Note that it is in no way new that humans were using fire back then. The oldest hint of deliberate control of fire are from ~2Myr ago, the oldest evidence that is generally considered conclusive is from ~1Myr ago.
But that's not evidence for fires started by humans, only that people were managing fire. Prior to this find, the oldest evidence for a method of starting fire was from 50kyr ago. Archeologists generally consider this to be an artifact of what gets preserved, not proof of when people started creating fires. There is a lot of natural fire on the landscape over thousands of years, and teasing apart what is evidence for humans starting fire from what is found naturally is really hard.
So this is an amazing find, but it is not paradigm-shifting in any way.
> Fire allowed early populations to survive colder environments, deter predators and cook food. Cooking breaks down toxins in roots and tubers and kills pathogens in meat, improving digestion and releasing more energy to support larger brains.
> Fire also enabled new forms of social life. Evening gatherings around a hearth would have provided time for planning, storytelling and strengthening group relationships, which are behaviors often associated with the development of language and more organized societies.
seems very important to be able to start fire for this stuff. And if we were off by like an order of magnitude it's pretty paradigm shifting.
We are very certain that people had fire. We just have no direct evidence for it, only indirect.
Also, the ability to start fires is not necessary for having fires, there is some evidence of a practice of maintaining slow-burning fires for essentially forever, letting you catch some from a wildfire and then just maintain it.
They did not lie, you are reading things into the text that are not there.
Firstly "Consensus that humans started making fire 50k years ago" is very different from "Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence ... about 50,000 years ago.". All archaeology has to contend with the reality that we have evidence of a very small fraction of the things that happened in the past, and archaeology focusing on the paleolithic doubly so. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Secondly, use of fire (which is what is needed for the scenes you quoted) and the ability to start a fire are two entirely different technologies that might be separated by a vast gulf of time. We have clear and accepted evidence of use of fire from ~1 million years ago, and fragmentary, contested evidence a million years before that. Prior to this find, we didn't have any evidence of people deliberately starting fires more than 50k years ago. These claims are not in conflict! It is entirely possible that people were maintaining fires they caught out of wildfires, for substantially longer period of time than has elapsed since we learned to start fires. Or alternatively maybe there was a method of starting fires that left no durable evidence.
This is still an amazing find! But it changes a lot less about what we know about or past than a careless read of it might suggest. It certainly does not hint that human evolution was slower than we thought.
The original novel is set in 1625-1628. At that point, firearms are well and truly established, having proven themselves to be the war-winning weapon in the Italian Wars more than a century ago. They are not new and unproven technology; they are the weapon that the great grandparents of the main characters fought and won with.
But they are a symbol of the wrong social class. A musket is something that a peasant or a burgher can use to kill a noble. All the main characters in the three musketeers are nobility, and their social class has suffered greatly from the "democratization" of war. They, like almost everyone like them historically, much prefer the old ways from when they were more pre-eminent, and look down their noses at firearms. They spend very little time at war, and a lot more time duelling and participating in schemes.
The high-tech of the early 17th century wasn't even matchlocks anymore, it was flintlocks. Those took another ~50 or so years to become general issue, but at the time of the novels upper class people who can afford modern weapons wouldn't have been fumbling with matches anymore.
Even though firearms were well and truly established by the 17th Century, blade weapons remained important right on through to the mid-1800s.
Bayonet charges were a major aspect of Napoleonic warfare, and only really went away with the development of firearms that had higher rates of fire and were accurate out to larger ranges. In the Napoleonic era, soldiers would close to within 50-100 meters, fire off a few volleys, and then charge in with the bayonet.
By the time armies were equipped with breech-loading rifles that could fire half a dozen accurate shots a minute at a distance of a few hundred meters, the volume and accuracy of fire made the bayonet charge obsolete. But that was rather late (the 1860s or so).
By the Napoleonic Wars, something below 10% of casualties were caused by melee weapons. And even that was mostly cavalry, bayonets account for ~2%. The purpose of the bayonet charge was not to kill your enemy, it was to convince your weakened enemy to cede his position after you had already done the killing. The forces rarely fought hand-to-hand and when they did it was notable, usually one side was so weakened and shocked that they fled or refused to charge.
Even though most of the casualties were caused by musket and artillery fire, the bayonet was tactically very important in Napoleonic warfare. A bayonet charge is absolutely terrifying, and the reason why there were relatively few casualties from them is likely because soldiers would break rank and flee in the face of one. If soldiers had stood their ground and fought, casualties would have been much higher, and with their low rate of fire, muskets would have been of little use in hand-to-hand combat.
