When you are forbidden to expand taxation on the people with money, because "ideology" and your country is accruing debt at historic levels, tariffs are about the only revenue source that you have that won't make the oligarchs angry.
I have wondered if an option would be to have a state make it law that every 4 or 5 years they open the bidding for a health care insurance provider for the entire state. A state committee then takes the bid with best premiums to services ratio and they do the job for the contract term.
There would still be the option of people and businesses to buy 3rd party "extras" like private hospital rooms, vision care etc. on top the state plan, but some level of basic health care would be provided to all people paying into the state plan.
I can play chords on a violin or viola and strum them. Keeping a four-finger chord perfectly in tune in rapid changes is really hard (near impossible) without frets.
I used Forth to explain numbers in different radices to my grandson.
Being able to interactively try things at the console was really helpful.
It also helps to separate the internal number in the machine from how we display it, due to the different operators to print numbers as signed or unsigned. This is something that I have seen young programmers confuse.
I think another area where Forth can help young people is in understanding some low level details like memory addresses and reading and writing memory. It seems simpler than abstracting it to "pointers", more like assembler but interactive.
Forth is very good in this regard, because the word names are short and there is no "fluff" around the syntax if you can even call it syntax.
Also there is no need to name your data. Literal numbers can be used just as easily even for memory addresses.
The "no safety net" means that Forth is a low level language. You can touch anything in the machine. Many times it is used without an O/S. So if you push a random number onto the hardware stack you will get burned.
Of course not. I was merely expressing that Forth makes interactively very easy.
And like all languages, it is impossible to evaluate them if you don't use them for some significant amount of time.
And when we begin coupling solar to cheap sodium ion battery banks it gets very interesting. Sodium ion will even be compatible with a Minnesota winter!
The other big reason is the longevity. LFP life span gives you about 2000-5000 cycles depending on where your application can't tolerate the capacity reduction.
Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
This makes financing a large grid scale storage plant look way better to the bean counters because the investment continues to work and make money, after the 5 year amortization, typical of a corporate investment. This will be the kicker IMHO.
> Sodium Ion can go to 10,000 cycles (27 years) with a 70% capacity reduction at that life.
The article claims much better:
> the company’s GS1.1 [Sodium Ion] system will store energy for 20 years, over roughly 20,000 cycles, and still retain 80 percent of its capacity. For LFP, a basic durability benchmark pegs them at 70 percent capacity after 8,000 cycles.
I saw an interview with I think the CATL ceo and he was saying it's quite a headache ensuring the batteries last that long. Grid storage companies want 25 or 30 year guarantees. It sounds like sodium may have the advantage there.
Net Present Value isn't quite the right thing to look at. Inflation-adjusted energy prices have been rising over time, so the thing these batteries are projected to deliver (fixed impact on that electricity grid) increases in value over time even after the NPV discount. The more important component is the "risk-adjusted" NPV, which may or may not make tech like this effectively worthless.
