You can also take a fairly selfish view and come to the same conclusion. Like, I don't want to see homeless encampments, or really sick and untreated people, or panhandlers, or (...) while I'm walking around in my city. I can solve this problem by 1) moving to a nice suburb, or 2) having my tax dollars go to fix a problem that affects me. 1) is off the table because I want to live in the city, and 2) --- while it helps the greater good --- also helps me directly. (2 can also be addressed in a draconian fashion, which is not what I'm advocating at all.)
I think one problem is looking at things as zero sum. It's not. If you are healthy and housed and fed then you're not --- to be very crass --- an eyesore, you're adding to the fabric of the city. I want street musicians who are playing for fun, not because they're trying to make enough to afford dinner.
I think an issue here is that taxonomic and colloquial definitions don't always agree.
Spiders are colloquially bugs, but they're not taxonomically "true bugs" (which is itself a colloquialism for Hemiptera). Tomatos are colloquially vegetables but taxonomically fruits...but afaik vegetable is a purely colloquial term anyway.
And as someone else in the thread mentioned, colloquial berries are not always taxonomic berries.
So...colloquially, "plants" sorta means, "macroscopic multicellular living non-animal thing," but taxonomically it's something else.
It's mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.
Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled --- everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.
VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.
Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.
No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.
Afaik photovoltaics are fine running open circuit, i.e., disconnecting them. Thermal solar, and wind, are (I think) much trickier (but covering things for solar thermal, like you suggest, is perhaps feasible).
Ground doesn't typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load --- so if you just hook a wire to ground, you're dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON'T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It's easy enough to burn a kilowatt --- just boil some water. But it's entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
We tend to use between 3kWh (vacation/idle power consumption) and around 8kWh per day. If we switched to electric stove, water heater, and heat pump, and add a hot tub, that'd increase substantially. But if we added solar (on our long Todo list...), the battery in the article (60kWh) would probably be able to handle all our storage needs, and it'd fit in he garage (bonus of it can be placed outside/under a deck!). I live in a major city, but I would absolutely love to effectively be off grid.
Exciting stuff --- it seems these are touted as being extremely robust/safe, which is of course important for me if it's going to be in/near our house. Storage density not a huge concern, but price is somewhat important --- let's hope this sort of thing ticks all the boxes.
You can also take a fairly selfish view and come to the same conclusion. Like, I don't want to see homeless encampments, or really sick and untreated people, or panhandlers, or (...) while I'm walking around in my city. I can solve this problem by 1) moving to a nice suburb, or 2) having my tax dollars go to fix a problem that affects me. 1) is off the table because I want to live in the city, and 2) --- while it helps the greater good --- also helps me directly. (2 can also be addressed in a draconian fashion, which is not what I'm advocating at all.)
I think one problem is looking at things as zero sum. It's not. If you are healthy and housed and fed then you're not --- to be very crass --- an eyesore, you're adding to the fabric of the city. I want street musicians who are playing for fun, not because they're trying to make enough to afford dinner.