They key change that happened in the mid-1800s is that firearms finally achieved ranges and rates of fire that made closing with a massed enemy nearly impossible.
Also it would be pretty hard for officers to make soldiers do bayonet attack if it weren't known they'd probably face little or no resistance. People tend to value their lives.
I suppose you are right about the history of firearms. However, the novel was written in 1844, more than 200 years after the time in which it is set.
Which makes me wonder if the author (Alexandre Dumas) knew and cared about the historic facts.
Dumas was meticulously accurate, not to the world as it historically existed, but to how the French upper classes felt and wrote about. He was extremely well read in people's memoirs and diaries, and wrote his stories set in the world as the French aristocracy imagined it existed.
I believe he got this detail right in both ways; in that firearms were the most important weapons, and also the main characters would have done their very best to ignore that fact.
One thing that always bothered me was his use of currency. In the French original he mentions at least 5-6 types of currency and it seems they all have common sub-divisions, despite some of them being Spanish or even Italian.
Was France using other people's currrncy back then ?
The nation of France as we know it did not exist at that time and there was no standardized currency among the kingdoms that made up the crown. Livres, sous, and deniers were the standard unit of accounting but each major polity produced their own coinage. Kings also sometimes devalued their currencies to help pay for wars so traders preferred to use more stable currencies like Spanish and Dutch coins (Louis XIII did a major devaluation about a decade after the time period of the book, which colored perceptions of the time).
It was very common before nationalism and the standardization of currencies. I read primary sources about conquistadors and the contracts financing and supplying the expedition might involve a dozen currencies because each trader supplying the wood, food, animals, etc would work in their own preferred/local currency.
One niggle: France was mostly made up of duchies, not kingdoms. The King of France had allegiance from some of the duchies making up modern France, but notably Burgundy was the one who captured Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc) and turned her over to the English - so clearly not all.
Not sure about the Occitan; IIRC Eleanor was considered a queen in her own right as rule of Aquitaine, not a duchess.
I'm no historian, but back then, coins were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume...
It’s more that there was a standard unit of accounting (livres, sous, and deniers) and everyone could convert from one currency to that standard and back to another currency. It moved a lot slower than modern foreign exchange so except for local fluctuations, it was rather predictable.
> were literally worth their weight in gold (or silver, copper, bronze, whatever), so it was probably easier to pay with foreign currency than we might assume
Are you sure you know what the coin paid you is made of? A merchant of the time wasn’t. Those who care not to be scammed have never found it simple.
Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
You are discussing absolute certainty, but in practice a box full of Spanish dubloons was very likely to be a treasure trove, and people generally trusted coinage, even if they had doubts. A filed silver penny still often bought a penny's worth of goods.
Everyone used whatever currency was locally availible, with every merchant in border regions being very aware of conversion rates. Throughout history there was also a cronic shortage of smaller-denomination cash, stuff for normal people to buy normal things. Today, we see "clipped" coins as evidence of forgery when in fact much of that was likely related to a lack of loose change. Nobody in town able to break a gold crown? Well, maybe you buy a horse with a slice of gold from that crown.
Clipping and dissecting a coin into smaller pieces for down-conversion are very different things. The piece of eight wasn't haphazardly cut, but instead pre-indented for breaking cleanly.
If you want to buy something worth 6% of a gold coin, whacking off an edge of one is a weird way to do it. You'd need a scale handy.
above all, I believe he cared about getting the next draft ready for each week / before deadline, and then about keeping the cliffhanger suspense high, to keep his fish on their hooks.
Alternatively, latecomers will make use of newly cheaply available compute (from the firesales of failing companies) to produce models that match their quality, while having to invest only a fraction of what the first wave had to, allowing them to push the price below the cost floor of the first wave and making them go under.
Apple really doesn't like to own manufacturing. They want to be in a position of a favored key customer, but still have the ability to switch vendors at a moment's notice if they can get a better deal.
> Things like 64 bit immediates are almost certainly a bad idea (as opposed to just having a load from memory)
Strongly disagree. Throughput is cheap, latency is expensive. Any time you can fit a constant in the instruction fetch stream is a win. This is especially true for jump targets, because getting them resolved faster both saves power and improves performance.
> Most 64 bit constants in use can be sign extended from much smaller values
You should obviously also have smaller load instructions.
> will necessarily bloat instruction cache, stall your instruction decoder (or limit parallelism)
No, just have more fetch throughput.
