NickM

I think this is correct right now, but the biggest cost by far for generating green methane at scale would be the energy costs for electrolysis to get the hydrogen from water. If renewables continue to fall in cost, we may rapidly reach a point where we have a huge surplus of green energy for parts of the year. There are already places in the US where energy prices regularly go negative due to excess wind energy, for example.

Folks have talked a lot in the past about using excess energy from renewables to generate hydrogen gas, but hydrogen alone is a lot harder to manage, is much less energy-dense by volume, is impractical to liquefy for storage and transport, and isn't compatible with existing infrastructure. Methane solves all of these issues, and doesn't take much additional energy to create beyond what you must spend for hydrogen alone.

For dense urban areas, there may not be enough open ground available to bury the heat pump coils. Also, in colder climates, many houses and buildings use hot water or steam radiators, and heat pumps can't efficiently heat water hot enough for this type of system. Retrofitting ducts to replace radiators and switching to forced air heating can be prohibitively complex and expensive.

Methane leaks are certainly a valid concern, but if we mandate better monitoring systems and do a better job of repairing leaks when they occur, it seems plausible we could get leaks down to acceptable levels. Methane is indeed a potent greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last nearly as long as CO2 before it breaks down, so if leaks are kept to a minimum I don't know whether they would ultimately be a huge deal in the long term.

If the best argument in favor of them is "well, they're not really good for much right now, but someday somebody might figure out a good use for them," then it's hard to see why people are so excited.

(Though, maybe it's not so hard to see why people are excited if the folks who are excited are all crypto fans who want to build hype to drive the prices up....)

Synthetic methane seems like a great solution to these problems, and very few people are talking about it. If you used DAC for CO2, or got your CO2 from organic sources, and then combined it with green hydrogen to make methane, it would be a carbon-neutral fuel, and could take advantage of all the existing infrastructure we have for natural gas. Plus, it would also bypass the problem of trying to replace millions of gas furnaces and other appliances in existing buildings. LNG is ten times more energy dense than lithium-ion batteries by volume, and a hundred times more energy dense by mass; generating methane with surplus solar energy in the summer and storing it for later use in the winter seems like it might be doable.

(It seems clear to me that this isn't a valuable enough capability to justify the current price of BTC, but I guess that's a separate discussion.)

From the very same letter, there is also this quote:

Please note that Tesla’s development of true autonomous features (SAE Levels 3+) will follow our iterative process (development, validation, early release, etc.) and any such features will not be released to the general public until we have fully validated them and received any required regulatory permits or approvals.

If you truly believe that not saving a life is equivalent to killing someone, then you have to start accepting some pretty controversial things. For example, if you can statistically save one life by donating a few thousand dollars to a charity that buys mosquito nets for people, does that mean everyone who can spare that money and chooses not to donate is morally equivalent to a contract killer? In both cases, you have one person who ends up richer in exchange for someone else dying, no?

Or to take it a step further, what about people who can't afford to donate that money, but could've had enough money to donate more if they'd chosen a different career path? Does that make them less guilty, just because the "opt-out" decision is farther removed from the result? I think most people would say yes, but if you really believe that action is equivalent to inaction then it doesn't seem any different.

Asymmetric cryptography is a completely separate, much older technology that has nothing directly to do with cryptocurrencies.

Furthermore, Bitcoin does nothing to solve the kind of fraud problems you are talking about, and in fact makes the consequences of them much worse, since you no longer have a central authorities that can reverse fraudulant transactions and the like. The "double spend" problem refers to a problem in distributed systems, not applied security.

The big question in my mind is whether direct air capture is inherently expensive and inefficient...or if this is just a chicken/egg problem where we haven't invested time and money in making it cheaper because it's expensive, and it's expensive because we haven't invested time and money in making it cheaper.

I don't know enough about physics and chemistry to answer the question on what the theoretical lower bound on cost might be.

I think you're confusing their market cap with their balance sheet. A $25B hedge fund has $25B in assets, but a $25B market cap does not mean that they have access to anywhere near that amount of capital.

Sure, maybe they could issue a dilutive follow-on offering and bring in some cash, but who knows where the stock price will be by the time they get through the paperwork on that. And they're currently losing about half a billion per year on about $6B in revenue, so I'm not sure that an extra billion or so in cash is going to fundamentally remake the company....

Keep in mind that this is very likely a zero-sum game. At some point the bubble will pop, and as many people as gained money on the way up will lose money on the way down.

Even topics like ML (an example referenced by the original post) benefit greatly from an understanding of theory and fundamentals. Yeah maybe any random dev can hack together a model by downloading scikit-learn and throwing data at it, but you'll probably get much better results if you take the time to learn about concepts like cross-validation, overfitting, etc.

The "just do stuff" attitude has its merits, but there's also something to be said for working from first principles and learning some theory to back up your applied skills.

How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?

I think most people don't realize why phone calls suck these days; it just feels awkward and cumbersome, but it doesn't have to be that way.

To reuse your example: does the idea of an authoritarian figure quoting 1984 not seem shady and manipulative to you? Clearly the ideas contained in the original work were very anti-authoritarian, regardless of whether Orwell's words can be twisted or taken out of context to imply something else.

I'm still mad about this. It was such a great piece of software, and then Slack bought it and literally killed it without offering anything to replace the lost functionality.

I don't think anyone would argue that first-past-the-post would have produced a better candidate in this election than RCV did.

I don't think so either, but I also think that's a straw man argument. The Condorcet winner would've been the Democrat. IRV elected the Progressive, but according to that same Wiki page FPTP would have likely elected the Republican, whereas the Democrat would have likely won under systems like approval or score.

I mostly agree with you, but I do fear that some of the hidden flaws of ranked choice could end up poisoning the well for better systems like approval voting. After 2009, Burlington switched back to FPTP, and as far as I know there have been no serious efforts to try any other alternative systems there.

If massive money and effort is put into adopting RCV while people falsely claim that it solves the spoiler effect, then once the problems with RCV start to become more widely understood, people are going to be a lot more skeptical next time around when advocates of approval/score/STAR voting come around and say "okay but this time it really fixes it!"

By voting honestly and putting their favorite candidate first, they screwed themselves over and threw away their vote, and were understandably bitter about it given that ranked choice is frequently claimed to solve this exact problem.