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Cake day: September 14th, 2024

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  • It wouldn’t be a 30% higher electrical bill overall. It would be 30% more for whatever power you’re using for this specific device, which, if it’s ordinarily 10W while in sleep and an average 100W while in use, and you use it 50 hours per week, or 215 hours per month, that’s a baseline power usage of 21500 watt hours in use and 5050 watt hours from idle/sleep/suspend. Or a total of 26550 watt hours, or 26.5 kWh. At 20 cents per kWh, you’re talking about $5.30 per month in electricity for the computer. A 30% increase would be an extra $1.60 per month.



  • exasperation@lemm.eetoFunny@sh.itjust.worksMicro-retirement
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    1 month ago

    What’s funny is I just typed a comment trying to analyze what types of jobs would allow for this, and one category was the “discrete projects that have a defined beginning and end” type jobs, and it did cross my mind that movie-style heists tend to have this kind of arrangement.


  • exasperation@lemm.eetoFunny@sh.itjust.worksMicro-retirement
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    1 month ago

    It works if you can build up the relationships and reputation, which will depend heavily on the industry and the job.

    I know two people who do this, and they have jobs that allow them to.

    One is an emergency room physician. His shifts are staffed through a middleman at 3 different local hospitals, and the nature of the work is that he just does work during the shift and doesn’t bring any home with him or continuing onto the next shift he works. He gets paid very well when he’s working (average annual salary of an emergency physician in the U.S. is about $375,000 per year). And occasionally just lines up a long sabbatical, does volunteer work overseas (Doctors Without Borders/MSF), and takes time off for himself and his family. He basically budgets a $200k lifestyle and takes unpaid time off. But his pathway basically required him to just dominate school, from kindergarten through a bachelor’s degree and 4 years of medical school, and then put in his time as a resident.

    Another friend of mine works as an electrician and lighting crew member on TV shows and movies. He always has to line up his next project after the current one ends, but occasionally can line something up in the future so that he can take a calculated 3-6 months between projects. He’s got a good working relationship with some producers and directors, so he basically knows he can find a job anytime with whatever production those people happen to be working on. Whenever he has enough cash, he can go and travel, timed out to where he’s not paying rent for an unoccupied apartment. Then he lines up another gig, signs a new lease, and then continues working. I think he lives very frugally on the job (I think stuff like food is covered when filming on location, so not a lot of out of pocket expenses for food/drink while working), and saves money that way.

    With that, I think there are a few opportunities to think through which careers might actually allow for this.

    Project-based jobs, where people work for a few months or a year towards a particular project completion, might be good for intentionally taking gaps between projects. I wonder if construction and similar industries would allow for this. Academia often has formal sabbatical policies, too, but that’s relatively late career.

    Personal independent gigs can do this, if you can earn enough money doing it (so, like, not Uber and Doordash). Some people do contract design work, create independent art, write essays and op eds for different publications, etc. If you’re paid by the job, taking a break doesn’t really hurt your “resume,” so to speak. Even some who are expected to publish on a defined schedule can get ahead of the curve by producing a bunch of work for publication on that schedule (some webcomic authors and social media influencers are known to do this).

    Jobs where you are employed by some firm but actually work for a client that hired your firm might also be a good candidate, if you have the seniority and flexibility and credibility to just take unpaid time off while still being on the books and website as an employee. I know people who took off a year of parental leave as lawyers, but it really depends on practice area and firm culture whether that will permanently hold them back on career growth.

    Jobs that are basically shift work are designed so that no one person is totally indispensable or non replaceable, which gives the worker the flexibility to leave without hard feelings, and come back whenever they’re ready. My emergency medicine friend probably fits in this category. But also, maybe any kind of 24/7 coverage job sorta fits this category, too, in health care, IT, critical infrastructure, etc.


  • exasperation@lemm.eetoFunny@sh.itjust.worksLife at 40
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    1 month ago

    anti-aging research.

    I mean, there’s plenty of anti aging research going on. It’s just that aging isn’t any one thing. At the genetic level, telomeres are getting shorter and mutations are accelerating. In cells, certain metabolic waste products accumulate, and the cells experience increased oxidative stress.

