Ok, so they don’t call it a ’buy’ program.

It’s a lending program, for free. With a deposit for full value so it becomes a purchase if you don’t return it in time. Same structure but the phrasing matters.

Cool idea.

From the website it seems like they're expecting that some people will do this with the intention of renting, but then decide to keep or not get around to the return process.

The tools are almost always something they sell normally, and it keeps their accounting clean.

You'd be a silly goose to rent it and then never return it, however, as the rental tools have been used to heck and back.

> , is "man, capitalism is a mistake"

Man, we need a better term for this criticism.

The US right now is more harsh to live in than the US pre-Reagan, which was more harsh than many countries with a strong welfare state, but all of them are capitalistic.

Perhaps the term you are looking for is corporate feudalism.

Maybe, but you have very similar dynamics in China or other countries. At the root the problem is one of power dynamics, inequality, authoritarianism (whether legitimized by money or politics or both). Or said otherwise, an erosion of democratic and egalitarian ideals.

“Late-stage capitalism” is the normal term for expressing a belief that capitalism tends to eat itself over a long enough time horizon.

It’s rather neat, and recently hit 1.0.

That game, Timberborn, shares some design elements with roller coaster tycoon.

A block based 3d world they can be modified by the player.

Units walking around on player defined paths, with their mood influenced by pretty bushes.

But there are no obvious performance considerations like in the article.

> Vertically they produce 77% compared to 90% of the tilted panels? In what graph is the lower number better?

77% of the ’normal orientation’ per year, but the graph and 131% value is for a day in winter (January 15 this year). At least that’s my read.

I also believe vertical panels produce more than flat panels in the mornings and evenings, thereby giving them anti-duck curve properties.

So one day of the year is producing 131% yet still only averages 77% for the year? Yeah, that sounds like a good trade off. /s

I'm still trying to decide if the entire post is trolling or not. Nothing about it sounds sane to me.

So your problem is that during summer, average solar production is much higher than in winter in the first place. So to ensure that you have sufficient energy in winter, you can either overprovision heavily for summer use (lots of flat panels facing south) or you can sacrifice summer efficiency to gain winter efficiency - vertical panels do that.

It's not just about production, it's also about reducing maintenance costs (don't collect snow, less dust build up on panels) and land usage. If you can take that 77% average, but maybe stick a couple more panels on land to reach your energy goals in an overall smaller footprint with less maintenance work, then maybe it's a good solution to specific problems.

If you had a solar panel that produced half as much power as regular, but produced power at night that would be a massive win. This is a less extreme equivalent. It produces less power than a normal solar pannel, but it produces power at an important time (when regular solar panels don't produce much power).

Iirc I thought they were a bit disingenuous.

In theory the change in electric field will induce a small current in the other wire, and their magical science lamp turns on at any non-zero electricity. Whether the wires are connected or not at the far end doesn’t matter.

They never clarified how strong the other current would be.

Centralized moderation is a big thing.

Usenet was a very open system, where iirc moderation sometimes happened per discussion group but otherwise everyone individually had to ignore bad actors (add to killfile). It scaled badly with more people and spammers. Arguably it started going downhill 30 years ago. Found a decade old discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9987679

> actually explain the "double" part in detail?

$100 appears in your account. That’s one part. The other part depends on why.

* you moved money from another account, the double is -100 in that account.

* you sold stuff, +100 in income.

* you borrowed some money, +100 in ‘debt’.

In a physical book each of these categories would have a left and right column, and each transaction has numbers in one left and one right column. Or in many columns but the sums of left vs right columns must be the same.

When describing a game that looks like it had a smallish team and graphics budget, ‘indie’ is a useful shorthand. It sets certain expectations.

Certainly marketing and media (as evidenced by the article) find this useful, but I think many consumers also are more interested in the game than in the creators. So it makes sense that this language shift happens.

But yes it certainly misses the theoretical point of a category like that.

And would be nice if it was replaced with a technically correct word. ‘Indie-like’?

That’s because it’s not a self-improving computer system. It’s just programming as it exists today for thousands of years.

No. If you listen to only a single artist for a month, your payment is still split the same way everyone else’s payment is, by total streamed numbers.

It sounds better if they artist got your entire monthly payment (after payment processors and Spotify’s fee), but probably a nightmare for accountants.