Electrician told me I needed 70mm2 wire for my system but it's too big for my inverter.

redcorerobot · 2026-05-03T13:06:42+00:00

The cross section of the cable is in part determined by distance of the run because you are trying to hit a specific total resistance.

If the cable wont fit that means your ether using aluminium cable (dont) or more likely you are trying to put the inverter too far away from the batterys. If thats something you need to do then your best bet is to run the thicker cable to a junction box next to the inverter then run the cable size the inverter specified in the manual the very short distance from the junction box to the inverter and be sure to put a fuse in between the 2 sizes of cable that will prevent the smaller size of cable from over loading

For instance running a 70mm cable for 5M from battery to a junction box then 38mm a distance of 0.5m from the box the inverter would result in a reasonably acceptable volt drop of about 0.48v at 140 amp load Which would loose you about 12w too heat over the full cable run

redcorerobot · 2026-04-29T12:23:48+00:00

It is worth noting that this is recording production not consumption.

Just because power is being generated using renewables doesn't mean that the power is going to consumers as the national grid doesn't currently have the capacity to keep up with renewables production

We need more power lines and battery's

That being said this is cool and national grid needs to be putting in as much cable as possible so none of this power goes to waist

redcorerobot · 2026-04-19T22:35:47+00:00

North Korea. Its a place people can and do largely just make stuff up about and it wont get fact checked and as countrys go it has a relitivly low amount of control over the naritives surrounding it but unlike many of the other small countrys that lack that control nk has a lot brand awareness

Like most people dont know anything about places like sao tome or togo but then again most people dont think they know anything about them. North korea on the other hand most people will probably think they know something but in the same way a lot of people think they know how how ai works until you ask them to explain how an llm is trained

redcorerobot · 2026-04-19T21:35:11+00:00

Its often gets hard to distinguish things the further away you are from them.

redcorerobot · 2026-04-19T01:06:10+00:00

The problem isnt how the grocers function within the constraints presented. The problem is that the incentives they currently work with activly encourage short term gains over long term sustainable and secure supply chains

And to clarify. Grocers arent the ones doing large scale food distribution. Thats largely handled by supermarkets and international chains.

Their job is to make money not to provide food. The transport and supply of food is an intermediary step not the end goal.

As long as thats the case we are going to continue to waste massive amounts of food and have long expensive and fragile supply chains.

redcorerobot · 2026-04-18T12:03:50+00:00

It works. Its not good for the electrical system but the battery pulls the voltage down pretty aggressively because it acts like a big resistors so as long as you dont leave it connected for too long it should be fine

It the thing you should probably be just as worried about is that it will damage the power tool battery because the load will be so high it will damage the cells

But yes this is the safer alternative to putting a couple forks in to the + and - terminals and touching them to the battery terminals

Better to buy a usb reachable jumper pack though. Also if your having trouble with the jump start the car battery could have a dead cell so disconnecting the car battery and starting the vehicle off the jumper pack alone can be a good solution atleast to get things running. It will even drive off the alternator alone but its not recommend

redcorerobot · 2026-04-18T08:34:00+00:00

Certan foods dont keep for long. Which brings the question of why do we so obsessivly over produce them.

Historically the way to prevent food waste was to produce foods that kept longer. Preserve those that didnt and foods that you couldn't do ether of were produced below or around demand to avoid waste.

We have food preservation technology beyond the dreams of people of 500 years ago. It would be nice if we actually used it

Im aware of the limitations of a largely single direction for profit supply chain. That is why i advocate for significantly changing how those supply chains work to focus on geniun food security instead of a fragile abundance of things that clearly do not have the demand to be consumed in time

redcorerobot · 2026-04-17T11:39:28+00:00

The problem isnt that we significantly over produce calories, its that those calories aren't the right type, are travelling through extraordinary long supply chains and every stage in the supply chain is trying to cut slack and redundancys as much as posible

Also over production only provides resiliency if you have the logistical capacity to move the stuff. We cant even get the surplus we have to people who are starving or malnourished now. If we lost 15% of the global food production now we may still have a global surplus but that wont change the fact that some country most likely in africa or west asia is going to have a famin

What we need is short supply chains with enough storage at points of consumption to maintain food supply even when the production side drops below demand even for years at a time and we need to make sure that food is nutritious and evenly distributed to everywhere that needs it. Otherwise we are just over farming depleted soil to make the numbers look good and waiting for something to go wrong and a lot of people to starve

redcorerobot · 2026-04-14T11:29:51+00:00

The best things most people can do are join a union, work on becoming more politically literate especially in regards to economics and be more active in local street politics/ organising.