> and will only be 2 cycles faster than a L1 cache load
Only on tiny machines will L1 cache load be 2 cycles. On a reasonable high-end machine it will be 4-5 cycles, and more critically (because the latency would usually be masked well by OoO), the energy required to engage the load path is orders of magnitude more than just getting it from the fetch.
And that's when it's not a jump target, when it's a jump target suddenly loading it using a load instruction adds 12+ cycles of latency.
> TLDR is that RISC-V makes reasonable choices for a fairly "boring" ISA.
No. Not even talking about constants, RISC-V makes insane choices for essentially religious reasons. Can you explain to me why, exactly, would you ever make jal take a register operand, instead of using a fixed link register and putting the spare bits into the address immediate?
Fetch throughput isn't unlimited. Modern x86 CPUs only have ~16-32B/cycle (from L2 once you're out of the uop cache). If you decode a single 10 byte instruction you're already using up a huge amount of the available decode bandwidth.
There absolutely are cases where a 64 bit load instruction would be an advantage, but ISA design is always a case of tradeoffs. Allowing 10 byte instructions has real cost in decode complexity, instruction bandwidth requirements, ensuring cacheline/pageline alignment etc. You have to weigh against that how frequent the instruction would be as well as what your alternative options are. Most imediates are small, and many others can be efficiently synthesized via 2 other instructions (e.g. shifts/xors/nots) and any synthesis that is 2 instructions or fewer will be cheaper than doing a load anyway. As a result you would end up massively complicating your architecture/decoders to benefit a fairly rare instruction which probably isn't worthwhile. It's notable that aarch64 makes the same tradeoff here and Apple's M series processors have an IPC advantage over the best x86.
> Can you explain to me why, exactly, would you ever make jal take a register operand, instead of using a fixed link register and putting the spare bits into the address immediate?
This mostly seems like a mistake to me. The rational probably is that you need the other instructions anyway (not all jumps are returns), so adding a jal that doesn't take a register would take a decent percentage of the opspace, but the extra 5 bits would be very nice.
> Can you explain to me why, exactly, would you ever make jal take a register operand, instead of using a fixed link register and putting the spare bits into the address immediate?
AFAIK, the reason RISC-V supports alternative link registers is that it allows for efficient -msave-restore, keeps the encoding orthogonal to LUI/AUPIC and using the smaller immediate didn't impact codegen much.
Partial register updates are kryptonite to OoO engines. For people used to low-level programming weak machines, it seems natural to just update part of a register, but the way every modern OoO CPU works that is literally not a possible operation. Registers are written to exactly once, and this operation also frees every subsequent instruction waiting for that register to be executed. Dirty registers don't get written to again, they are garbage collected and reset for next renaming.
The only way to implement partial register updates is to add 3-operand instructions, and have the old register state to be the third input. This is also more expensive than it sounds like, and on many modern CPUs you can execute only one 3-operand integer instruction per clock, vs 4+ 2-operand ones.
Either fusion or drill baby drill is necessary. Watt’s steam engine was absolutely horrible, but it was the worst steam engine ever built. If Finland builds the worst deep geothermal ever that still works, we can hope for better ones.
Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?
> Yeah I know drilling through ~8-10 kilometers of rock is kinda hard… they know, they tried, maybe it now is a good political climate to try again?
The Finnish 7 kilometer geothermal drilling failed commercially, I guess that's what you're referring to. Is there any reason to assume drilling deeper would work?
Yeah, that’s the one. Economics of this are hard - but money is numbers in computers, it’s just a question of how serious the government is with getting it done - physics-wise it gets like 10-15C warmer with every km, which is important for the delta T obviously. I know nothing about drilling the extra couple km, though, only assuming it can be done with enough engineering.
I understood that temperature wasn't the problem. How it works is that you pump water into one well, and get it out from an adjacent one. The main problem was permeability, they couldn't get the necessary flow rate between the wells.
They tried in southern Finland not long ago. At great expense and spending a lot of time they managed to drill down 6-7 km until they figured out that the porosity of the rock down there was so poor that it was impossible to make the project economical, so it was cancelled. The idea was to pump this heat directly into the district heating grid.
1. The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
4. Likewise.
5. Improvements in efficiency do not help you stay alive when it's -30°C.
The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help. They are nice to have, and it makes sense to build them because they complement the reduced output of nuclear in summertime, and because the lower cost/kWh can help some industry, but that's all.