    At the tissue level, you see blood vessels stiffening up, accumulating calcium deposits in the vessel walls themselves, and arterial plague within the vessels. Conversely, bones lose strength and lose calcium, and muscles and joints and tendons and ligaments deteriorate in strength and range of motion. Skin loses elasticity. Plaques and other abnormalities form in the brain and throughout the nervous system. The endocrine system undergoes changes as the hormonal balance of people changes in late adulthood (most notably menopause in women).

    Each of these effects of aging is being investigated, researched, and potentially treated. Dermatologists can make old skin look younger, or at least slow down the rate of apparent aging. There are pills that give 60 year old men the boners of a 20 year old. Some hormone therapies reverse some of the age-related decline in particular hormone levels. Each treatment treats its own thing, reversing or stalling one tiny aspect of aging.

    And they’re continuing to work on it. There’s plenty of research being done, with lots and lots of funding behind it.




  • exasperation@lemm.eetoFunny@sh.itjust.worksLife at 40
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    1 month ago

    Are we all assuming everyone in this conversation is white? Because I know plenty of black and Asian friends who I don’t recall having wrinkles. Most of them have pretty solid moisturizing/lotion/sunscreen routines, though, so it’s hard to tell how much is cultural versus genetic.




  • I can’t answer for dual numbers, but I can answer for imaginary numbers in circuit design.

    Imaginary numbers are those that include an imaginary component, that squares into a negative number. Traditionally, i^2 = -1, but electrical engineers like to use j instead (I tends to be a variable used to describe electrical current).

    Complex numbers, that include a real component and an imaginary component, can be thought of as having an “angle,” based on how much of it is imaginary and how much of it is real, mapped onto a 2-dimensional representation of that number’s real and imaginary components. 5 + 5j is as real as it is imaginary, so it’s like having a 45° angle. The real number 5 is completely real, so it has a 0° angle.

    Meanwhile, in alternating current (AC) circuits, like what you get from your wall outlet, the voltage source is a wave that alternates between a maximum peak of positive voltage and a bottom trough of negative voltage, in a nice clean sinusoidal shape over time. If you hook up a normal resistor, the nice clean sinusoidal voltage also becomes a nice clean sinusoidal current with the exact same timing of when the max voltage matches up with the max current.

    But there’s also capacitors, which accumulate charge so that the flow of current on the other side depends on its own state of charge. And there are inductors, that affect current based on the amount of energy stored magnetically. These react to the existing current and voltage in the system and manipulate the time relationship between what moment in time a peak current will happen and when the peak voltage was.

    And through some interesting overlap in how adding and subtracting and delaying sinusoidal waves works, the circuit characteristics line up perfectly with that complex angle I was talking about, with the imaginary numbers. So any circuit, or any part of a circuit, can be represented with an “impedance” that has both an imaginary and real component, with a corresponding phase angle. And that complex number can be used to calculate information about the time delay in the wave of current versus the wave of voltage.

    So using complex phase angles makes certain AC calculations much, much easier, to represent the output of real current from real voltage, where the imaginary numbers are an important part of the calculation but not in the actual real world observation itself.

    So even though we start with real numbers and end with real numbers, having imaginary numbers in the toolbox make the middle part feasible.







  • Lazard is a pretty respected analyst for energy costs. Here’s their report from June 2024.

    In the U.S., peaker gas plants that are only fired up between 5-20% of the time, the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is between $110 to $230 per MWh. The levelized cost of storage for utility scale 4-hour storage ranges from $124-$226 per MWh, after subsidies. Before subsidies, that 4-hour storage costs $170-$296.

    Residential storage, on the other hand, doesn’t come close. That’s $882 to $1101 before subsidies, or $653 to $855 after subsidies.

    So in other words, utility scale storage has dropped down to around the same price as gas peaker plants, in the U.S., after subsidies.


  • Yeah, people are working on it.

    The EIA estimates that there’s about 30 GW of battery capacity in the U.S., mostly in storage systems that are designed to store about 1-4 hours worth.

    That’s in comparison to 1,200 GW of generation capacity, or 400 times as much as there is storage.

    It’s coming along, but the orders of magnitude difference between real-time supply and demand and our capacity for shifting some of the power just a few hours isn’t quite ready for load balancing across a whole 24 hour day, much less for days-long weather patterns or even seasonality across the year. We’re probably gonna need to see another few years of exponential growth before it starts actually making a big impact to generation activity.