Sorry if I came out like I’m trying to discredit the idea, rather I was just trying to put more information out there - the linked article is fairly light on details.
Like, if your primary business is solar, and as a profitable side project you also produce food, what’s the actual issue there?
There isn’t one. But it’s somewhat concerning that it was more viable for the owner to become a power plant than to run their farm as a farm.
It’s a dodge since the farm mentioned is historic farmland. They aren’t allowed to stop farming and just put up solar.
When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.
In Kominek’s case, he literally bet the farm in order to finance the roughly $2 million solar arrays.
“We had to put up our farm as collateral as well as the solar array as collateral to the bank,” he says. “If this doesn’t work, we lose the farm.”
From: Original NPR story
If anything it seems like a clever way around zoning. Reading between the lines it seems they view the crops as kind of a bonus, not half the point like the original article makes it seem.
This seems to largely be a “retelling” of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.
The original story from NPR says that they’re able to drive their tractor between the panels. It’s interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that’s how they’re making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they’re required to do for historic reasons.
Do you have any more information on this? A quick search largely just shows results about how firefighters need to be careful since the panels can look bad but still be producing voltage and are a shock hazard.
Not an expert, but my gut reaction is not really. The panels themselves are largely glass, aluminum and silicon, with fairly small amounts of doping agents. There are electronics but since they’re outside they’re largely encased in something, wiring which would be plastic and copper or possibly aluminum, and then the structure itself which is going to be steel and concrete.
Solar panels are significantly more sturdy than one would think given they are essentially a giant piece of glass. They’re usually rated to 12mm hail or more, which would normally absolutely devastate a crop. They don’t really go bad either they just become less efficient over time. There’s no moving parts to wear, no liquids, and in some designs very little in the way of electronics to go bad.
Essentially, I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be more harmful contamination from a diesel tractor driving around in the field or from a nearby coal power plant than from any kind of solar array as long as it didn’t have like, lead legs or something.
That being said, these kind of projects have been shown a lot but they’re unlikely to be used in most large scale farming - they usually interfere with any machines used to plant or harvest, and are only really well suited to a few crops. Parking lots are a much easier target for this type of solar project.
Tldw: it’s boring and grindy. Honestly the video isn’t great.
Since I played it when it was free from epic too:
Its a game whose tediousness outstrips its interesting ideas way too quickly. There’s a loop that starts blank that the hero goes around, and the player builds the loop up over the course of a “mission” by placing things like mountains and plains and swamps. Some of these tiles spawn monsters, some help the hero, and some do both. It’s the most interesting thing in the game and also the most underdeveloped. Eventually after placing enough tiles a boss spawns and your “mission” is over and the hero goes back to camp. Technically you can keep going through loops but there’s really no point.
Camp is made up of buildings that you build out of resources collected during the loop and serves as a sort of meta progression for the game. You build things and get new cards, classes, equipment and whatnot. They’re made of tiles but much larger and less visually distinct than the loop tiles - which is super annoying because much like the loop tiles layout is important but unlike the loop that you will place a million times, you only get one camp, so any mistakes are forever. Camp Tiles are built from resources gathered doing loops, so they feed into each other in a kind of rougelite way.
The main problem with the game is that the systems are interesting but they have so much tedious stuff attached that the entire experience is bogged down. Take for instance equipment: the game gives you a stream of equipment that functionally can be different, it might buff attack speed, defense, all kinds of things. But the game gives you like hundreds of pieces of equipment per loop, and it’s all random so you wind up babysitting the equipment section of the screen all the time so that the hero doesn’t become underpowered and die, but you also can’t try for a “build” because any equipment you don’t use is slowly deleted. If you want attack speed the only thing you can do is pray to rngsus that it pops up consistently (spoiler, it won’t). Or the camp itself - eventually you unlock furniture for each house, there are a million different ones, and they’re all things like +1%hp Regen.