The difference between baseline and peak electricity consumption in Finland is >2x. That's mostly driven by heating. Because renewables make electricity cheap on the average, utility companies invest in cheap heat storage systems such as sand batteries. They use electricity when it's cheap, store the heat, and distribute it when it's needed.
As for nuclear, the challenge is finding companies that are able and willing to build it. Areva and Rosatom both failed at the "able" part. And a power company (I think it was Fortum) recently stated that they would consider building new nuclear reactors with German electric prices but not with Finnish prices.
There is more to that than a power company asking for subsidies. Finland is a small country. Olkiluoto 3 alone generates >10% of the electricity. Newer reactors would likely be smaller but still ~10% of the total. Finnish power companies are too small to take risks like that on their own. They can't build new reactors at their own risk, in order to sell the power in the market. Before a reactor gets built, the power company needs long-term commitments from industrial users and utility companies to buy power for a guaranteed price. Such commitments would make sense for the buyer with German electricity prices but not with Finnish prices.
I think this is exactly right, and people are focusing on the wrong risk with nuclear. It's financial risk, not safety risk, that is the biggest burden for more nuclear.
Finland was very very wise and savvy to get a fixed price contract for Olkiluoto 3. The final cost was far far far above its price, and France ended up paying that price. I'm not sure if you'll see a builder go down that route any time soon again.
Well that covers the financial risk from the safety risks... but even if it were purely about safety it's an act that's part of making the safety not be an issue. Unless it were not renewed, then it would be a problem agai.
>2. We have no geothermal sources sufficient for production of electricity, it can only be used to slightly reduce primary energy use during winter, but it will raise electricity use during winter.
The project for properly deep geothermal for district heating in Espoo was not resounding success. And that is 6,4km deep hole in southern part of Finland. My understanding is that it somewhat worked. But not as good as expected.
>The option up here really truly is "do we use fossil fuels, or do we use nuclear". Renewables do not help.
Hey now - renewables gave us electricity up here long before Einstein started thinking about atoms!
We are very few people here, 250MWh helps a lot, but if we have to chip in to build a nuclear plant we'll be broke before the project planning is done. ;-)
> The southernmost spot in Finland is too far north, and the scramble that happened in EU at the loss of Russian energy supplies made it crystal clear that we can not trust any other country to help in times of need.
Note that even if Central Europe did have sufficient energy for export it wouldn't really help during crisis. To get the energy to Finland it would need to either go thru the Baltic Sea via undersea cables or via Northern Sweden. We have seen that it's not necessarily good idea to rely on the former during the crisis as those lines can easily be cut, they have been multiple times in just past year or so by certain commercial ships "accidentally" dropping their anchors.
As for latter Sweden, doesn't currently have capacity for it and I don't think they have been very interested in increasing it, currently Finland often benefits from the fact that there isn't enough transport capacity between Southern and Northern Sweden electric grids so Finland gets some cheap electricity from there.
> 3. Helps not at all, because 0 times however large number you like is still 0.
Show me your Monte Carlo simulation where wind (which is negatively correlated to solar) and 8 hours of battery storage are factored in, along with small amounts of gas peaking plants.
What is also important to know is during the winter is that while production on average shows numbers every day, in practice that production comes only during the few actually sunny days in December when the panels aren't covered in snow.
Go even a bit up north from Helsinki and unless you keep your panels clear of snow manually, you'll hardly make anything between Nov and April.
We have the problem of stable high-pressure polar air masses potentially parking over the country. Whenever that happens, we get 2 weeks of dead calm, coinciding with the coldest weather that occurs in the country. At the time of the year when there is no solar.
Show one where it does work. Even in far souther countries like Poland solar production is 1/4 of what it is in summer. I'd have to fill my entire roof with solar and still would have to get some power from the network to heat my house
We don't really. Hydro storage requires reservoirs where you can freely adjust the water level. Most of our lakes have shorelines that have been built out, and the property owners get really angry if you suggest frequently adjusting the water level significantly.
The largest planned hydro storage projects are using decommissioned mines, and those are going to run out quickly.
You could just build a back-channel for the existing hydro-dams? Those reservoirs are only full for a short period and that is when you dont need pump energy.
But where? In Finland, at least, the land is relatively flat when compared with Norway and Sweden, and with a large rural population there aren't really any good locations.
In my local area, we had major flooding this spring because the hydro plant operators were sleeping on the job (or whatever they did instead of regulating water levels). And that was a simple 2m increase in water levels.
