> Lower powered I would expect

With the right software, ESP32 can be incredibly low power. Like "months on 3xAA batteries" for watching a pin with the ultra low power subsystem and then occasionally waking up and making a HTTPS call over WiFi.

That's not lower power, is it? E.g. RuuviTags can run 3 years or longer while sending sensor data 2.5 times per second, with a single CR2477 (3V 1000mAh). A single AA alkaline battery has 1.5V and 2100-2700 mAh (https://batteryskills.com/aa-battery-comparison-chart/ , somehow this data was difficult to find so I'll add this link :)).

Bluetooth is lower energy than WiFi, but in your scenario the energy used for the radio is quite low anyway.

There definitely are lower-powered options; I mostly meant that as an example that as an hobbyist, an ESP32 - possibly even on a standard dev board! - could easily be good enough for your use case.

I never did a formal study to see how much of that power use was standby vs. power-on usage, how much of the standby usage was the ESP32 vs. the board/voltage regulators/pulldowns, how much of the power on usage was radio vs. e.g. all the crypto (we're doing asymmetric crypto for the TLS handshakes on batteries here, that isn't going to be cheap!) etc.

I just slapped it together and found it good enough to not care further.

nRF52832 are famous for their low energy usage, it's hard to compete with them. However, ESP32 is much more universal.

Actually I've read claims that ESP32 C6s are pretty decent battery-consumption-wise. So much so that I bought a few, hoping to make at least a doorbell out of it. Alas I don't have a device to measure microampers, so I guess I'll just see how long they're fare..

This is just kind-of low-power. Some microcontrollers (e.g. PICs) can have sleep consumptions measured in nanoamperes. Months to years on a coin cell... just, they would need an external wifi module, which is highly inconvenient.

Do you have an example of such a setup handy?

No, it was an undocumented one-off using a random cheap devboard from Aliexpress (i.e. not some specifically optimized circuit!), built (IIRC) using the Arduino IDE - aside from spending the time to find and configure the low power mode properly, this was done in the dumbest, most naive way possible, and still worked.

Sometimes reviewers also look for whether the paper cites enough of their own papers, who is publishing it (regardless of whether the review is supposed to be anonymous or not), whether it clashes with a paper they're about to publish... science is just as full of politics and corruption (if not more) as any other field.

I almost added "place the research into the context of other relevant research" as another way of saying "cite enough of the peer reviewer's papers" but fair enough.

I'm not sure if science has as much corruption as other fields, but it definitely has politics. PIs get to their position without the typical selection process for leadership that happens in most larger orgs, so there's more fragile and explosive personalities than I find in other management/leadership positions.

They also don't seem to account for the reduction of sulfur emissions from ships, which is surprising given how widely this was reported even in mainstream media.

Is this an oversight (or "oversight") or something that is reasonable for some reason that would be so obvious to experts in the field that it's not worth mentioning?

I mean...they're just cherry-picking the sources of "noise" that prevent their preferred window from showing "significance". It's not like they did a thorough analysis of every uncontrolled factor and carefully tried to control them all. Even that would be crap, but at least it would be good-faith crap.

Doesn't that fall outside the scope of "natural variability factors" which they are trying to account for?

The paper doesn't seem to account for the reduction in sulfur emissions from ships, which was widely reported to be the cause for some of the recent warming?

The worst thing you can do when you're actively geoengineering is to abruptly stop doing it. So naturally we found a way we were already doing it and cut it immediately to make sure we fuck ourselves as much as possible :)

I'm almost convinced it's intentional at this point, the rich are busy building their offbrand vault tec bunkers and starting random wars for no real reason. Longtermism nonsense over the today.

Airborne sulfur comes with its own negative environmental consequences, though.

Clearly worth the tradeoff of not making the worst catastrophe we've ever faced as a species exponentially worse?

I mean hell, piston engined airplanes use leaded fuel and crop dust it over everyone daily, but nobody cares as long as they get to fly them and that's a just minor money saving measure that causes a lot environmental consequences.

China has long surpassed most countries in per-capita emissions and is still on an upward trajectory. India is on an upward trajectory but still below the world average. The US and Canada are higher than China but on a downward trajectory. The EU is on a downward trajectory and below China.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

Those are our emissions that we have exported to china. Your TV, Phone, etc etc isn't built in NA.

You're right. When I posted some facts about Chinese and Indian emissions, my post was actually flagged by someone who didn't want those facts to be known. When it comes to the climate, the Left are not interested in honest pursuit of science - they just cherry pick data that supports their neo-Marxist agenda of redistributing wealth and capabilities from the West to the East, driven by their hatred of the West and its success under capitalism.