But by far the grind gets the most real when you start looking at how many resources you need. Certain tiles grant certain resources that are given during the loop, which is a really good way to incentive players to not get stuck in a rut when building the loop - but the math is way off, and when failing to defeat the boss means that you lose 70% of anything gathered it just adds insult to injury. It’s supposed to be a push your luck thing, but you’re only allowed to leave once a loop and loops can be fairly long and … well like everything else in this game - random.
It kinda feels like I’m just crapping on the game, but I actually think under the tedium there’s an interesting game here. The first time you find a tile interaction (of which there are far too few) is a little magical, and the plot is kind of interesting even though it’s the most overwrought sequel to the neverending story you’ll ever read. Like an annoying amount of Devolver games, this kinda feels like it would be a really good mobile game if it was somewhat streamlined.
Have them printed from a service. A normal deck of cards should run about $30 USD. The paper, laminate, ink and maybe sleeves will probably cost the same or more and will come out with way lower quality especially if this is your first time crafting them.
I’ve done both and unless you want really quick and dirty prototype cards or something that is super handmade that you drew on yourself instead of designed on a computer, the ones from a printing service win hands down.
From what I’ve seen this has been turned upside down by… well essentially automation, just not the kind everyone is afraid of.
Between better techniques and tools, a lot of construction is significantly faster than it used to be, to the point that a job that’s smaller has enough… I guess “opportunity” cost that it can be significantly less profitable.
Let’s say I’m a plumber. In the 80s, I would use copper pipe and have to solder all the connections - even a small job would take a long time - on the order of days. If I do a small house it takes way less time than a big house.
But now instead I would put in long lines of PEX with crimp on connectors. It’s like 4x as fast so it should be 4x cheaper right? Except now I have to drive to 4 different jobs to work all day, set up and tear down 4 times, deal with 4 different customers and invoices, etc. OR I can do 1 big house and make essentially the same money since I cut out all the extra work.
Add to that that most people are going to use more expensive finishes on larger houses that I basically just take a percentage of, and they might request something specialty and working on small affordable houses seems like a terrible business plan.
As someone who works with people in residential construction fairly often, this is the answer - and it’s why they don’t build new “starter” homes anymore. It’s very difficult to turn a profit on a single family home that would be considered affordable most places.
Basically, its very little extra effort and expense to build a luxury house compared to an inexpensive one, and your profit margin goes from very thin to decent.
Anecdotally in my area, most residential new construction is going to retirees who have a nest egg and the sale now very expensive house, or couples who sold an inherited house. Occasionally there are people who are remotely working or people building as an investment property, but they’re in the minority.
Direct link to paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2304318120
Not my field but takeaways from a quick glace are that they note that the more energy dense they make it the worse it is at being concrete, and that their 10kwh number needs 45m³ of concrete. That would be 15x15x0.2m or like 55ftx55ftx8in which isn’t crazy but it’s a pretty decent amount.
Except that nefarious is not a direct synonym for criminal. Nefarious has a subtext of specific underhanded malicious intent, whereas criminal doesn’t have the same intentional connotations.
If one were to read about a “Criminal website”, it might have instructions on how to make a bomb or something like that, whereas a “nefarious website” is likely to be read as looking normal but stealing your information.
By calling the sorting nefarious, OP has (likely) unintentionally implied that there is an underlying sinister reason for the issues, which is not likely to be the case.
I’d love some kind of per community bias adjustment even for subscribed communities. Like, I don’t really want to remove them cause memes are great, but because !memes@lemmy.world and 196 post so often my subscribed feed is pretty dominated by them no matter how I sort it.
For “All” some kind of adjustment based on subscribers makes sense, but I don’t even know if that’s possible given the way Lemmy works. Maybe a “show me less” button that moves the same bias adjustment just for communities you’re not subscribed to?
Yeah that’s essentially the system I was thinking of but more something the communities could opt into with each other, and could easily moderate how much and what “meta” content made its way into their community.
