richardc323

That is a bit extreme. Wanting to preserve the environment isn't the same as wanting to let everyone starve, it's quite the opposite. Spend a minute or two looking up soil erosion, and extrapolate 100 years.

It depends who's definition of organic you are using. Demeter and Biogro, which are the certifications I am familiar with prohibit most conventional artificial fertilisers.

Yes, the Green Revolution. I agree it's not black and white, which may well be an ironic turn of phrase.

Turns out the article is on the Ammonia Energy Association website, wake up Richard.

Ha, for the last 30 years I have been convinced it was Disk Direct.

Wow. Did you read the next three paragraphs to the end of the article:

| Policymakers are now attempting to come up with solutions. “You can make solar play nice with the grids,” ...

| Yet the best solution would be for energy firms to respond to the competition and sort themselves out.

The article is talking about: * how solar is disrupting the traditional utility model * in countries where the utilities provide a poor service wealthy people are doing there own thing producing their own power with PV * how this leads to less customers for the utility leading to more expensive power for people who cannot afford to generate their own power * that solutions like grid-tied home PV instead of independent systems provides a better outcome for everyone in the area.

I don't think it it to much of a stretch to say that the article is advocating for, as you say, "a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage."

You are reading that very narrowly. The paragraph is simply pointing out that solar power is cheaper when built out in a centralised way because of: * economies of scale for construction and maintenance * higher utilisation. They don't spell it out exactly, but it is pretty clear fro m the context that, "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted", is eluding to a wider geographic area needing more panels to satisfy all demand when each house has an independent system, rather than being grid tied.

Sounds like as well as mandating limited on-duty time government needs to mandate pay for waiting time is same as pay for driving. This would reduce the incentive for drivers to drive more hours.

This is not so straightforward when drivers are paid by the kilometer. In such cases government could mandate minimum waiting pay rate is average equivalent hourly pay rate of driving hours from same shift, or such like.

I suspect it is the credit card company rather than the banks that have the power to fix this, but yes the incentives seem wrong.

They have successfully shifted liability for the problem to banks and merchants.

Instead the innovation has gone into things like Paywave which reduces payment friction.

This would be more secure than what I proposed, but requires changes that are out of the control of the credit card companies.

For the card to sign the transaction, you need to add some kind of card interface to the users device. Maybe this is what happens with chip cards when you use it at a shop with a card terminal.

Sure, there is a trade off, but they have it wrong for online fraud from stolen credit cards.

The three digit CVV code should be a one time passcode (OTP). Banks have been using these since the 1990s for online logins.

Using 90s technology, the card issuer would issue one of these OTP fobs along with the card. It has the card number printed on it, a button and a LCD screen where the OTP is displayed. The CVV is already sent through to the computer that authorises the transaction, the software that checks the CVV would need to be changed.

So we have a trade off of the user having to have a separate thicker card, to fit the battery, for online use.

I just googled, you can get batteries that are 0.4mm X 22mm x 29mm, a credit card is 0.76mm. Eink is old technology now with the right performance characteristics. I suspect in volume using this technology you could integrate the OTP device in the standard card form factor for less than a couple of dollars a card.

So with a bit of innovation the friction of payment / fraud tradeoff goes away.

This all strikes me as fairly obvious to someone designing these things, is there another tradeoff going on here?