Hot Water Energy Battery Mashup Article

I wish I kept better records. . .

Why? Because this is related to an idea I actually corresponded with a solar panel manufacturer about, 15-16 years ago, AND another idea I'd always wanted to put into practice if I ever got to build a home.

This is the "this" that I refer to. (Sorry - I could have linked it in the last sentence but this is worth reading so I broke it out into this separate paragraph.) And my idea was related - oh, so related - to it. I'll bring out the significant sentence in the article:

"A heater with a 300-litre tank can store about as much energy as a second-generation Tesla Powerwall – at a fraction of the cost."

The UTS Institute for Sustainable Futures study found that a HWS (Hot Water System) can store energy in low usage periods of the day and not hitting the grid with HWS demand during peak periods. That's actually supposed to happen by offering cheaper energy between 3AM and 5AM but - I'm in Australia and while our electric meter has a separate circuit for the hot water system it isn't used to advantage. 

How Off-Peak Is (And Isn't) Working:

The two ways off-peak offerings are supposed to work are to 1) offer tariff incentives by making energy rates cheaper during off-peak periods and 2) with smart meters, being able to time-control devices (such as hot water systems) that store energy already to use the electricity during those off-peak times. Optionally a third way would be to 3) demand-control these devices. 

How It Works:

The first two are things that should be happening but I've never actually had an energy supplier that offers off-peak rates. This would have been super handy in the past and might have slightly reduced fossil fuel use and maybe made energy bills for consumers cheaper. But it seems that in practice it was all too hard, and the only concession to offpeak load levelling I've ever seen is that meters here offer that timed circuit for the hot water system... 

I actually tried doing this manually in WA by operating the breaker for the HWS because it was freakishly expensive at my rental to keep the hot water hot. It was a tiny HWS out in the elements and must have had the insulation soaked through and as a result insulating nothing. All I know is that it would switch on 4-6 times a day and this was pretty expensive to deal with. 

It proved cheaper to a) make a free-standing  insulating enclosure around it and b) turn it on before I went to bed and off in the morning before having a shower, then on again 30-60 minutes before the evening shower and doing dishes. A difference of about $40 per month in fact.

So - I've never been offered incentives and 2) the timer method must be a pain in the ass for energy companies as the (just in my State of Victoria alone) 2.8mln houses in the State that have electric HWSs switch on at 3AM. I'll be generous and say that 20% have boosted solar HWS, 40% have gas, and only 40% are pure electric but that's still over a million systems that these stupid meters switch on at the same time every night.

How It Should Work:

With the stupidly large numbers of these "smart" meters that are being insisted on, you'd think that energy companies could have phased in a system where the smart meters gradually load up with random HWSs during sags in demand during the day and then offer reduced tariffs during the night time offpeak and just switch in the HWSs that hadn't been activated during the day and then 20 minutes later those latter ones as well, which would stop this huge demand spike and spread it out. 

As far as I've been able to work out, that was one of the original ideas behind smart meters, to be able to level demand out. But oh yeah - it doesn't pay our CEOs and shareholders any more so we won't waste time and money implementing it.

My Take-out From This.

Energy companies will never give the customer a break when they can gouge them instead. In the Fossil Fuel Cartel's (FFC) postcapitalism period, they are going to gouge until they get stopped by government regulation. Yes, they are experiencing what it'll be like when their product is devalued and yes, I know our current Labor government are making some efforts already to muzzle their gorging instincts. It all needs to happen faster. 

Grass Roots Activism. It's going to take a surging tide of people like you and me to write emails and letters and petitions and more posts like this one. 

Now How That Article Was Nothing Like My Idea

The first idea, the one I wrote to a solar panel manufacturer about, was to put water-cooled heatsinks on the back of solar panels and use the coolant water with a heat pump to heat the home's hot water. The heat pumps were already available, all they had to do was put a stamped aluminium watercooled heatsink on the bottoms of their panels. I remember they were all like "interesting idea, but . . ." and they obviously saw the energy advantages to it but weren't prepared to be the first one on the market with it.

How ALL Of This Relates To My Second Idea:

My second idea was that if I ever got the opportunity to build, I'd put two sets of cisterns under the house under the concrete pad, thermally insulated and with recirculation pumps and use solar energy to heat the water in one set of cisterns and cool the other, and then use those to control the temperatures of sub-floor heating along with ceiling fans. Had the advantages that a) you collected heat from solar panels using my other idea, and also solar HWS collectors, and electric heating elements to use up excess solar electric energy, and save almost all the climate control costs.

