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Cake day: June 3rd, 2023

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  • UllallullooAtoProgrammer Humor@programming.dev"Cloud" Devs
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    27 days ago

    GitHub is kind of a cloud service, but it isn’t a server host. Cloud development is just more…abstracted than traditional web development. Instead of controlling a computer and choosing how to store files and managing ports and firewalls and making backups and serving requests and redirecting to closer servers and making sure you have enough computing power but not too much computing power and all that stuff, you instead just give Amazon/Microsoft/Google your code and data and pay them to do all that for you.





























  • I think it’s more like this: Say maintenance of a grid costs $1 million/year, power generation costs another $1 million/year and people use 10 million kWh/yr at 20¢ per. Everything is balanced. Then half the people cut their usage in half. Grid maintenance still costs $1 million/year, generation dropped to $750,000, but revenue dropped to $1.5 million. They have to raise the price 16% to go back to paying for maintenance. You’re still saving money if you dropped your usage more than 16%, but those that didn’t pay the difference.

    Since you generally have to be fairly well-off to afford the massive upfront labor costs involved with solar, its adoption has disproportionately raised the living expenses of the lower class.

    The alternative is a base services charge, where everyone pays a flat percentage of the grid maintenance costs and then his or her usage is on top of that. No idea why it’s taking this long for PG&E to adopt that model, but adding charges for solar is a big improvement in equity.