SECProto

Yes, the DOE does research on various energy related topics to prepare for the future. First you suggest they should be investing in supply side research (thorium reactors), then you say they shouldn't invest in demand side research (desalination)?

This is about creating potable water, not cooling water for nuclear plants. Huge portions of the US population live in areas with lots of access to saline water, but minimal access to fresh water - desalination would help reduce demand on a supply that is already collapsing.

The DOE is doing the work because desalination takes huge amounts of energy, and they're looking at ways to reduce this.

That's bad napkin math. Per the video, it is charging at 50W. At worst, it would be charging 24hr/day, so 50Wx24h is 1.2kWh per day. Using your 20¢ rate, that's $0.24 per day or 7.20/month. That's the upper bound, assuming it only charges and does no work.

> This is to be a 8 GWh, 1 GW facility

That is big for time-shifting daily energy usage, but way too small for seasonal energy storage

There are resources to track progress on promises. They have similar for the provinces. Pretty decent slow n steady progress on various promises.

https://www.polimeter.org/en/trudeau

I would much rather drive an anemic Tesla - skinny cheaper tires, lighter so easier to change myself.

I'm even more against apps than I am against motorized door openers.

I haven't had one so I can't directly weigh in, but up here, winter = physically pulling hard on door handles to get the seals to unstick. I can't imagine something like cybertruck (no handles at all) working in real winter.

I'm hopeful for Tesla to release their 25k car, and I'm really hoping for my car to last a couple years longer so I can get something from a different manufacturer that realizes some design standards have good reasons behind them.

> Painting an entire machine, instead of just the panels that need it, takes time and wastes energy.

As someone who lives in a location that heavily salts the roads, I am not looking forward to a car where a designer living with california weather decides which few parts of the body "need" it... The same causes issues with model 3 door handles that get coated in ice and need to be melted before they can be opened (ice storms usually happens a couple times a winter)

Yeah, it was a huge simplification to be sure. The comment was talking about cutting his train ticket by $15, so I assumed it was more of a long distance thing - amtrack has farebox recovery of 95%

This is just putting them on a similar model (user pays). Currently, a train ticket has to cover the capital and operating costs of both the vehicle (train, driver) and tracks. For driving, the driver pays the operating and capital cost of the vehicle only - the road budget comes out of general revenue (of the city, state, etc).

Your suggestion of dropping the cost just means the transit agency would have to make up the cost elsewhere - any suggestions? General revenues backed by a tax hike? Shifting burden of track construction and maintenance fully to tax-funded?

> Bridges only last for roughly 50 years.

The bridge projects I've been on spec 75 or 100 years. Main difference is better protection/sacrificial depth on ferrous members.

> Wow, talk about taking a comment to an absurd point.

I think the one that "took a comment to an absurd point" is the one about driving being a human right.

Yes, that is an issue and should be corrected. Every monetary penalty should also contribute towards license revocation.

The money is the economic incentive. The points resulting in license suspension fills the other loophole.

> Once in a while, I get a ticket for it. I just pay it and continue not having a license plate on the front of that car

Yes, I agree - your state shouldn't have this loophole. Since the economic penalty doesn't work, you should also be receiving non-monetary penalties for this behaviour that would have resulted in revocation of your driving permit (and further violations would be criminal).

Yes, I covered that in my comment about points systems (they exist everywhere I've lived - get too many tickets and your license is suspended, regardless of if you pay it off). Unless you mean that there should be no fee to renew your license, no nandatory insurance, no gas taxes, etc?

People get tickets for violating motor vehicle laws. These laws exist to protect all users of the road. If you can't follow the rules, you don't get to operate a vehicle that can easily kill other users. The only issue with license suspensions as a result of unpaid tickets, is that you can pay the ticket to buy your way out - an issue most places rectify by having a points system, so that drivers can't violate the law repeatedly just because they can pay.

> On places people have no other ways to move around, this is a human rights violation. Nothing less.

