Amazing video by Technology Connections. It’s a long one, but don’t miss his 30 minute angry rant at the end.
As someone not from the US, I can’t say how much I appreciate the last part of his video. As much as I understand why YouTubers want to “keep politics out of entertainment”, it’s disappointing and makes me lose interest in some US content because it seems like they are ignoring what’s going on around them.
And about the batteries, that’s unfortunately an argument I sometimes hear from skeptics. “What are we going to do with all those batteries?” they ask. I explain that they can mostly be recycled and like to ask what are we going to do with all the CO2 in the air, but apparently it’s different. Ironically one of those persons is my father, that has a cabin with a solar system that I installed for him. He originally bought a generator but since it’s very noisy to run only for some lights, he prefers using the battery bank powered by a few solar panels on the roof. I’d show him this video but he doesn’t speak English and it’s probably a lost cause anyway.
We can only hope that at least a few people can be influenced by this video; both parts.
For what it’s worth, ALL technology connections videos have manually added English closed captions, not auto generated gibberish. It’s some of the best captioning work I’ve ever seen. He actually takes the time to sync them to the auto/video, prevents spoiling jokes/punchlines, and adds an Easter egg at the end of most episodes (usually describing the smooth jazz outro).
You might actually have decent luck using the subtitle translation feature built into YouTube, since it (machine) translates the actual words Alec is saying.
And he’s spoken about doing it in part to ensure accessibility for the deaf, which I appreciate immensely as someone who grew up watching time delayed black box captions on whatever my mom was watching
Alec is awesome. The content he makes isn’t really my cup of tea, but I recognize that that man has some serious game.
I don’t find his videos to be entertaining, but they’re so educational that I watch them anyway.
I always flick the subtitles on at the end to see how the jazz is described and how he transcribes his bloopers.
The political discussion taboo only serves 2 purposes. 1, keep the stupid comfortable. To them, politics isn’t about ideas but about identity and is treated like a religion. You aren’t challenging an idea, you are threatening their identity. 2, Don’t upset rich people. Everyone discussion politics openly is a threat to the rich. So if you make it taboo to discuss those things you make it so that only those not bound by that taboo may participate.
Oh fuck they broke Alec shit’s bad
I don’t think I had ever heard him swear until this video.
Did they break him…? Or did they set him free? :D
(was going to go with “unleashed” but that carries a different vibe not fitting to this serious cause :) )
Went from “ehh, its a long video. I’ll watch it tomorrow” to “holy fuck…”
I actually stopped watching it at the hour mark because I had to make dinner but then I let it play while I worked and holy shit! This dude for president!
This dude for president!
Can you imagine what he could do? I mean, if he could focus on the President thing and not use his time in office to take apart washing machines and heat pumps.
Technology Connections video in 2020: “This is a Sunbeam Radiant toaster”
Technology Connections video in 2034: “This is an AGM-158C long-range anti-ship missile”
Fell asleep an hour into his last night, didn’t expect it to be that long, but I am looking forward to finishing it.
Well, you’re in for a ride. The last half hour is the spiciest.
God damn, hell ya. Truth speaker
I’ve been connected to renewables for over a year now and am quite satisfied with its performance, although I could be much happier if there were less trees lining the line paths causing outages during winters. That being said, when it does go out the line managers are very quick to fix it.
“A wind turbine is like an oil derrick that generates eq. 3 gallons of gasoline evry single minute.”
Tbh I thought it would be more
Except the wind never runs out. Also we can use the energy from wind turbines 3x as efficiently as we can the energy from a barrel of oil. Carnot is a bitch.
Wind sometimes runs out (as in, calm weather) and wind turbines do eventually run out after a few decades. But, 3 gallons of gasoline-equivalent per minute seemed a bit small for my intuition, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to compare it to pumpjacks for oil.
I’m doing these calculations in metric, because the US traditional units are insane, and nobody should subject themselves to that.
3 gallons is about 11.3L, so 11.3L per minute is 678 L per hour, or about 16 kL of “gasoline-equivalent” per day.