There are now several public buildings that save energy by using geothermal and/or natural heat/cooling and use it to climate control the space.

I'm not claiming I was the first for any of those ideas but I am saying that such ideas are a natural outgrowth of existing tech and keep getting 'discovered' over and over before they finally land on fertile ground. I'm hoping that some person reading this will either be that fertile ground or will know someone else that will be. 

Once again - all these things need action. Take action, share this post, write to a member of government about their part in cleaning up our energy system, write to newspapers or CEOs and make your viewpoint known, support organisations that are making a difference, make donations, talk to people, share links. 

Please don't do nothing. It'll take a majority of us to make a difference.

Spot The Differences.

There is definitely a difference...

ACAP - All Capitalists Are Bastards.  (see * below)

Just take a look - and yes, I'm aware this news site is left-leaning, that's why I read it every day:

1. USA Republican story.
2. Australia Labor story.

Those two stories are co-contemporary on The New Daily today and they tell the whole story. All there is to know in this world. The alpha and the omega. About the state of our planet.

1: Using the debt ceiling to wrangle changes in policy. What changes? Oh, just the usual, see how many people we can put into deeper poverty or kill off. Our wealthy buddies need the space. 

2: Fixing trade relationships, making the medical and benefits systems more fair and raising more people out of life-threatening poverty. Speed up adoption of renewable/clean energy.

There endeth the lesson. 

Why Did I Post This?

These first two stories were in my TND (The New Daily) newsletter email this morning. Yep, I get daily newsletters from a few dozen news sources every day and Read them for things to comment on or act on. I find it pays me to Know stuff, just like Tyrion. I highly suggest you Read things and Know things too, but I'm not suggesting you should receive 40 - 80 articles a day and Read A Selected 10 - 15 Of Them. My email newsletter ("Subscribe" link in the banner above, hint hint...) only comes out once a week on Fridays and contains between 1 and 6 articles per issue.

But two stories in the same issue and showing the diametrically opposite approaches of the right and left, that was an irony I couldn't resist. As I mentioned in a previous article, there are many approaches to government.

The Right are inevitably paranoid, greedy, cruel, and authoritarian; and they brook no discussion. "Either give it all to us, be obedient to us, be like us - or we'll kill you, one way or another." And the circle that constitutes "us" in that particular equation always gets smaller and more selective, until there's only one person left standing.

Those on the Left tend to be far more egalitarian, far less assertive, and recognise a greater percentage of their fellow beings as "humans like ourselves." But they too are prone to Otherism, cruelty, and - the scourge of the planet - capitalistism.

Look at the state of the planet: 1% own most of the wealth, the richest 10% - including that 1% - own 80% of the planet's wealth, and the poorest people comprise something like 40% of the population and share in 20% of the wealth. No matter which "wing" of government you feel kinship with, they all allow this inequality to stand in the overall picture. It's just a small shift in how many citizens that government is willing to kill.

Governments get too used to "running things around here." Don't forget that governments came out of kingdoms and fiefdoms and before that village councils and before that small groups - all usually headed by the most sociopathic alpha in the group. 

Do we actually still NEED sheepdogs?

But is the time for authoritarian protectionist elitist capitalism over now? Because now the gloves are pretty much going to be coming off, because of the promise of AI and robots and automation (Robots are coming - have a read) it would appear that there'll no longer be a need for 90% of the world's population. And both sides seem okay with that and it's only the actual percentages they differ on. Maybe what we need is a smarter flock.

The linked article is about a company called Sanctuary AI who are produicng a 5'7" robot called Phoenix. Well, they're releasing a few in their immediate vicinity, at any rate. To local businesses. At hourly rental. And the video of a rather jerky wobbly bot doesn't inspire me to hire one for probably more than the hourly rate of a casual worker, no, not one bit.

BTW: That article clearly demonstrates one other thing about our human condition - we've turned cognitive dissonance and fantasizing into an artform. The lede line demonstrates this quite clearly:

"The AI-powered humanoid could be your next coworker." -- https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/general-purpose-robot

Except. 

No. 

I mean, really? Many people won't work alongside people who have a different skin colour, gender, or ability. The robot(s?) in  the video definitely show mechanical instabilities that lead to inaccuracies that will slow them down, meaning that working alongside them could become frustrating really quickly.