By this argument, driving tests should be illegal too. Or age limits on licensing. Or fees to renew plates or permits. If there's a "human rights violation", it's letting motorists known to repeatedly violate the law (putting my life in danger) continue to operate a vehicle.

Grammatically, pronouns are used when it's already clear who is being described. In this thread, the Government of Canada was the only body mentioned. Using "they" to refer to a singular officer who had before then not been referenced would not be grammatically clear.

By using the pronoun "they", you're implying the same person ("the Canadian government") as the post above. Per your sources, the statement was made by a single officer, with the actual police services quoted as advising differently. Your comment is inaccurate.

Children Of The Sky is certainly available digitally.

> cities can presumably limit parking, make it very expensive, perhaps implement congestion charges

These are three very difficult to implement changes (due to complaints), and also very ineffective at increasing safety (fewer vehicles = more speeding = no improvement in accident rates).

> have lots of levers to keep cars out

It's not about keeping cars out, it's making them behave safely. You can put a 20mph limit at an elementary school, but if your lanes are limited to 11 foot width, you'll still have cars driving 40, you still have long crossing distances, you still have all these factors reducing safety. If your corner radius has to be designed for a transport truck turning at 15 mph, you'll have cars turning at 40, failing to yield at crosswalks, etc.

> without not complying with design standards.

It's not about "not complying with design standards" - it's about the standards being too car-focused and having unintended consequences for others.

> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars.

This is inaccurate - for liability purposes, most road design in the US conforms to the MUTCD (and other design standards), which have very car-centric requirements. For example, the minimum lane width it allows is 11 feet (3.3m). If you design and install a 10 foot lane, you're not supported by that standard, and will likely get sued for damages if someone sideswipes someone, etc. The same applies for many other features that can improve pedestrian safety. It's one of the fundamental reasons north American built environment looks so much different (even compared with a car-centric design in other countries)

> 2.75 million unplugged wells in the US that output "6.6m tons of Co2 worth of methane" [2], or put in another way each well puts out 2.4T of Co2e each per year.

Per the article you cited, the 6.6m tonnes (not tons) of CO2e does not have a lot of empirical measurements behind it, and it may be much higher. That's one of the things these satellites can help to improve.

I think a better way to look at it is comparing the 57t of emissions with other sources of CO2 emissions. For example, a single cross-country flight puts out in the range of 300-350t of CO2 (~1t per passenger). So launching 6 of these satellites in separate launches would be equivalent to a single airliner flight, i.e. negligible in the grand scheme of things.

> So I looked it up.

Note that the links you provided are not primary sources. They rely on this one tweet as the primary source. https://twitter.com/siddharthkara/status/1612587425087524864

> ADB is an acronym. Not everyone knows what it means

I've used ADB a half-hundred times, and I had no idea what it meant until I read replies to your comment. Defining the acronym is likely not helpful to anyone who has used it before (and thus be affected by the change)

Here's data for the price of gold over the same period in USD, showing almost same 5x increase. Could you explain the relevance of either to this story about the Nikkei?

Price of gold in 1989: ~$370 USD/oz

Price of gold in 2024: ~2000 USD/oz

Skip the gear and tell them it was your deepest freedive

While true that they are concerns, the first article you linked notes that those started to be clamped down on 6 years ago - would be good to have an update.

And also, the scale of methane leaks compared with cfc11/12 means that even though they have ~3-4x the GWP of methane, the impacts of poorly tracked methane leaks are astronomically higher.

> quarks have -1 and 2.

Wikipedia suggests the quarks that make up the proton have charge ⅔e and -⅓e

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_quark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_quark

Not a physicist at all but I'd offer the following thoughts on the question of "why":

- Take a neutron, pull out an electron (and an antineutrino), and you're left with a proton.

- Asking why protons and electrons are so different is a little bit like asking why hydrogen and iodine have exactly opposite charges even though iodine is so much more complex: they're made of different things