Big communities would probably just share common posts between each other like they might use a mega thread for, small communities might pull more “meta” content to keep activity up. But making it all an opt in kind of thing on the community level.
The main reason I think it needs to be a core part of the software is just buy in. Like, whatever the solution to this thing that apparently a lot of people think is something or an issue, it needs to be pretty well supported by everyone. Like, apps, instance admins, mods, they kinda all need to be on board - and that probably means something coming to the closest thing this whole mess has to a top.
In a perfect world I’d like to see some kind of meta community system where the individual communities still exist but kind of automagically cross pollinate with each other so that users, server, and moderation load is split somewhat democratically. Not going to happen any time soon since it would probably take dev work and they have their hands full.
Practically what will probably happen is certain communities will become the “standard” ones and others will be smaller versions, just like there were countless “true” subreddits.
What you can do is subscribe and post to whatever one you like, and then feel free to cross post to other communities. Cross posting works really well on Lemmy.
Basically, it’s “why not both?”
So first, kubernetes is a different ball of wax than containers, and if you want to run it on one machine you can, but it’s really for running containers across a cluster of machines. I’m guessing you just generally mean containers so I’ll go with that.
Containers are essentially just apps running on a virtual os. Virtual machines are an OS running on virtual hardware. You can abstract both layers and have virtual hardware running an os that runs a virtual os for your containers, and nothing will really mind - in fact that’s kind of the way to do it if you have one big machine you need to run a bunch of services on. You might cut up a server into a Linux VM, a Windows VM, and a BSD VM, and run containers on each one. Or you might run 3 Linux VMs and have the containers for 3 different services split between them.
It really depends on what you’re hosting and trying to do for how exactly to go about it. Take for instance a pretty common self hosted stack:
Plex Radarr Prowlarr Deluge TrueNAS
Now you could install TrueNAS scale and run all of those as containers on it, and it would work ok, but TrueNAS scale isn’t really meant for managing a ton of containers right now. You could make a vm on it for each service and have them all talk to each other but then you’re probably wasting resources by duplicating the OS 5 times. Also, what if you want to run TrueNAS core instead of scale? Can you get everything else working in jails – maybe? – but it’ll probably be a pain.
Instead, you might install proxmox and pass through the drive controller, and set up one VM for TrueNAS core. Then you might make another VM for the arrs containers, and a third for Plex itself.
It gets you the best of both worlds. TrueNAS can run on BSD instead of Linux, your arrs are easy to deploy and update in containers that keep everything separated, and Plex is sequestered in a hardened os with read only access to everything else since it gets a port forwarded and is more of a security risk. Again that’s just one option though.
VMs get you a ton of really handy things like snapshots and for simple VMs, very easy portability between relatively similar hardware. I’ll probably get ruined for saying this but they’re also a security tool that you should probably keep in your belt. If someone manages to break out of a container and your files are just sitting there for the taking that’s not great. If someone manages to break into your VM and “the good stuff” is on another VM that’s another layer of security they have to break through.
Containers on the other hand use way fewer resources, especially ram - and are much easier to wrangle than many OSes for updates and config.
There’s really a lot of self hosted stuff that assumes you’re running docker and treats regular install as a kind of weird edge case, so you’ll probably run docker even if you don’t want to.
Kubernetes on the other hand I would argue isn’t really meant for self hosting where you probably have a one or two servers that you own. Its meant to deploy containers across various cloud servers in a way that’s more automated to manage. If you need storage in a kubernetes cluster you’ll probably use something like s3 buckets, not a hard drive.
If you want to learn it you can totally deploy it on a computer running a few VMs as nodes or with a few laptops / SBCs as a cluster, but if you just want the services to run on your server in the closet it’s a bit like using a sledgehammer to nail a chair back together. That’s why you don’t tend to see it talked about as much - it’s a bit of a different rabbit hole.
Epoxy coated rebar is already a thing, so insulated rebar shouldn’t be that big of a deal - if epoxy isn’t enough already.