At Octopus Energy, I think we’ve made negative prices available to retail customers (at least in the UK, not sure about the other countries we’re retailing in).
People getting paid to charge their cars because the grid has a surplus of (probably green) energy.
I just want to compliment Octopus Energy, I just tried popping over for a quote, and the website just says "No. You don't want to switch right now". Not sure if this is common with other energy suppliers, but it looks good (I'll remember for when/if I do end up switching next).
This is mandated by OFGEM in the UK now. uSwitch will also give you the current "best deal".
I have done some work with the Octopus systems and they are very new an agile, but don't handle the complexity that the big 6 have put in place over several decades. The overall metering and settlements business in the UK is quite complex especially including legacy gas and elec accounts and meters.
It's not a law enforcement issue, it's a city planning issue.
The practical solution is to reallocate usage of the street to prioritize all modes of transport. i.e. Take a car lane and replace it with proper 2-way concrete barriered bike lane.
They're on the sidewalks because they don't feel safe riding in the street, and who would with huge trucks blowing past you at high rates of speed. But if you give them some infrastructure and someplace safe to ride, they won't be forced to dive through pedestrians on the sidewalk.
Or, they didn't know that they should be riding in the street. Which is a problem of both planning and enforcement.
The road the sidewalk paralleled is great (for the area) cycling infrastructure. 25 MPH, low traffic, sharrows, signed Bicycle Route, and with wide paved shoulders.
What I mentioned above was more likely out of ignorance than fear.
It depends on the level of rain, but there are affordable solutions to cycling in the rain to prevent you from getting drenched. I use the Rover cycling poncho from Cleverhoods to keep dry. It's mostly a regular poncho, but it has thumb straps you can strap on your handlebars and your legs are covered.
My son, who rides in a seat on the back, has a rain cover that provides shade when it's not raining and that we can zip an enclosure onto when it is to keep him completely dry.
If it's a heavy rain and we can't wait it out we'll take the car. But we mostly use our e-bikes as it's easier/quicker/more fun.
^^^ you mean ctrl-a and ctrl-e? But yes, +100 to the caps lock → ctrl remapping. Trivial to do in the keyboard "modifier keys" setting, and makes emacs text movement extra fast.
Japan used to have a bad drunk driving problem until they changed the laws to be mostly zero tolerance. If your caught it's an automatic 90-day suspension of your license. Over 0.25mg and it could be up to 2 years. That's excluding potential fines and imprisonment. Oh, and any adults in the car and or the person who owns the car can also be held liable.
Technical monitoring is one solution. Making you calculate if driving is potentially worth, at a minimum 3-months of no driving, quickly makes you decide it's not worth the risk is another. That said, you'd think potentially running someone over would be enough risk for to avoid driving under the influence, but it's obviously not.
Japan has very different city structures, iirc. The presence of good public transportation is a big one.
There's a considerable portion of the US where your options are drive drunk, pay $$$ for an Uber, or sleep next to your car (people have gotten DUIs for sleeping in the car). There are also areas where Uber doesn't exist at 2am, so your options are drive drunk or sleep next to your car.
Japan also has this neat concept of tiny hotels, where they stack beds almost like the drawers at a morgue. They're super cheap though, which gives Japan's drinkers yet another option if they don't want to drive. In the US, I've never been able to rent anything but a full room + bathroom, and you'd still have to solve the issue of how you get to the motel.
Japan has to convince their drinkers to sleep in a tiny hotel or take the train instead of driving. The US is trying to convince a drunk person they'd rather sleep on the ground than try to drive home. I am not surprised that Japan has better compliance rates than the US; it's a much smaller ask.
The Japanese country side isn't too different than the US. Sure there's trains, but not an extensive network ala Tokyo, and you drive everywhere.
The way they handle the issue is "daikou taxi", which is a service from the taxi providers. If you've been drinking, you call them, they send a taxi with 2 drivers. You get in the taxi, and the other driver drives your car home.
Introducing a service like this would help reduce DUIs, I think. Having stricter laws about also helps avoid people making the decision to drive somewhere, where they know they're going to drink, in the first place. Instead they may opt to take a cab, find a designated driver etc, drink closer to home etc..
Blogs that aren't SEO fluff to get adsense money just don't appear in the search results. Discovery is the real issue. Finding these blogs independently or outside is nigh impossible.
I've been thinking it might be fun to make a GeoCities-esque neighborhood directory site that you could add your blog to help with discovery. But could you (I) change my habits to stumble upon sites in the neighborhoods instead of opening HN/Twitter?
You may like micro.blog. It’s a blog/rss based social network. You can create a blog with them or import an existing RSS feed (what I do). It’s all chronological. And since it’s “just rss”, you can use different apps to use it like Instagram or Twitter.
The indieweb is what got me back in to blogging and RSS again. Being able to be social on the net without FB/Twitter has made being on the 'net fun again. Adding your feed to micro.blog even gives you a full-social modern social-experience, except it's completely powered by blogs and RSS.
There's still a bit of faff required to get setup (even with Wordpress), so I've been building what I hope will be a faff-free blogging engine ( http://tanzawa.blog ). It's finally gotten feature-complete enough for me to move my own blog it last week ( https://jamesvandyne.com ).
The best part of the IndieWeb is that you don't have to go "all-in" on day 1. I have a static JS-free site with a self-hosted Webmention receiver (https://seirdy.one); Hugo pulls in the JSON-encoded Webmentions during `hugo build` in CI.
The combination of Webmentions and Microformats creates a self-hosted comments section where everyone's comment is hosted on their preferred platforms: comments/likes are preferably hosted on commenters' own websites, but they can also be hosted on silos like Twitter or the Fediverse.
Webmentions are a great way of getting back to a decentralized web. Being able to comment on someone else's site _from your own site_ feels like magic. It brings back memories of the web before social media took hold.
Implementation is pretty simple, too. I documented how I handled processing and display of webmentions on http://tanzawa.blog (a system I'm developing designed to make using the IndieWeb easier/less fiddly).
People getting paid to charge their cars because the grid has a surplus of (probably green) energy.