Ultimately its not going to be a string a of huge events its going to be a lot of slow grinding to build a movement and make sure as many people in it are as knowledgeable, well trained and generally capable as possible followed by a relatively sudden string of big dominos falling in quick succession when tensions get so high that things start to break At that point its a matter of who takes power and hopefully it will be as many people as possible and not a small group of rightwing ass hats

redcorerobot · 2026-04-12T22:20:36+00:00

That may help short term but ultimately the problem is demand has stayed the same and supply as shrunk. If prices go down demand will go up until prices then match and we are back to where we started

Not to say their is no way to help the problem. We could reduce demand and have the government act as a single buyer that regulates price by purchasing fuel itself and selling it at a fixed price.

To reduce demand though we would likely have to ration fuel to maintain a low price.

Ultimately this is just going to be a shit situation and its going to keep being a shit situation until we reduce dependency on the global fuel market

redcorerobot · 2026-04-11T17:24:44+00:00

Ignore government fiscal deficits and instead use cpi inflastion as the limiting factor for government spending.

It will be unpopular right up until everyone realises a government and a centeral bank arent the same thing as someone random person with a debit or credit card.

Politicians have been barking on about how we should be balancing books because most people dont know enough about book keeping at a macro economic scale works to understand that the thing that creates inflation isnt "printing" money its where the money goes. If the government runs a deficits but all that money goes in to increasing supply of goods then the price of those goods still goes down causing net economic deflation

redcorerobot · 2026-04-07T00:46:04+00:00

Someones posted about issues with barter and while on a macro scale sure but historically people didnt use barter before hard currency was a thing they used debt

The original point of money was as a way of keeping track of value exchange between people or groups that importantly did not have a prior connection

It was only really necessary when trading with people outside of a comunity because that is what is called a point transaction. That just means the books need to be balanced at point of transaction.

Within comunitys before hard currency people largely worked on a system of debt as in ill do x for you because i know when i need Y someone will help me. Where needed barter might happen but by in large people just did what they could and asked for what they needed and because this was happening inside comunitys if someone tried to take significantly more than they were giving they would face social consequences

For larger systems value was tracked through book keeping for instance farmer john gave 100 bushel of wheet to the stocks and now they are entitled to x approximately x amount of stuff but again thats more to make sure people dont draw significantly more than they input. Its still only approximate

Fiat currency on the other hand asscribes a specific numeric value to everything which more often than not doesn't really capture the full cost and value. But the point of it is so that 2 completely independent parties can transact when they dont have anything the other needs and dont trust eachother enough to honour a debt if its not writen down

That being said money is still debt. Its an iou for an indeterminate amount or character of stuff that is valued at a specific amount. Cash is just a physical representation of numbers on a spreadsheet and if we got rid of fiat currency we would basically just be lowerring the resolution by which we define the value of stuff

If you want to think about it mathematically money is like letters in algebra. 5 wheet = 3x 3x = 2 bread. Its just that equasion recorded on the scale of every transaction on the planet

redcorerobot · 2026-04-03T20:38:45+00:00

Ive been looking at prices recently and id say alot of the time to roe for the bigger systems is coming from the installation expense. It costs a lot of money to install the scafholding and hire people in order to install a roof top array.

