bluGill

I have about 6 hours of mind work in me per day. To fill up an 8 hour day I need to have 2 hours of meetings. I don’t know how anyone can do 10 much less 12. Those long days work for mindless labor where you are just putting pegs in holes but if I need to think I can’t do long days.

If you trust them. Where I live the bar chooses the person on the ballot and we only get a up or down. Thus any evaluation they do is by definiton a conflict of interest.

Better than voting for who looks the best on TV, or any of the other ways people vote without being fully informed. I’m sometimes forced to leave sections blanks because I cannot find anything about the candidates (I don’t know why my state vote on judges, the only way to find out if they any are good is to spend 100% of your time in court rooms, reading decisions, and so on all year)

In theory yes, but in practice no. Before we used fossil fuels (say 1000 years ago) the earth was on a slight cooling trend because a little organic matter still gets converted to coal. I can’t find the amount, but IIRC it was something like enough for -0.1C every thousand years. That number is so small that even a tiny amount of fuel use would keep us even.

You can maybe stretch that 4 hours to several days. However you must get enough solar in 4 hours to provide more than 1 day of use. You will probably get to 6-8 hours of production from your panels, but the production is reduced in the off hours and there are almost always a few clouds reducing your output even at peak times so until proved otherwise just count on 4 hours. (prove can be several years worth of data, or careful local climate calculation possibly with various devices to handle the sun moving)

How reliable do you need to be - https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ often goes offline because there wasn’t enough sun to keep their servers up - would this be acceptable for your servers? (you should spend a lot of time on that website when it is up - it will teach you more than anyone else here)

Will you allow yourself to plug in the backup if there isn’t much sun for a few days (either yourself or some automatic system) - just the ability to go 20 hours on battery and enough solar to recharge the battery in 4 hours on a sunny day would get most people to 90% solar and will be a lot cheaper than chasing to 100% solar all the time - but that might not be good enough for you.

The general rule of thumb if you never can go down is you need to be able to run for 2 weeks without any sun, and enough solar to then recharge those batteries when there is 4 hours of full sun. Of course the weather where you live makes a difference. If you live in the desert your worst possible day will always be followed by a day where you can completely recharge the battery so you need much less batteries; while those who live in arctic locations will not get any sun for a couple months and so need a lot more storage.