Remember that guy that just sent bogus bills to like Facebook and Google and they just paid? Over $100m in bills, for over two years, until they finally caught him?

It'll happen man...

I heard that when you're burned alive, it only hurts for the first 5 minutes or so... Apparently all the nerve endings responsible for feeling heat and pain die out pretty quickly.

You agree context matters I assume? In the context of addressing deaths caused by ML, saying capitalism causes deaths too sounds very much like an intended defense.

That being said, every political system ever has caused deaths, whether intentionately or not, so it's a moot point anyway. I hate arguing it. It's much more relevant to just say capitalism's falling is actually the intentional fueling of inequality through false meritocratic rhetoric, which results in death and suffering due to not affording vital necessities, class tensions which result in a more divided society, stifling human progress by focusing on what's more profitable instead of what's better for people as a whole, so on and so forth.

So no, I do think it's an oversimplification that doesn't even touch the problem, since it's a trait it shares with all past political systems, and perhaps with future ones as well.

I think people who are on the left reflexively feel like they have to defend ML just because it's exactly what some will try to clobber them over the head with in arguments. "But so many deaths caused by soshalism!!!1!"

Yeah, but like, you know... It's not the system communists today(aside from tankies) and socialists want to implement. A democratic socialist system should look nothing like any of the ML states, and nobody should feel compelled to defend those failures at all. It's not socialist policies that killed millions, it's cunt dictators and their bootlickers who never should have been running countries in the first place.

But people don't really make that distinction easy.

That's a bit of an oversimplification of capitalism's failings. And there's nothing wrong with keeping in mind how to NOT design the next socialist system.

I'm not saying it's a good faith critique of ML, it's not used as such. I agree with you that capitalism killed a lot of people too. However, I see no point in defending ML at all. Whatever good emerged from it could have emerged without all those deaths if Lenin, Mao and Stalin weren't such massive cunts. If it was democratic. Really, there's no point in mounting a defense of that failure.

I know, I only got my bachelor's in EE and never went into the field, so I'll be the first to admit I'm not quite up to date on distribution technology. Was just offering some perspective on why generating electricity via motors is still so widely used for now.

It's not just the supply introducing harmonics and deformed power. Consumers do too, and every single rectifier plugged into the network contributes to that.

Think of every phone charger, every laptop charger, every device that uses a rectifier to power its electronics essentially draws non-sine current. There are standards for these devices of course, but it's the supply that has to compensate.

Add on top of that the fact that AC carries reactive power as well, which means that every asynchronous motor plugged in the system will further destabilize it, and you have quite a chore on your hands!

It's honestly a marvel of engineering that your supply is as close to a pure sine as it is :P

Doubtful, you still need to convert to AC to transform power to high enough voltages for transmission. Transformers only work in AC after all. There are ways to convert DC power to a higher voltage, like the boost converter, but those aren't really applicable at the kinds of voltages you need for power transmission, 100kV to 800kV... Far too high for any solid state converters.

So if we have to use a transformer to raise the voltage for transmission and then convert to DC, it won't make a difference if we have to feed it AC as the supply anyway. I don't think it will ever become a drawback, just maybe DC power generation will become as advantageous as AC is now.

AC power is incredibly convenient and has served us well for decades, its only drawback really is that you need to sync AC transmission systems so that they're in phase. That is something HVDC transmission does address, but aside from that, power generation in AC is likely to still be more convenient, if only for local distribution.

Generating energy via mechanical energy is very simple, very easy, has fairly low losses , is efficient, and also generates natural multi phase sine waves.

Artificial sine waves, such as produced by inverters that have to transform the DC output of solar panels into multi phase AC, also unfortunately introduce harmonics into the system, which you can think of as noise and voltage/current spikes. I won't get into the weeds, but essentially you need more voltage and current filtering to get high quality, stable electricity.

Turning a motor, on the other hand, to get you 3 phase AC for example can go straight through a transformer and into the supply.

I massively oversimplified it but hopefully you get what I mean. It's much cheaper and more convenient while we still use an AC distribution system.