In my experience most countries put barriers in place to prevent people from moving into the country, from another country, when you don't have enough money to support yourself, but I believe the parent is describing a system that puts barriers in place for internal migration of its citizens.
For years Python has been build on a skeleton crew.
Especially compared to billions poured into Javascript ecosystem due to it being native language of the web.
The money for Python was never there, even when it become the top language of data engineering and data science. Even now, devs that improve Python ecosystem get fired: https://bsky.app/profile/snarky.ca/post/3lp5w5j5tws2i
>The worst was almost certainly Poland, which had 3.3 million Jews before the war (for reference: 18% of the Jewish population of the world, over 33 percent of that of Europe), killed 82-89% of them
Wow, that was done by Poles in Poland? How did that happen?
Certainly the whole nation had to be behind this? [0]
It gets interesting with batteries, panels, and spot prices. You can eg. offset (some of) your winter costs in summer. And it does depend on your latitude and local market. It's an interesting optimization problem.
Maybe - but then you end up in a situation like author where delivery costs trump generation, because the additional winter capacity does not come from nowhere. And the actual best case is what happens in California - mass deployment of batteries.
Ah, so ultimately the author did end up paying less. The problem was they were on the wrong plan.
And the optimization problem at this point in time is that -ideally- you want to have some amount of excess generation on your solar panels, then time shift that with batteries to a point in time when power is more expensive, and have some amount of excess capacity in batteries so you can also sell that power; versus the (amortized) cost of that extra capacity; and/or what will actually fit on your roof.
This varies per house/plot, per contract, and per latitude. But in some situations you can end up at net 0 or better.
>And the optimization problem at this point in time is that -ideally- you want to have some amount of excess generation on your solar panels, then time shift that with batteries to a point in time when power is more expensive, and have some amount of excess capacity in batteries so you can also sell that power; versus the (amortized) cost of that extra capacity; and/or what will actually fit on your roof.
Yep, that's the ideal case - given you're in the region where you have reliable sunshine in the winter. It's not the case where I live, when we had total of 7 hours of sun in December 2023.
The idea would be to sell excess power in summer to offset the cost of buying power in winter.
For sure this won't work equally well everywhere, and I'm not sure if this would still work once practically everyone has solar; but right now it's plausible.
Okay, but the "excess power in summer" does not magically materialize in winter. The current systems where it works like that are accounting trick meant to solar power industry.
In reality, we have no realistic mechanism for long-term energy storage on a grid scale - we barely start to breach scale where storage can handle daily fluctuations - like in California. And it's not free - it's being costly affair.
You're looking at this from a very different angle than I am, I think. While I acknowledge that at the system level we still have a way to go, we're already at the point where individual homeowners can sell power in summer and use that money to offset a significant portion of their winter costs - if they play their cards right. This won't solve all our global or national energy challenges, but it can make financial sense at the individual household level.
> China is rapidly decarbonizing, India is right behind, it is the US you have to convince to move faster (coal plants are rapidly on their way out, but US consumers prefer ICE pickups over EVs, and LNG exports must be prevented and substitutes found [carbon footprint determined to be substantially higher than coal]).
I argue this ignores rate of change of manufacturing capacity and deployment trajectories, but concede all we can do is speculate based on data available today.