"hostis humani generis" implies "subject to violence and execution by anyone" (Wikipedia). The label has historically been a term/label for pirates, with the penalty for those caught generally being death. So yeah, they did suggest death for those people.

It's code for "don't travel, especially long distance"... because most people would simply not be willing to make many trips if the trips took as long as the non-flight option would require.

Prices are a great incentive.

In Germany, 1 kWh of electricity costs roughly 3x as much as 1 kWh of gas. That doesn't make heat pumps very attractive. Historically the differences were even worse.

Relying on people individually making choices that are better for the environment at a disadvantage for themselves is not going to work.

The way a good heat pump works is that you can get about 3-5kwh of heat out of 1 kwh of electricity. So, they can save money over gas even though electricity is more expensive per kwh. And of course gas prices fluctuate quite a bit. Right now Germany is low on gas and gas prices are going through the roof because of the situation in the middle east.

Here in Germany this issue is lack of policy, financing, and a lot of people are renting. I actually pay about > 100/month for gas. I live in a 20 apartment building with a big furnace in the basement for the whole building. A heat pump would be cheaper to run but you'd have to do a big one for the whole building. This is actually a good thing. Big heat pumps can be quite efficient. It's probably cheaper than having to install 20 heatpumps for 20 apartments.

But buying and installing heat pumps costs money. Technically, it is actually an investment (i.e. it has an ROI). If you do this collectively as a building, you'd do it to lower your monthly bills. This is something that should be possible to finance out of those savings (at least partially). That's literally why private home owners install heat pumps and get their money back in 6-10 years typically. Faster if they also invest in solar. And get an EV that also powers from those panels.

But this where things break down in Germany. You need consensus. And financing. And there are home owners that can block things and it's their renters that pay the heating bill so the owners don't care. And so on. And if you are renting, you are not going to pay for this either. So, everybody just coughs up the money every month without even questioning it. My apartment doesn't even have a thermostat or a smart meter for electricity. Apparently that's normal in this country. Germany is just deeply bureaucratic and inefficient. For all the talk about environment, they can't be arsed to do what the rest of the world did decades ago: save some energy with smart meters.

Policy could help here. Mainly clearing up bureaucracy. And maybe some more subsidies/incentives (those already exist) or low interest financing. And a clear political goal to vastly reduce expensive gas imports. Even if the electricity for powering these heat pumps would come from gas powered electricity plants, it would still require a lot less gas. And of course Germany has lots of wind power. I think other countries in the EU are a bit further with their thinking than Germany on this front. On paper it having lots of apartment buildings like mine actually means it is fairly straight forward from a technical point of view to upgrade these buildings.

A gas furnace produces at most 1 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of gas. A heat pumps produces 3-4 kWh of heat from 1 kWh of electricity. If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.

Plus, it also gives you AC which comes in handy if you live someplace where you want AC.

> If electricity is 3x as much as gas per kWh the heat pump should be less expensive to operate.

This would be true if heat pumps were free. But "less expensive to operate" needs to justify cost of installation over some measurable period of time. If electricity is 3x more expensive than gas, and the heat pump is 3-4x (2.5-3.5x realistically) then you're barely squeeking by except on the days when the pump is most efficient (when it's already warm out). That 3.5 - 3 leaves 0.5, amortized over the lifetime of the heat pump...might not even pay for installation.

So, make heat pumps free or energy cheaper, I guess.

You wait until your existing heating system reaches its end of life and then you consider switching.

If only the German infrastructure hadn’t been built for Nordstream…

In France, with Nuclear power and renewable it’s 20% lower.

Prices also depends on who you want to give power.

germany is an excellent example of an industrial powerhouse imploding their country by adopting the stupidest power strategy possible. Just utterly incomprehensible.

What we should do is make gas four times more expensive through taxes to guarantee the poor never vote for the progressives again. Unironically.

The prizes (Maui trip, second/third prizes, swag kits, shipping for the swag kits) probably cost around $20k in total.

Assuming an engineer costs $200k/year, 200 effective working days per year, that's 1k/day. Developing the contest (from the idea to building the rules to building the site to playtesting) likely cost more than 20 eng-days, making it the biggest cost.

Hiring is expensive. If it takes 30 minutes to screen one candidate for suitability for the "real" interview and 5h to do a "real" interview (including evaluation etc.), 5 screenings for one interview-worthy candidate and 5 interviews for one hire (I suspect the real factors might be closer to 10), that's 12.5h of screening and 25h of interviewing per hire.

Sure, hiring is expensive, but firing is really expensive! I salute your efforts to get it right on the first try.

20% off the tariff-inflated price, so customers only pay the original price (until the tariff refund is used up, then it's back to the inflated price again).