NO/SE have some more geographically suitable locations, but last time I checked, flooding them was considered too environmentally destructive too the local environment.
Yeah, you're right regarding the environmental concerns.
Most of Norway's hydro dams were built a long time ago when there was little focus on the environmental effects.
The last major plant went live in 1993. Most of the focus now is on far smaller schemes, that doesn't really add up to a lot compared to Norway's established generating capacity (which outstrip the total electricity use anyway), but which also meet far less opposition.
Part of the reason for that was growing local opposition to larger plants, and sometimes national opposition, culminating with the Alta controversy[1] in the late 70's that were some of the largest civil protests in Norway since the end of WW2. The protests eventually failed, but it had a lasting effect on Norwegian politics.
If you pump the water back into the existing reserviors you will have less flooding?
I suggested a pump-water extension to existing hydro power reservoirs.
Like your EV recharges when you release the pedal.
Right shouldn't talk about EVs with a Finn, that analogy will not fly. Ok, like if you plan carefully where you throw up your koskenkorva you can re-use it.
The reservoirs in Finland aren't quite at the scale your Explorer Vodka-fuelled Swedish mind believe them to be. Most are small generators hooked up to the local rivers, and are required to prioritize keeping the water from flooding residential areas.
There's a reason we're looking at using old mines for pumped hydro rather than trying to pump water upriver during a spring flood because other power sources have surplus generation.
You could use the ocean for the bottom level and an artificial reservoir for the top level. You're not going to noticeably affect ocean levels.
Or just use a large lake. You're not going to noticeably affect the water levels of a large lake. You might pump 10 billion litres of water, which is .02% of the volume of Mjøsa.
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
This is incorrect. There is currently not a single pumped hydro station that is suitable for seasonal storage. They're all designed to drain their upper reservoir in 4-16 hours.
It's the only thing that's half economical. Do the math: Even a modest power plant - 1 GW output - that can run for 1000 hours means you need a 1 TWh (even typing it feels ridiculous) storage reservoir. If you only have 100m of head, that's 3 cubic kilometers of water. That would mean building an artificial lake that immediately would be Norway's 6th largest body of fresh water, and draining it completely every winter.
And effectively, you'd have to build it twice - you also need a lower reservoir. Because there's nowhere to get 3 cubic kilometers of fresh water to fill it otherwise, and you really don't want to do pumped hydro with seawater.
Norway already have seasonal storage with a storage capacity equivalent to 6-8 months of total electricity use in the form of its existing hydroelectric plants, with no need to pump things back up again.
> And yet it's still far cheaper than any other form of seasonal storage.
Only for countries with very suitable landscape, and the willingness to use it - damming high altitude valley is extremely unpopular and bad for the environment.
Also, pumped hydro is expensive. Initial capex is higher than today's lithium batteries, if you design comparable systems. The only reason anybody is still building new pumped storage is that you can use it for 100 years (instead of 20 for the batteries, although nobody really knows how much they'll actually degrade).
I think we'll find hundreds of TWh of seasonal storage elsewhere. Thermal storage is extremely attractive if (or once) you have district heating installed. Takes care of a massive junk of domestic heating, and could take over light (food processing, paper,... ) and medium (chemical, ...) industry. Just don't try to turn it back into electricity...
Once steel and concrete get electrified, we might get seasonal hydrogen storage in underground salt caverns. Concrete and steel need absurd amounts of high heat which probably means making lots of hydrogen, putting those in the right locations might make additional hydrogen for fuel cells/gas turbines available, relatively cheaply (still extremely expensive, seasonal storage always is). But who knows...
> A typical pumped storage facility uses 100m of delta
Most projects seek 200-600m. This map doesn't even consider pumped hydro <200m: https://maps.nrel.gov/psh
> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.
Based on what? Cost is particularly variable for pumped hydro. It can be one of the cheaper options when stars align. But you need 1) a suitable geography that minimizes the cost of damming or digging a resivoir with sufficient head 2) available for development without too much backlash 3) Near enough grid resources to minimize infrastructure and line losses. I'm surely leaving pieces out.
It can be cheap, but it has far more hoops to jump than alternatives like batteries, hot sand and other "storage-in-a-building" designs which can be built where needed and using fairly standard industrial construction.
10 billion liters of water is 1,000 m^2 * 10m deep. There is no suitable location for that that is both elevated enough and near enough to Mjøsa to be financially viable.
Norway also existing hydro reservoirs with a capacity equivalent to around 6-8 months electricity supply, so it's not really a major need for Norway, anyway, but this is a fairly general problem: Finding suitable locations that are close enough to a water source, and provides a large enough potential reservoir is hard.
