Gibraltar's political situation is what it is because this was sorted out in the Treaty of Utrecht three hundred years ago, and Europe got very tired of leaders that thought they could redraw the map at the cost of millions of lives.
Probably the best we can expect from Iran is a frozen conflict like Korea or Cyprus, that stays frozen.
I disagree. If this ceasefire had not happened, the US and Israel would bomb all of Iran's electricity and fuel facilities. That's what was supposed to happen today, and is what forced Iran to the negotiating table with an hour to spare.
Without electricity, there is no modern life. There is no ability to communicate, run a financial economy, pay salaries, etc. Without fuel, there are no logistics; there is no capability to transport an army. Nor is there an ability to transport food; it would cause an enormous civilian crisis, and this would cause massive riots.
Iran would collapse, within a week. It would collapse into factions, and a civil war would start, similar to in Syria.
The US and Israel have been sitting on this the entire time. They don't want to do it, because it would cause near permanent economic damage to Iran.
Once Iran showed it had no ability to prevent the US/Israel from doing a indiscriminate bombing campaign, it was clear the US and Israel could always win this war.
Would be good to have more than a one sentence explanation of what you mean, but this is a result of low storage. In the oil market, if prices are too volatile you just stick it in a tank until they stabilize. You only get negative prices if all the storage is full, which happened to WTI once.
Exactly. That's clearly not a price dictated by gas. That's an example where CCGT generators were willing to pay you to take away their electricity. Obviously the gas they bought to do this cost money and so they're making a small loss when this happens and it would be good to understand why and how this makes sense for them in order to develop policies which get us the outcomes we want.
The how and why is that gas takes up space, cutting usage to zero when your site storage is full can cause issues (you can do this short term and get a bit of line pack going but it all eventually has to go somewhere).
I think gas turbines can turn off completely without issue (unlike coal) but there may also be situations where it costs more money to restart the generation process completely than to idle it at low capacity for a few hours when there is no demand for gas generation.
You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
Yes and no, not really. There are many smart grids and more not-so smart grids around the world, but only a few are non-commercial or owned by the members.
Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
Please give some proof of Varoufakis lying. I always check what he claims in his books and talks and I never spotted a lie. I also check Saul Griffith and Amory Lovins talks, books and papers on factual errors and never spotten one in two decades.
Turns out I'm actually on 20p from a fix from last year, I was just grabbing some representative numbers off the website. Also this discussion has reminded me to put in a meter reading.
> my electricity has been free to negative all day
Like a gambler who only talks about their wins, people on these smart energy plans on the few days it goes very cheap only seem to pipe up with the current low unit price, and never mention their longer-term moving-average unit price...
A recent (last year?) Windows update moved a lot of people's Documents folder into OneDrive, without asking. In some cases people lost data, in others it was a nuisance as all sorts of embedded or saved paths broke.
Yup, they managed to get my Dad on this. When he uninstalled it, they give you a small warning "oh you might lose some data" - when it is 100% guaranteed if you were over their 5gb limit.
Absolutely insane, glad I had Backblaze to restore from, but it even remapped his Documents and other home folders to a new place, so using restore didn't immediately make the files appear.
> A recent (last year?) Windows update moved a lot of people's Documents folder into OneDrive, without asking.
Something similar happened to my Dropbox on Mac: the change to the macOS File Provider API meant that a lot of my locally synced files became cloud-sync only. Not cool when I was expecting limited internet access.
I still have no idea how to redownload and keep everything local while synced with cloud.
Did that really happen? Like existing and populated with existing files /user/Documents content had been moved automatically to the /user/OneDrive/ without asking? No offense, but I have a hard time believing it.
If if was a new setup and people accidentally started using OneDrive dir as a primary folder and then something broke, then yeah, that may happen. Or if the users got conned into enabling automatic backups for folders. That's also possible. The problem is that backup setting is off by default. But automatically copying or moving files from outside of the /user/OneDrive without any prompting?
There are plenty of reasons to criticize OneDrive and I personally would not use it. But I think comparing it with a weekend vibe coded self hosted project is a bit of a stretch.
Microsoft has zero goodwill from me with regards to software quality or pro-consumer business moves.
I will forever assume that microsoft product is 1) technically broken 2) trying to upsell and 3) probably required by some esoteric software suite, which is the only reason a sane human would put up with it.
I think many people are just looking at the outcomes. Slop is now being retroactively applied to human produced software as well, as a new adjective for software generally.
There is also sentiment / understanding that Microslop has been pushing their devs to do the ai thing and that it is resulting in more downtime and bugs. This is not limited to one company and more an artifact of the hype cycle. If anything, it's worse with the corporate product because there should be more checks and balances, but here we are.
Yeah, we're (UK) only just at the "occasionally cheap 100% renewables" state, and it's maddeningly slow progress. But it seems like a lot of things are suddenly coming online, like battery storage, and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years. https://eandt.theiet.org/2026/04/02/ps12bn-plan-upgrade-scot...
The transition will probably be quite nonlinear: getting from zero to a few days a year of 100% renewables is about as much effort as going from a few days a year to most of the year.
> and the Scotland-England grid upgrade will happen in the next few years.
I hope not. We're currently getting shafted by National Grid pricing, and this is only going to mean we get to pay even more for electricity where it's generated while the south coast of the UK gets it cheap.
reply