Let's Examine That

Most mobile humanoid robots aren't really ready for prime time yet. The Atlas parkour robots and Spot dogs of the robot world are very expensive machines that were especially trained for agility and mobility and even they muff their actions regularly. A less costly robot like Phoenix won't be able to be built with all the expensive hardware, so they'll be inherently mechanically handicapped.

Why are most robots put behind service desks or in "no humans" areas? Why aren't there more robot nannies spoon-feeding infants or elderly? Because they still regularly get out of registration with their surroundings and repeatedly damage the dolls they train on. 

The best affordable robots are plagued with problems, they wobble, oscillate, can't repeat an action within close enough tolerances, and are slow. Humans "co-working" with them will hate them within the first few hours.

Another form of robot are those swarm drones and guided missiles. Go look up the accuracy statistics on those, it's a bit scary actually. And yes, I'm aware that the skywriting drones that are seemingly performing rock-solid shows but you have to understand that they were built, equipped, and programmed quite painstakingly for just one thing, and that's to do those shows. 

I'll mention the term "brittle AI" - this is a fairly simple form of AI which is just tasked with one job. It's called brittle because any other task will probably break it. Ask a kitchen pasta-boiling bot, consisting of usually just a pair of arms on an overhead track (with a really tiny set of instructions consisting of "take {object}, place in boiling water, wait X minutes for al dente, Y minutes for well cooked, then remove and plate up"), to babysit and you'll only have yourself to blame for the consequences.

So those show drones are a brittle combination of programming and hardware that are just good for those specific tasks. Imagine buying 1,200 cheap drones and Hue lights and trying to produce the same show. 

Or take autonomous delivery drones. They're designed & built to traverse well-known sets of points along well-known routes and pay attention to their surroundings. And yet there are people making a living out of compiling delivery drone fails on Youtube...

I don't make or program robots but I think if I was - oh, say ... - an AI firm making robots, I'd work on giving the robots some really excellent but brittle AI as a base layer of programming. 

This base AI's task will just be to learn how the damn body moves in the real world. "Oh - when I move the arm like this with a kilo of weight in the hand, my torso gives way ever so slightly and then I look like a drunken racoon stealing my second full bottle of vodka, maybe I can pre-emptively correct for this in future?" and that will be all that this AI program does. Know to within a millimetre how to recover if some asshole human co-worker bumps the robot for a joke, where that bottle finishes up if the robot stumbles - is it still upright? - and so forth. 

THEN I'd have a second AI program that just gets told what to put where and with what and when and whom to, and asks the basic movement AI to "make it so."

And THEN I'd have a third level of AI that interacts with people and the surroundings and adjusts the task queue for 2nd level, which in turn tells the base level what to do.

I mean, if you're talking to someone and they say "Hand me that bottle of vodka wouldja" you don't plan the whole action in your conscious brain, do you? No, you look for a bottle, grab it, and hand it to Person B. We have all those different subsystems. So should our machines. Not just one system paddling like hell to do all of everything, every time. 

30 years ago there was already a six legged "ant" that taught itself to walk in a desired direction. It basically had controllers for each leg that knew nothing, but got rewarded by the direction circuit for every millimetre Attila the Ant moved in the right direction, and it learned quite quickly. But that was all it could do.

And I know that "cobots" exist that will share space with humans without harming them but they will by necessity be hampered by that limitation and most mangers will find ways to slowly take some of those limits off just to get production up. Robots cost money but can then work without pay, but humans cost a wage or salary and if an accident happens well that's just one less wage to make up next month. 

Also - the best robots are the industrial arm bots. They're fixed to a certain area, it's easy to get completely repeatable results out of them, and since they have the power to both accelerate AND stop quickly, so they can be made fairly safe around humans. But they're not really intelligent. 

You can have it relatively dumb, strong, and hard-working - or smart, a bit unstable, and slow. These limits aren't going to go away too quickly.

So yeah - we take the Polyanna attitude that Phoenix will really quickly become a miracle of precision engineering, and we'll somehow educate people not to mess with the new robot worker just for the hell of it or get offended that it's a bit slow at the job thus slowing the human worker down, and also we have this perfect environment where the robot you work with does everything in sync with you and things will get along swimmingly. It'll happen, it just hasn't happened yet.

Dun-dun-dun-dun! Elephant in the room alert!

And we also ignore one other "cognitive dissonance elephant" in the room: that if the robot is so good that it's acceptable to the humans then . .  well . . . remember the ACAPs? 