Looking at a few of them, a few obvious problems are apparent.
Firstly, it takes a rather liberal idea of how close the basins need to be to each other to be viable.
Secondly, most of the ones I looked at would require extensive relocation of existing populations and/or large-scale infrastructure changes, such as re-routing important roads.
The first few I looked at also do not have a sufficient water supply nearby - you'd face either covering them or you'd quickly run into problems of evaporation that you have little ability to replenish/replace.
A lot of the ones I quickly looked at would also face "fun" issues such as no nearby infrastructure such as roads to bring in construction materials.
I have no idea how many suitable locations there are on that map, but it seems pretty apparent it is a small fraction of the ones marked before you even consider how many would be politically unviable because of public resistance to the environmental destruction.
To be clear, I'm not at all opposed to investigating pumped storage, but it's also not nearly that simple.
> relationship between users' reward/punishment and the grid's health seems wildly disproportionate.
It's still much closer to the real costs for the grid operator than $/kWh. The fundamental problem that rooftop solar has revealed is that people think they are paying for the electricity, but they are not. Electricity is dirt cheap. Most of what they are paying for is the maintenance of the grid, and simple usage based billing crushes the system because of freeloader problem once rooftop solar is added.
Long term, the likely thing you pay for will be the size of the main fuse that connects you to the grid. Because that's the thing that scales with the costs you impose on the operator.
Actually the local cost is not the fuse size, but how much smaller the first transformer after you could be if you weren't there.
Though it's often more fair to determine such for each user; then take those as a relative scale, then split the transformer's actual TCO by the determined share sizes between the users. Because the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size, which is lower as they won't use it peak at the same time.
> the first user needs the transformer to it's peak size; the second only by the instantaneous-added peak size
Of course, how does the electricity company determine which user was first in this situation. A tariff that depends on the order of connection may not be practical for domestic situations, although it may be OK for very large users, e.g. factories, data-centres.
Using fuse size seems a more reasonable and fair proxy for cost, assuming the same load patterns as the rest of the users. Then again, consumers with EVs might argue that their load pattern is different to the average user (e.g. filling up with off-peak electricity). Also consumers with air conditioning might argue for special treatment given their usage correlates with solar output (except where it does not).
You don't; you let the second one pay more than what the marginal cost was, in order to make the first one not pay so disproportionally.
That only has to happen once there is a second one, though.
Punishing a mere "large enough to not worry about popping it" fuse by billing shared infrastructure based on it (not just billing the stub line from the main in the street to the fuse/meter box in one's home in relation to what wire gauge is needed based on the fuse choosen) is pretty stifling.
If e.g. your furnace fails in the middle of the winter and the repair guy tells you it needs replacing, you might want to get some space heaters and run them for a few days until your actually-wanted new furnace/heatpump/whatever can get delivered, instead of having to get installed whatever the HVAC guy has in the local storage, because if you wait more than on the order of 12 hours, you'll start to get frost damage from pipes and such.
Having to be beholden to an electricity company having time to upgrade your fuses on such short notice so that you can plug in the space heaters without blowing them might be a problem.
But paying say 300 bucks extra because you did that for like 3 days or so would easily be cheaper than the cost of temporarily installing an available loan furnace and then having to remove it again to make way for the actually-wanted one.
They do though bill you if you make them dig the street up to say pull a medium voltage line into your factory that previously just got low voltage from a shared street transformer, but now that you've plans to use a lot more, you'd need the higher feed. Then they bill you and if within like 10 years or so someone else orders service that can piggyback on what capex you paid for, then you'd get a proportional refund from them having to pay off part of your share.
But that's not for just getting normal basic electric service to a normal residential building in a city, that's for building a new farmhouse on the other end of some field where there never was electricity, or for getting unusual service that wouldn't be in the street if you didn't request it.
Merely sizing the transformers/substations to handle the aggregate current of the users attached is not typically handled by the above mechanism, especially because it only covers initial buildout.
But that's not evidence for fires started by humans, only that people were managing fire. Prior to this find, the oldest evidence for a method of starting fire was from 50kyr ago. Archeologists generally consider this to be an artifact of what gets preserved, not proof of when people started creating fires. There is a lot of natural fire on the landscape over thousands of years, and teasing apart what is evidence for humans starting fire from what is found naturally is really hard.
So this is an amazing find, but it is not paradigm-shifting in any way.