It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well.

You missed my point; I was talking about being entirely off-grid there. So unless the homeowner in question also has a large industrial building with a flat roof, we’re back to where I said that they didn’t have enough generative capacity to not be reliant on a power grid, at least in part.

If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility,

No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well. I want to have my own well so I’m not relying on someone else to deliver water. I want enough arable land to grow most, or all, of my own food. This isn’t compatible with living in a city. (And part of the reason I want to generate my own power is so that I can use all electric vehicles.)

Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

Unless you have capital to invest, you can’t expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov’t–through taxation–or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren’t dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can’t get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

But isn’t that also true with snakes? All of the times that I’ve stumbled across copperheads or rattlesnakes, they’ve just wanted to do their thing, and go on their way. They didn’t want to bite me. And 99.999% of the time, as long as you back off, the snake isn’t going to do anything.

…Except there’s that .001% of the time when a snake is going to chase someone, and attack them. And that makes everyone terrified of all snakes, because they never know which one is going to be that .001%.

It’s understandable, but it’s not fair, and yeah, it sucks to have people think you’re a threat when you’re trying hard not to be.

Sure, you’re talking about the wet bulb temperature.

But.

You’ll find a lot of people from the northern part of the US that simply can’t function in the south in the summer, when it’s >90F. I’m a transplant from the north to the south; I’ve adapted just fine, by virtue (?!) of not having air conditioning. And it goes the other way too; if you move to a colder climate from a hotter one, you’ll eventually adapt to it.

This is not the case for all people, but most people will be able to adapt.

Even worse, the famine was entirely caused by landlords and especially the English. It wasn’t a natural disaster, but a product of monoculture that was forced on the people through no fault of their own.