• 10 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.

    I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.

    The list goes oooonnnnnn






  • Any time someone brings this up I wonder if they’re financed by the fossil fuel industry as it’s just such a weird point to make.

    First: consider the alternatives: Every form of energy has an environmental cost associated with it. Surely we agree that while not perfect, PV is vastly superior in this regard to gas/coal/oil? It might even be less polluting than nuclear, but it’s early here and I’m too tired to research this.

    Second: PV modules have a very long life span. At least 20 years. After that time, they’ll probably be operating still, but at maybe 60-80% of peak performance. That’s probably not good enough for commercial use, but I built myself a nice little garden shed solar array using “old” modules because they were basically free and I don’t care that much about peak performance in my use case. That’s to say, these things can still be used for a long time.

    Third: if they ever do need to be completely recycled, well, that’s doable. In the EU, it’s actually compulsory. The processes are there, although they don’t quite scale yet. That’s mainly because there’s just not that many old modules to recycle yet.

    sooo with all that going on, what exactly are you basing your point on?