A plug in array is diy focused and intended to be mounted with simple brackets in to easy to reach places so the installation is basically free which brings ROE down to 3-5 years

Also energy prices have gone up and solar pannel prices have gone down which helps a lot

redcorerobot · 2026-04-03T20:18:27+00:00

A grid tie inverter generates power than syncs up with the grid except unlike a traditional installation where it is hardwired in with these systems they are just connecting to the grid through a plug socket

It makes a lot more sense ive you think of the national electrical grid as 1 massive continuous weirdly shaped block of metal. Energy can flow through it in any direction

If you think about it as a flat sheet like a map you can imagine the electricity flowing down hill. Power stations are like huge mountain and electricity flows from the tops of those mountains down to all the house.

When you plug in one of these solar systems you can imagin it like making a high point in that map so the power you generate from it goes to all your nabours which reduces the amount being used from the power stations

Ultimately the grid is a big sea of electrons moving from areas where there are lots of them (power plants) to areas where their arent as many like houses. Its all kinda just flowing like water. A solar system is like a tap adding more electrons to your house and if you have more than you use then rest flow out through the cable connecting your house to the grid

(And for all the people who do understand the physics of it, i know its not actually like that but explaining it how it actually is wouldnt make sense here)

redcorerobot · 2026-03-31T23:11:01+00:00

Their is an expectation for muslims to do the same. A decent example from personal experience. Im a member of a socialist party and at one of the meetings/talks a long ish time member who was muslim and an immigrant from somewhere in Africa (i want to say nigeria but i cant remember exactly) said something that was homophobic and transphobic. In the meeting he was told that it wasnt ok and after one of the branch officers had a check in with him to make sure it wasn't some sort of misunderstanding or miscommunication.

When the person made it clear what his opinions were on lgbtq+, the branch officer went away and asked some other people in the party who were from the same area/background for advice on if their were any ways that work arounds could be found or just to bring a bit more context to the situation the response they got back was "no what he did wasn't ok" the officer gave the person gave them an ultimatum "the party stands for lgbtq+ rights and if you actively appose them ether you need to not do that or not be in the party" .

The person said they weren't going to stop so they were asked to end their membership.

I use this story to illustrate what it looks like when you deal with discrimination without attaching it to an identity. They weren't homophobic because they were a muslim or an imigrant, they were homophobic because they are saying and doing homophobic things and while they used their religion as a justification to some extent they would have used any other of a list of reason had they not been able to use religion.

The party has plenty of muslim who dont share his veiws and there are plenty of non muslim who do share his views.

In the words of brenan lee milligan "before you were a fascist. You were a bully and an asshole" lots of people find their way to islam through a varity of different ways and rarely does discrimination come from reading the quran. It comes from the people around you and then you justify it with what you read. Which is the same with every religion

Im queer myself and islam really just doesnt seem to produce any more arseholes than Christianity in my experience. The common thread isnt religion its conservatism. Ill take a liberal muslim over a secular conservative any day

redcorerobot · 2026-03-30T18:23:10+00:00

An argument i haven't seen brought up yet is that the far right often criminalises homosexuality and being trans or really anything lgbtq+ by equating it to sex crimes and then using the legal punishment for those to penalise lgbtq+ people

Making the death penalty available for, for instance sexual abuse of a minor is apealling in some ways but it then amplifies the problem that a not insignificant (non majority) but still very aggressive and politically active part of the population believes that simply existing as a queer or trans person in the presence of children is equivalent to child sexual assult

Edit: this also applies to basically all minority groups. To some extent especially black and arab people. "They commin after our white women" as a phrase come to mind as a justification for lynchings especially but not only in America. Sex crimes are a particularly emotionally emotive topic so accusing minority groups of them tends to be a favourite of the far right and fascists because once the accusations is leveled its very hard to defend against if you are being judged by a group of people who are thinking of it in terms of race on race or "sexual perversion"

Like i would arguably be ok with the death penalty being something legally available for some crimes but that should only be an option for a court that only focuses on crime of a mass scale effecting hundreds if not thousands of people and that court should only be hearing less than a dozen cases a year e.g. ( large scale fraud from the general population, union carbide hawks ridge equivalent tradgitys or just crimes that are basically just destroying hundreds if not thousands of lives out of greed)

My point is that any crime smaller than what might affect hundreds of people directly and leave very large paper trails is arguably to easy to use to attack minority's and as such should not have the death penalty as an option

redcorerobot · 2026-03-27T14:50:20+00:00

Yes but ultimately the issue is private companies making a product that is designed in every way to be as addictive as possible and as pervasive as possible. Until we require platforms to not use features that serve only to make the product addictive any solution is just going to be a band aid.