This perfect robot arrives and is booted up and has shown that it can work alongside you perfectly. Q: How long after this point do you think it will be before Management just quietly hire another Phoenix and give you a Pink Slip? 

Upper Level Management

Then there's also that top level AI. The lower level AI are quite focused on specific tasks. Like our autonomous nervous system just does basic things like breathing and regulating hormones and heart rate to match activity; and then our unconscious functions just know that when your top level AI says "I want to walk to - there." it makes the legs and feet walk you there, there's that top level that even in we humans isn't always perfect.

You know, the "hold my beer!" kinds of actions that we later look back on (if we survive...) with a mixture of "wow!" and regret. And we think an AI will be able to manage that better than we can. Uhhm... Nuh-uh...  Our best two shots at higher-level AI at present are brittle machine learning and Generative Predictive (or Pre-Trained) Transformers or GPT. If you just read that link in this paragraph, you'd know that GPT doesn't find what's right, it finds what looks like it should go next to the preceding words/phrases. GPT finds absolute bullshit sometimes, that would make our most glorious Darwin Awards "hold-my-beer" moments look like amateur hour.

Give me a Phoenix robot with a GPT-style AI in it trying to figure out the most efficient way to get a bottle of vodka to me and I risk having the 'bot try to ram the vodka down my throat cork, bottle, and all because the sentence "Phoenix delivered the bottle of vodka quickly and efficiently" sounded better to the GPT than "Phoenix got a glass, set it down, filled it with a 20ml shot of vodka from the bottle in its other hand, set down the bottle, and handed the glass to Ted." 

But because ACAP, they'll rush these decrepit POS robots to market as quickly as they can, and then we'll have to make the Three Laws Of Robotics, and then the "One thousand one Hundred Clauses To The Three Laws Of Robotics" to protect against the inevitable manufacturers' race to the bottom in terms of making the cheapest possible robots and sell as many as possible. Look what happened with 3D printers for FSM's sake.

We need lawmakers to come from among the companies making the robots and AIs, because the lawmakers we do have can't think past their own pants and ever-ready-for-grift-money pockets. Most are also religiously bent so to them, AI and robots sounds like something wanting to be God and they can't have that so they make underlings do the research for them. And then ignore their advice and vote on grift lines.

Also, I can't help thinking this stuff is dumbing us down too. Because things like this. Apparently we have people aspiring to imitate GPT, which will be a pale shadow of what's itself just a pale shadow of human creativity. I'm not sure if this guy is a publicity whore or if he's more of a brilliant performance artist than a writer. 

And M John Harris is apparently a good writer, so this begs the question of why he'd want to imitate a mediocre thing like GPT? Also he shows some kind of understanding deficit about GPT - it "writes" nothing itself, it scours millions of people's writing and then tries to predict what word fits the training data best, then the next word, and the word after that, and so on. And all these words were written by different people, the rule and training data sets were from writings of other individuals. GPT doesn't develop a unique writing style that MJH can imitate, it develops all the writing styles and mashes them together. 

Oh look:

"Do you think GPT will ever write an original piece of writing?

As an AI language model, I don't possess personal opinions or beliefs. However, I can provide you with some insights on the topic.

The GPT models, such as GPT-3, are capable of generating text that appears to be original and creative. They can produce coherent and contextually relevant content based on the input they receive. However, it's important to note that GPT models generate text by predicting the most probable next word given the preceding context, utilizing the patterns and information it learned during training.

While GPT models can generate text that seems original, they do not possess true creativity or originality in the same way humans do. They rely on patterns and examples from the data they were trained on, rather than forming entirely new ideas or concepts. They excel at mimicking and emulating human-generated text, but their output is ultimately constrained by the data they have been exposed to during training.

That said, researchers are constantly working on advancing AI models and exploring ways to enhance their capabilities. It's possible that future iterations or new models may exhibit more originality, creativity, and the ability to generate truly unique content. However, the question of whether AI models can achieve true originality in the same way humans do is still a subject of debate and ongoing research."

In other words, to imitate GPT's "style" you have to just imitate everyone's styles and average them together. The bit I highlighted is probably the only thing GPT outputs that's distinctive - and it was probably written omne quod est by the developers...

Why Did I Really Write This? Will I Ever Shut Up?

Because I won't let the bastards get away with anything, and I will support every change that improves life for everyone. And I'll never stop until the last right wing capitalist is silent, exiled, or has passed away. 

Because right wing capitalists need to be exposed, fought, lampooned, and kicked up the arse every time they stick their heads up.