Apparently a pumpjack pumps about 5 to 40 “barrels” of crude oil per day. A barrel is 159 L so that’s 795 L to 6360 L per day.
So, the back of the envelope “how much ‘energy’ does this big mechanical thing produce” seems fairly similar, ignoring a whole lot of complexity.
That last 30 minutes earned a new Patreon subscription. I hope this starts a trend.
Any non-youtube link to watch this? Don’t want to deal with Google no more
If you haven’t already, try out the LibRedirect extension for your browser. It takes a small amount of configuring, but it is able to redirect you to privacy oriented front ends for most social media platforms including youtube. Once set up, it can automatically take you to an invidious instance whenever you click a youtube link.
Also, you can go to inv.nadeko.net (which is my go-to) from your browser and search all of youtube through it. Same thing as using LibRedirect, it’s just the manual version.
If you’re on android you can use the NewPipe app. Similar idea as Invidious, it’s just a self contained app and not a website.
For tech people: You can host Invidious locally… No google, no ads, no popups.
It’s a lot of maintenance. I’m not knocking it, I’m just pointing out how difficult it is.
I hosted a pixelfed server for my city and it cost a few hundred bucks out of my own pocket. It was a test run so I can push my city to move their social media to open-source.
But the constant need to apply spam protection and abuse from visitors, not to mention abuse from users like copyright shit and even CSAM. My expensive side project became a full time job.
Locally!!!
I’m hosting it in my own network. I access it. no one else!!
And I’m doing it, so I can tell you: It’s almost no effort hosting Invidious locally for yourself. It just works. And if YouTube breaks something every 2 months, you can usually “docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up” and it works again.
Just in case it is not clear: Invidious is an alternative YouTube frontend. In the backend, it uses YouTube. It’s not some kind of Fediverse thing. You cannot upload videos with it / on it and you can be the only user ever using it.
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
Conclusion: low effort to host locally.
It amazes me how certain people just can’t help themselves with CSAM. Disgusting.
My theory is that it’s just a handful of people who are using anything free to mirror that content, out of fear of losing it.
I imagine some of them are also just trolls trying to get people in trouble. (Pedophillic trolls, to be clear.) The same way folks just wanna break stuff just to break it. But who fucking knows. Some people are just disgusting and ruin good things.
Emule flashbacks 🤮
Ooh nice! Does he have other videos like this or is it all computers and stuff?
If you ever wanted to learn about latent heat of transformation, your cup runneth over.
Alright, but what if I wanted to learn about heat pumps? Or the clever engineering behind some old (usually mechanical) products?
What I’d like to know more about is detergent pods
He hasn’t done any videos on computers, AFAIK. His channel covers a wide range of topics, from washing machines, car blinkers, heaters, refrigerators, to christmas lights. You can see his backlog here.
AND HEAT PUMPS!!!
I highly recommend the series on the CED and the downfall of RCA. He’s also got a number of videos about various cameras which are also great!
Lots of great stuff, lots of retro tech and common how it works stuff. His dishwasher video makes it so there is no reason to wash things by hand pretty much ever.
As someone on reddit said, “I could disappear bodies in my dishwasher.”
He has a lot of videos focused on home appliances. Some that come to mind are toasters, dishwashers, heat pumps, and an entire series on Christmas lights. Breaks everything down with lots of tips for better home use (because no one reads the manuals on thise things).
He does more old tech stuff or explains how appliances work. Not really computers. 10/10 channel but I get that the content isn’t super captivating for everyone.
Only now do you start feeling the urgency of the situation, when usually apolitical channels have started discussing politics.
“If you’ve been watching my channel for any length of time, then you should already have a pretty clear understanding of what my personal politics are. If you’ve been under the impression that I’ve not been political, you simply don’t understand what politics means. I have indeed stayed out of partisan politics and electoral politics, but I’ve been wearing my personal politics on my sleeve this whole time, and they’ve not been that subtle.”
That shit was beautiful. He’s fucking mad.