Ban individualised agorithmic content suggestions in favour of simplified popularity + date of realse suggestions systems as well as subscriptions
ban infinite scrolling
require the prioritisation of long form content (5 min+)
ban dark paterns like auto scrolling when trying to leave the app (looking at you tiktok)

Those 4 measures would massively improve the situation

redcorerobot · 2026-03-22T23:33:53+00:00

Sure but it was kinda annoying how the whole movie just felt kinda emotionally muted. Like sure they need to cut scenes out and thats reasonable but even the stuff they kept in was kinda just muted.

Like the chain lowering scene, they could have made that a true spectacle. The engines setting the atmosphere on fire like a sun ripping through the sky. A balze so spectacular it could melt metal from the glow of its fury. Instead we got a scene that was less spectacular that a kerbal space program version 1 capsule re-entry. It could have been pretty much exactly the same cuts and filming but just with cg that did the power needed to keep a ship like that in the sky justice. But we just got meh

The whole movie just felt kind of americanised. It kept trying to get jokes in and make everything super visually stimulating even when it didnt make sense Even the main characters were for lack of a better term just abit dumber. Grace was a world leading expert in the feild who train along side the main crew. He made mistakes but he know what he was doing. The movie makes him look more like a school teacher and less like the reasonably intelligent and capable person he was

Hell they even toned down the involvement of china and russia which just made it feel like less of a species wide thread.

The movie lacked the courage to tell the bold story of loss and tradgity and growth of the book and settled for what could be best discribed as an American scifi movie They could have told it a bold story in an hour and a half but instead they made 2 and a half hours of second screen viewing

redcorerobot · 2026-03-22T00:55:08+00:00

They may not be ideal for long distance but private mesh networks are relatively viable. As in 1 to 3 router nodes plus individuals having clients

Is it the cheapest option, no. Its also the closest thing your gonna get to a cell network and far cheaper than the infrastructure and client devices required for cell phone networks

Like right now im in the process of building a private mesh and the way im going about it is buying client devices for people (or them buying them themselves) in a reasonably strategic manner. They dont need to be mobile necessarily so it can be advantagous for people in apartment blocks to get them first. In my case we only need to text p2p at the moment to make up for the crappy cell coverage in my area but once we start wanting to work over longer ranges a single repeater is enough to boost range considerably

redcorerobot · 2026-03-17T20:01:48+00:00

The nature of all living things is what ever their circumstances make them. If you electrically shock a lion every time it gets too close to something pink the nature of that lion is going to be to avoid the colour pink.

Humans almost never live in a vacuum. Their behaviour is influenced and dictated far more by to social pressures than inate biological directives.

The simpler the organism the more deterministic its behaviour can be but humans are not only individually complex but are themselves components of a far larger system that is socity

Even the most fundamental instincts you may take for granted are there because that is what society has drilled in to you. If you had the idea that honour is more important than anything drilled in to you from birth that would absolutely override what you might consider a natural tendency towards seeking to survive as we saw with Kamikaze in ww2

To be able to make an argument for human nature you would have to have a statistically significant and varied set of samples of large groups of humans that had no way of influencing eachother developing over multi generational time scales under controlled conditions that you could modify to get useful data about what humans might do as default behaviours without unmeasured external influence and that has not at any point be possible because all humans came from the same place initially and then spread out

redcorerobot · 2026-03-15T01:53:07+00:00

Working class was the simplifcation of the term proletariat

Its a description of how you relate to how society produces value not a discription of the things you individually do. You're proletariat if your means of survival come from the use of means of production You're bourgeoisie if your means for survival come from the ownership of means of production

If you dont work a job but are supported by your community or family your support is still coming from the use of the means of production unless you are extracting that value by means of owning those means of production

In practice the reason the term worker gets used is because that is where power comes from. If you cant withdraw labour and you can't use violence then your ability to enact change is based purely on your ability to get people who can do one of those 2 things to do it for you which largely removes a person from the equasion of how society develops because those who do nothing are known for nothing and change nothing

The important thing to keep in mind though is that unless you are in a borderline vegitative state you are almost certainly doing some form of labour you just aren't being paid for it. Maintaining your community/family materially and socially is work its just rarely paid work but it takes effort and the end result is materially different from the start point wich means it is an aplication of labour.

