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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Power is the wrong unit to measure battery manufacturing capacity in, but "per year" technically brings energy back to power.

It's important to realize that scientific terms don't really mean anything outside of science. Calling this power is like someone saying they have the flu, when they actually have a cold. It's wrong, but they weren't writing a scientific paper, they were just telling you why they stayed inside all weekend. It's important to understand that language is used that way, so you don't get too confused.

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Having to do mental gymnastics to understand somebody using wrong words is one thing. Not everybody has to know better.

Writing about a subject with completely wrong terminology/concepts and thus severely miseducating people is another. I can already hear people claiming all batteries are based on Lithium and contain 20% Cobalt.

The medical terminology for "flu" is Influenza-like Illness or ILI. Under normal circumstances most ILI during winter is actually Influenza (you can randomly select patients experiencing "flu" into a study that checks if they have the Influenza virus), while most ILI during summer is not.

For most purposes knowing if it's actually Influenza isn't diagnostically important anyway, use medication to treat symptoms, stay home, rest, seek help if you don't feel better in a few days. Crazy how much of the world doesn't make this trivial for all residents - not just the US, but even many countries with some type of mandatory "sick leave" policy don't actually give all workers full pay to stay home with flu - encouraging them to instead go to work and get more people sick. And this normalises associated social expectations which also have negative consequences. If I work when I'm sick, why wouldn't I go to a bar, or visit friends?

No.

My car use is about 10000 km/year. That does not mean it’s a velocity.

It would be a speed, not a velocity, because velocity is a vector not a scalar. Something like "10000 km/year in a north east direction" is a velocity.

But with that corrected, 10000 km/year certainly is a speed; it's just an average speed rather than an instantaneous speed.

No.

It’s car use accumulated over a year. It is not an average speed.

I don’t agree that there is a wide consensus that velocity must be a vector outside of physics where it actually matters. “High velocity” is a term that does not hinge on a vector being present somehow.

It's definitely average speed over a year.

High velocity refers to the magnitude of a vector beyond 2D, so there is no conflict here.

Not only, IF it was a speed (it isn't) it would be a very, very slow one, as 10,000/(365x24)= 1.14 km/h.

Yes right, and a completely meaningless quantity without saying it’s the average /over a year/, so the accumulation interval is essential - thus cannot be thought of as a speed or velocity.

Yes, a lot of people say 'power' when they're talking about 'electricity' loosely.

Your point about "per year" technically going back to power is only applicable if you actually do the x GWh/per year maths. It's common to refer to energy production capacity as 'y kWh per year' (even though the ratio of those two components gives you the average power over that time period).

Calling another virus infection flu isn't actually wrong anyways. The word has been used that way for centuries before we actually were able to identify the virus.

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