Because the whole world could survive - and survive comfortably at that - if it wasn't for the wealth inequality that right wing capitalism creates.

And because when you come down to is, we all live on this planet, this one single habitat that we have, and we need to stop it being exploited for something as stupid and ultimately valueless as money. 

But it needs YOU to do things too - share this article, write emails and sign petitions, scroll back up and subscribe to my newsletter and donate to allow me to increase the reach of these posts, to let me continue making these posts. 

Remember that we're all Earthings on spaceship Earth.
And above all - "Thou Shalt Keep The Bastards Honest."

* No, I didn't write the acronym wrong. All Capitalists Are Pants.

TTMMGH#00010 Low Effort Marketing

Things That Make Me Go Hmmhmm #10

Stupid emails from stupid companies who all use the same emoticons because they're an easy way to appease the mug punter (yourself) with pretties. They want your attention but don't value it enough to put any effort into their marketing missives. They want your custom and your money but - steady on there bloke - we don't actually want to make you feel like you're, y'know, valued or anything. 

I'm imagining that those companies with several employees and an office space are earning money from me either directly or through selling my information or offering some of their clients a shot at advertising to me, so I and tens of thousands of their clients must be worth something to them - right? Yet all I see in those cheery icon-studded puddles of trite hogwash is someone whose job it is to generate the email just wanting to get it over with and get on with some other more important part of their life, and the person who's supposed to read it and improve it before it gets sent also deciding - well screw these mug punters, I have to get to my drinks with some other ass-kissers in ten minutes so just send it already. 

I hold down a life I intend to enjoy as much of as possible with a woman I love and pets that bring us joy and a garden that fulfils us both. I do my share of the housework and do the cooking. I work on a huge list of projects ranging from simple woodwork to complex machines to circuitry and programming, I write several blog articles a week. And I'd feel guilty if I just lifted a piece of clip art or got AI to generate a piece for me and then didn't work it over and add a bit of myself to it. 

And despite only ever earning well under $100 a year from those blog and instructive articles, I could not just pepper a few crap icons or an unimproved picture lifted off my Nightcafe creations into a post just because I can't be arsed to give something more of myself to my readers/followers.

Not Just The Email Bacn, Either

I've also noticed a few Youtubers whose channels contained decent vibrant content in the past that are now pumping out a steady stream of what I've heard in other circumstances described as schlock. For instance, I saw a video about (for the sake of this article I'll pick one at random) the US Defence Forces releasing information about UFOs. The video was produced well and was informative and obviously took a bit of research and time to put together. Then within a few days, it was like all those schlock jocks had seen that video and put together their own video to try and cash in on the hits the original articles had garnered. 

It was pretty obvious that many of the following videos were only researched by referring to the OP video and a bare minimum of changed wording. Now this I call cynical because the tail end had obviously just spent a day or two preparing and making their videos, but they're still cashing views on their reputation alone, and getting as much income for two days of production (and honestly - not this UFO topic in particular, it's just an example plucked out of thin air - some of these videos didn't deserve to coast along like this.) that I've now taken notifications off those channels. 

They may still produce an occasional brilliant original thought-provoking video but if they cbf to make a decent original videos their main output then I certainly can't be bothered to keep them in likes.  

And Just Because They're On Me Lawn:

Why do almost all sites include a "this site wants to send you notifications, allow / block?" messages? Does ANYONE want continual notifications from their toilet paper supplier site? Does anyone give a Flying Spaghetti Monster for notifications? 

I can sort of see how the intrusive

SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!

might garner a dozen news subscribers a year, but once someone's said no to these annoyances a few times, maybe use one of your precious cookies to stop sending those pop-up notifications... Or how the pervasive 

Bookmark!   Our!   Site!

might cause a few dozen people to add a bookmark. 

But the acme of keeping people coming back would have to be to have the best deals, the fastest delivery, the most unbiased news, and best value. Isn't that what most people want? So why detract from your qualities with these cheap attacks on your customers. You wouldn't put a person at your door and instruct them to try and glue your brochures onto customers as they enter and leave would you?

(Sinking feeling as I realise I've probably given some bricks and mortar Head Of Sales another idea...)

It's low-effort marketing, it's rude, it's intrusive, it's annoying, and it probably loses those sites thousands of viewers that might otherwise become returning visitors. I know that unless the site has some higher intrinsic value than another, they lose me after 2-3 visits because it's not worth the bother.