Just when I thought I couldn’t like him more, he goes and drops this gigabased rant.
TC for U.S president honestly
I like the guy. Really. But haven’t you seen what happens when people from entertainment become president?
Like Zelenskyy? Sign me up
Now that I’ve seen the type of people that seek political positions over a few decades, I would push Alec to run for some sort of local office. He’s the exact opposite of the majority of assholes who enter politics.
Or even a governor or senator, he has the right ideas and ability to explain what is happening and what needs to be done
That level of competence would never fly in the US government.
Most governments
That rant at the end really sums up my feelings as a Midwestern leftist. Hell the whole thing does honestly. But you treat people right, you make prudent decisions, and you treat labor with dignity and respect.
I also really respect him for accepting when something that had been obvious to him (the value proposition of solar and electrification) turned out to have not been obvious to others so he cut the snark and explained his reasoning. It’s an admirable display of character. But also, yeah it had been obvious to me as well.
Probably not my favorite video of his, but definitely rhe one I respect the most
I have watched only a few minutes of this vid so far, as well as the timestamps and I must admit I don’t agree with this approach because of something I learned today.
He says around 2 m something like: the strategic US reserve of oil even tho the number of barrels sounds huge, they could sustain the US only a month of our current use. From the context my understanding is that he implies that this is due to casual, everyday-people consumption.
Well, it looks like the Department of Defense is the U.S. government’s largest fossil fuel consumer, accounting for between 77% and 80% of all federal government energy consumption since 2001. So why is this huge percentage missing from this long analysis?
Anyways, if he talks about the US military petroleum consumption, please let me know. Or if I got something wrong with this new info I got about the US military, let me know too.
You should rewatch the video, because you totally have missed his main point
You’re right, we shouldn’t electrify and should keep using fossil fuels.
I’m really sorry that this is what you got from what I wrote. I definitely don’t think we should keep using fossil fuel. On the contrary, I am all in for phasing out extractions and usage.
Cuz the US strategic oil reserve isn’t earmarked for the federal government and the share of the military energy usage in the federal energy usage is entirely meaningless tot the oil consumption of the US economy.
Cuz the US strategic oil reserve isn’t earmarked for the federal government
According to a factcheck site it looks like the U.S. Oil Reserve Created for Supply Disruptions, Not Strictly Military Use. So maybe your statement is wrong? Otherwise could you share the source you got this from?
the share of the military energy usage in the federal energy usage is entirely meaningless tot the oil consumption of the US economy
I don’t understand what you are saying, could you please explain and/or share a relevant link? Btw maybe I should clarify that by talking about “consumption” I was not talking in economic terms, just in the sense of “utilizing”.
Come again? I am saying “isn’t earmarked for the federal government” and you come up with a fact check saying that it is not earmarked for military use. Which is the same thing.
Also, you are comparing the share of the military in the federal government’s energy usage. The government’s energy usage is largely electricity, not oil-based, while for the military it is the inverse. Also, the military consumes oil outside of the US economy: the oil consumption of an US Air Force base in say Spain is part of the Spanish economy, not of the US economy. Or at least, the overseas bases consumption will not be pulled from the US strategic oil reserves.
So it is all orthogonal to the US strategic oil reserves what the US military’s share in energy consumption of the US Federal Government is.
I am saying “isn’t earmarked for the federal government” and you come up with a fact check saying that it is not earmarked for military use. Which is the same thing.
No. “Isn’t earmarked for the federal government” is not the same as “isn’t earmarked for military use".
Any links to back what you say would be highly appreciated.
Because this video isn’t about the US military, and all you’re doing is bean soup leftism.
Great video. Completely breaks down the argument. You already knew this of you had been paying attention. Oil/gas for electricity generation in any form is DOA. It is insanely more expensive than solar + battery.
Not to mention destructive to the environment and politically fraught with issues.
To think if our government went all in it could provide dirt cheap limitless energy that would not cause lung disease or wars is staggering.