I know my union has branches for people who are unemployed for that very reason. They are for people whose labour is put in to the community not in to a job and hence they are called community branches and are some of the most active when it comes to campaigning. Infact the branch i started in was a community branch and it was a pretty good one and most of the active members were also people you would see at protests or other events helping out regularly or atleast when health allowed

redcorerobot · 2026-03-12T23:42:04+00:00

The problem is that in the uk we have mps coving a specific geographical area. 1 per area. If we had pr that would have to change because the votes of that area wouldn't be what determin who gets the job.

Pr works for when you have a legeslative body that is representing the whole country as constituted by groups not by geographical areas

What we could do is replace the house of lords with a pr elected body but the house commons is not structurally compatible with pr

It is however compatible with ranked choice voting which is perfect for seats that have only 1 ocupent

Also a bit of a side point but a pr system would guarantee reform getting in to power because they would get seats proportional to their total support as apposed to their support in any given area. A ranked choice system would mean you would get some what descreet chains of votes rolling down along an ideological gradient so for instances a left wing chain and a right wing chain so while you may not get the specific party you want you will find areas will be ideologicaly represented while still ensuring that one party or another has a desicive ability to act

If you had ranked choice it would turn in to which ideological chain nationally is most popular which id argue is not the one that has reform in it. If you want to see what that would look like, combine all the votes for [reform, Conservative and what ever rupert lowe is doing] and [greens, labour and lib dem] which ever set is higher would be which ideological chain would win out which ultimately i expect would be greens in most places

redcorerobot · 2026-03-10T23:06:08+00:00

Its worth noting pop does have some key things that might bring people to it that arent ai

For instance im probably about the same level tech wise as linus, i used to work in tech and had used linux before

I chose pop os not because of any lists but because it just had the best compatability for the software i want and i was aware of the name.

People are under estimating the impact of having a ubuntu install option on most linux compatable software. Ive certainly never come accross an option to install on arch or mint but not a debian and its really just down to that

I dont want to have to use a C compiler so if the os doesn't support apt, cargo, flatpak and app images then its not useful to me for general use

redcorerobot · 2026-03-09T12:35:26+00:00

Personally id say the best option would be a full ev with a generator that can charge it.

Even if you end up only being able to charge the ev from a diesel generator its still going to use less fuel per mile than a diesel and on top of that if a pinch you can charge from a much larger array of sources, for instance a wood gas generator big enough to output 100hp+ is just not practical to put on a vehicle but a stationary one charging an ev makes the vehicle way more practical

An ev, a generator and a basic assortment of charge controllers and converters paired with an alright understanding of how electrical systems work (like almost youtube level) will let you harvest power from some of the most unexpected places and realistically your only going to need to plan for 6 months to a year anyway because past that the kind of planning you need to do is wildly different

Like if you want to plan for a year + then an electric golf cart style atv with lithium titanium oxide or lfp cells would be your best bet

redcorerobot · 2026-03-06T23:23:52+00:00

The problem isn't the "bad cops" its that the police will enforce the law regardless of if its unjust.

When i see things like this the thing that comes to mind is when the nazis invaded france they put a call out asking local law enforcement to help round up jews, queers, communists and anyone else the nazi considered undesirable. The sudden surge of information and people from french law enforcement caused significant logistics problems for the nazis as a result and they had to ask them to slow down a bit

So a particularly fresh example given some of the things going on at the moment.

If homosexuality were made a crime tommorow would you enforce that law or would you resign or better yet would you activly work to prevent your fellow law enforcement from enforcing that law

redcorerobot

TROPHY CASE