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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • They certainly should work at the power level. My utility is ~36% renewable in their power mix right now, but I pay for 100% and that extra money causes them to go out and buy extra renewables for the remaining 64% of my power. I’m not under any illusion that on a cold, still winter night that my power isn’t coming from coal base load - but I have high confidence that they really are buying that extra power, and that in turn creates more demand for solar generation.

    My employer does something similar, we buy the RECs from something like a third of the output of a local solar farm (under contract) and then also buy dirty power from the utility. That should ultimately wash out.

    Though what I can’t figure out is how that solar power is actually accounted for when it hits the grid. It’s been severed from the renewable energy credits (that we bought) so presumably it must not count as a non-carbon power source when it enters the grid, but I can’t find a category for “non-green solar power” on any of the utility reports. Anyone know where it goes?








  • Yeah I’ve wrestled with that too - I justify it to myself that they are so much smaller than Amazon or Microsoft but they are certainly not a small operation.

    I also appreciate their participation in WinterCG and the dream of having interoperable runtime environments for serverless platforms. While I don’t think it’s quite there yet, I think it’s a force for good to have a medium-sized player trying to push the interoperability that Amazon obviously isn’t big on.





  • Yes, that’s obviously taking the lifetime K2 deaths and dividing by the summit attempts - though actually I get 19% in that situation. However we really dont have enough data to form a good confidence interval there - it’s possible we’ve had a lucky few years or maybe we’ve got better at deciding when to make the summit attempts.

    But it doesn’t really change my point. There’s some threshold where it seems fundamentally immoral to hire someone for a job that has a good chance of killing them. Mountain porter on k2 or everest is a higher risk job than “astronaut” without the same glory that comes with the space faring job title. Even if the chance of death is 1 in 200, I still think its immoral to take advantage of someone who’s so desperate for work that they’ll overlook it.