But the rich would be only 0.987 as wealthy
But what about the coal miners? 🥺 More importantly the coal mine owners, won’t somebody please think of them? 🥺
By pure coincidence, Hank Green released a video about coal on the same day
Also by pure coincidence, Matt Colville released a video explicitly paying homage to Technology Connections the same day, too.
they’d probably be more wealthy from their heavy investments in renewable energy, which is more profitable than fossil fuels btw
it’s the same story as weed legalization, it only happens after the current established powers have given themselves enough time to secure the new playing field.
Wondering now if paradoxically accelerating global warming increases stock ROI in renewables as the perceived value of renewable energy increases with the perceived/predicted level of global warming.
i don’t think they’re that far-sighted though it’s probably a neat side-effect to them
Mmm… Well i think there are enough of them that think long term to maintain their institutions. The oil industry has been suppressing concerns about climate change and disaster for well over a century now
No, they are just after power, not money. They have a darwinist ideology to push.
It’s capitalism, power is wealth by definition. These are compatible concepts.
By perceived value i mean speculation.
You have less power but more wealth than a Mycenean king. You have a more steady diet that is healthier for you, with better healthcare, better housing, more time for leisure, less chance of being robbed or murdered or killed in battle, etc. etc. But the king could have people killed or tortured; he could send people to their deaths; pass judgment in any moral dispute between hundreds of his subjects; etc.
The capitalist elite gladly loses wealth to gain power. And the power a rich person has over someone who must work for them to eat is incomprehensibly greater than the power a rich person has over someone who can eat regardless of whether they work for them. Thanks to ICE and other anti-immigration laws, rich people can effectively keep undocumented migrants as slaves again. What are they going to do? Complain and get themselves sent to a concentration camp?
What do you think a billionaire would rather have? A hundred mansions, ten private jets, twenty yachts, and a thousand unionized employees; or ten mansions, one private jet, two yachts, and a hundred slaves?
Wealth truly is not equivalent to power.
I agree that wealth is not equivalent to power but I continue to assert that it is the fundamental concept of capitalism. It’s rule by those who can exploit a market most effectively amassing the greatest amount of capital (by money/property value).
I find wealth in having hobbies and relationships that don’t return monetarily on my energy investment. This is incompatible with capitalism. While living under capitalism, i could have the highest quantity of relationships of the highest quality with other humans and it would still be worthless compared to someone with more capacity than me for taking on debt.
I wonder if I’m being misinterpreted here so if it’s unclear at this point; i see capitalism as a direct assault on our very humanity and a psychological disease that tears from us our empathy and feeling for one another through the pursuit of “wealth”. I despise it.
They use the aesthetics of capitalism to intellectualize and explain why we should not question their supremacy.
In reality, capitalism does not in any way justify monopolization of natural resources, or the large-scale destruction of the environment.
Capitalism is the ideology of thr petit-bourgeoisie, not the actual bourgeoisie. They are just social-darwinists.
I do not understand what this adds to the concept of capitalism other than introducing the term “social darwinism”.
There is no difference between “the aesthetics” of capitalism and its actualization, and neither base a capitalist’s actions in regard to benefitting society beyond “the market”. Capitalism is simply the current method of accruing power for someone to push their personal ideology on others. It just happens that the most effective method to exploit capitalism is to reject any sense of empathy or consideration for anything external or internal, especially flesh and blood humans because they are the only real threat to your power.
Common sense.
it still needs to be explained carefully though
like to a child you still have to explain how to read a clock or how to tie their shoes even though it’s common sense. and you have to be patient while explaining it.
I didn’t write “common sense” to imply it doesn’t need to be explained.
I wrote it to mean that once explained, it clearly is impossible to refute because it’s common sense.
My comment was not adversarial.
Nor was theirs.
Both are very neutral and can be interpreted as dissent or assent if you read the right tone into them.
Fairly uncommon, sadly
Sometimes I’ve been feeling like I’m the weird one for caring about other people and the shit that’s been going on. It’s really nice to see someone as angry as I am.
