap metal.
gather all — Orders the drone to systematically harvest all scrap in its current room.
generator — Connects a drone to a power inlet to restore power to a room's grid.
interface — Connects a drone to a powered terminal to extract ship logs or systems.
tow 2 — Forces drone 2 to attach to or detach from a salvageable object (like an upgrade or broken drone).
stealth — Actives the stealth utility to move through rooms undetected by infestations.
You can string multiple commands together sequentially by separating them with a semicolon (;). Each drone operates its queue in parallel.
navigate 1 r3; gather all; navigate 1 r1 — Drone 1 goes to room 3, sucks up all the scrap, and drives back to safety.
navigate 2 r4; tow 2; navigate 2 r1 — Tells drone 2 to go to room 4, hook up a towable item, and pull it back to the airlock.
Given that datacenters seem to much more manpower efficient, that seems like a poor trade, to the point it might not be worth viewing them similarly. I'm seeing info reporting about 1 job per 5000 square feet of a datacenter after completion, and 1 job per 800-1500 square feet for a factory, depending on type.
More jobs is good, but if we're going to look at this through the lens of industry returning, it's a lousy return, even before factoring in that we probably lost a lot more factories than we're gaining datacenters.
Sounds probably about right in scale. 5-10x more employees per sqft for common industrial or manufacturing businesses.
But local negative impact on community is not remotely comparable to most industrial development. Everything from traffic, noise, pollution, etc. A few bad projects aside, these things are glorified warehouses typically sited in suburban industrial parks or the middle of nowhere.
It all really just comes down to the electricity needs they demand. Otherwise it’s about as close to as free money to a community as you can get.
The most problematic thing to me with this whole deal are local tax abatements. Those should be outright illegal though for any development.
Ah, I see. The increment is so they can manually handle the included feature of the other cases, which number of the iteration you're on. Nice that it will automatically loop across a collection, annoying that they couldn't go the whole way and you need to deal with it manually.
They look like stock Powerpoint slide templates to me, which if that is a common way for AI to show items, is likely because it was already a common visual technique and AI learned it that way.
> Ok, so 100 people can all drive to the store, or one delivery truck can drive to everyone's house.
Whether you see that statement and read it as "obviously the delivery truck is better" or "obviously, going myself is better" is going to be primarily based on how far away from Costco you live, and how much you buy when you go.
I live a bit more than a mile away from Costco. I often buy 25-60 items, for each of the about weekly trips. There's enough large items that a normal delivery truck that could safely navigate and stop often in residential areas would have no change of fitting 100 people's purchases into it in a way to be easily offloaded (just the toilet paper and paper toweling would take up significant space). It's much less wasteful on almost all metrics for me to go to Costco. That's before we get into the fact that most of what I'm buying is produce and other food stuffs I wouldn't want shipped for worry they would spend longer than I wanted out of refrigeration.
If I lived an hour away that calculation turns out entirely differently, at least as long as there's enough people close by with purchases to gain efficiencies of travel.
The lower g is, the lower the profit margin for s is, so so the fewer resources they will put into it. Unless there's unlikely to be more releases later or g are not cost sensitive and want it at a premium, this neatly scales to lower numbers.
Groo was always a favorite of mine as a child. The amazing art of Sergio Aragones and the sarcasm and double speak that pervade the comic always connected better with me. That came across in the Aragones panels in Mad much of the time as well.
Same! They actually still put out new issues, in the form of a new 4-issue mini series roughly once per year. It's the only comic book I regularly read as an adult. Pretty amazing that Sergio is still doing this at age 88!
Doesn't tailscale require those all be administered and approved by one account?
> there is one giant "network" of all your nodes
From what I understand they're saying, the point is that you get easy connections to things that aren't "your" nodes, sort of like allowing me to connect one of my tailscale nodes ad-hoc to one of your tailscale nodes, when our accounts are not related in any way prior to us doing that, and without me having to allow your node onto my network or you allow one of mine onto your network and have to deal with the specialized ACLs for that, since it's just a direct connection between two nodes.
Yeah, I figured that in the mean time. It just didn’t occur to me because my use case is literally the opposite—having a secure company network where strict ACLs are the core value, not a nuisance. But if easy ad-hoc connections are your goal, Iroh sure looks like the better choice then.
