Australia is lucky, we get hot summers and mild winters, which means our electricity demand is highest precisely when we get the most solar.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
Temperature has nothing to do with the performance of solar. Solar panels perform better when they are cooled.
Also worth pointing out that much of the US is below 49 degrees latitude. Which is south of most of Europe. Washington DC and San Francisco are at a similar latitude (38) as Melbourne (-37). Most of the US is perfectly situated for getting pretty decent solar power around the year. Yes it gets cloudy sometimes. It's usually not continent wide. You can compensate with cables and batteries. The US is far behind because of policy and their local energy monopolists blocking progress. Not because of anything to do with the weather or geography.
Prices have a lot to do with scarcity. Which with monopolists has more to do with the lack of a free market than with a scarcity of resources. Installing solar is about 3-5x more as expensive in the US as in Australia. The permitting process in the US is more expensive than the total cost of buying and installing in Australia. That's a policy problem in the US. All the hand wringing around that topic isn't helping a lot. A bit of pragmatism could improve things a lot and probably very quickly. Australia is showing how to do that. And yes, they have rain there too and you can go skiing pretty close to Melbourne. That isn't stopping them.
I wasn't talking about the performance of solar, only the demand for electricity.
Someone pointed out that the big problem with solar isn't how do we store daytime solar for nighttime use - this is easily solved with batteries. The real unsolved problem is how do we store summer solar for winter use.
Australia doesn't have this problem, not to the extent of other colder places, because we don't need a lot of heating in the winter.
The cool thing is you can just try it. The barrier to entry is incredibly low right now. If it works for you, great. If it doesn't work for you, great. At least you know.
That's the real reason the conversation seems pointless. Every thread is full of comments from one group saying how useful AI is, and from another group saying how useless it is. The first group is convinced the second group just hasn't figured out how to use it right, and the second group is convinced the first group is deluded or outright lying.
Yes, I'm in the second group and I have that conviction about the first group based on personal experience with LLMs.
But most hype is not delusion. It's people trying to present themselves as "AI" experts in order to land those well paid "AI" positions. I don't think they even believe what they're saying.
It is incredibly annoying that in the case where the host doesn't know where the car is but opens a goat door anyway, the probability goes back to 50-50
Original rules (host knows where car is and always opens a door with a goat):
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, and you should stick
- 2/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, and you should switch
Alternative rules (host doesn't know where car is, and may open either the door with the car or a door with a goat)
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is the car, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should stick
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens a door with a goat, and you should switch
- 1/3 of the time your original choice is a goat, the host opens the door with the car, and you're going to lose whether you stick or switch
So even under the new rules, you still only win 1/3 of the time by consistently sticking. You're just no longer guaranteed that you can win in any given game.
Well yes, if you throw out half of the instances where your original choice was wrong, then the chance your original choice was correct will inevitably go up.
That would indeed be annoying, but I doubt it is the case. If you only consider this scenario, it cannot be distinguished by conditional probability from the case that the host knows, and so the math should stay the same.
As usual, the problem is not an incredibly difficult problem, but just a failure to state the problem clearly and correctly.
Try to write a computer program that approximates the probability, and you'll see what I mean.
Your program shows exactly what I mean: "Impossible" cannot be non-zero, your modified question is not well-defined.
Yes, of course it depends on the host knowing where the goat is, because if he doesn't, the scenario is not well-defined anymore. This is not annoying, this is to be expected (pun intended).
The scenario is well-defined. There's nothing logically impossible about the host not knowing which door has the car, and still opening the goat door.
"Impossible" in the program just refers to cases where the host picks the car door, i.e. the path that we are not on, by the nature of the statement. Feel free to replace the word "impossible" with "ignored" or "conditioned out". The math remains the same.
No, sorry, it is not well-defined. But I should have been clearer. What is not well-defined? Well, the game you are playing. And, without a game, what mathematical question are you even asking?
You cannot just "ignore" or "condition out" the case that there is a car behind the opened door, the game doesn't make any sense anymore then, and what you are measuring then makes no sense anymore with respect to the game. In order to make it well-defined, you need to answer the question what happens in the game when the door with the car is opened.
You can for example play the following game: The contestant picks a door, the host opens one of the other doors, and now the contestant can pick again one of the three doors. If there is a car behind the door the contestant picks, the contestant wins. Note that in this game, the contestant may very well pick the open door. The strategy is now to obviously pick the open door if there is a car behind it, and switch doors if it is not. I am pretty sure, when you simulate this game, you will see that it doesn't matter if the host knows where the car is (and uses this knowledge in an adversarial manner), or not.
The game you seem to want to play instead goes as follows: If the door with the car is opened, the game stops, and nobody wins or loses. Let's call this outcome a draw, and forget about how many times we had a draw in our stats. But you can see now that this is an entirely different game, and it is not strange that the resulting stats are different than for the original game.
I have worked mostly in larger enterprises where there are no "clients" but rather customers. I enjoy talking to customers and seeing how they use the software and hearing about their challenges. But that is much much different than talking to clients.
That's why something like 30% of Australian houses have solar.
That said, grid prices spiked recently. Both a combination of subsidies expiring, and fewer people buying grid power (because of solar) causing fixed costs to be shouldered by fewer people.
It should be pointed out that while electricity prices went up on paper, a lot of people aren't paying those higher prices because they are on solar!
reply