johnmorrison

I feel like you're overestimating the differentiation and not accounting for the fact that 99% of the population basically just uses the minimal subset of features (sending plain text and images)

Two services don't need to have identical feature sets to interoperate, because you don't need perfect, full interoperability, if you can send most of your messages across platforms, that's still pretty good.

> Let me just make that last point clear: you cannot design a messaging protocol where one party sees emojis and the other doesn't.

Which service doesn't show emojis? Literally every mainstream mobile operating system and desktop browser supports emojis as regular text.

Building this with Valyrio [1]

[1] https://valyr.io

I'm working on a sort of ancillary project which may help with this at Valyrio [https://valyr.io]

Counter-intuitively, the current goal is to centralize the messaging interface, providing a common platform for users who are willing to pay for a consolidated system that saves time and confusion, and to reduce the waste of niche use cases (e.g. having the entire [name here] messaging app on your phone because one weird family member or friend insists on using it)

Bringing email, text, and (aspirationally) all other messaging systems into one.

In doing this, we cannot possibly hope to uniquely integrate each of the countless hundreds of services with their weird quirks and formats, so I aim to establish a standardized language for async messages equipped with the basic common features and extensions for prevalent (but not universal) features like read receipts, "liking/reacting" to messages, etc

It would be really cool to open up that standard to the world if we do a good job of designing it, or collaborate with anyone else who wants to participate in this goal. Our core service will be a niche, paid, closed system, but the underlying language I would like to be open source and interoperable with whatever else turns out to develop (Twitter's new endeavor and Matrix are the two efforts I am most aware of)

After all, Valyrio means Language

I've also been working on an adjacent concept with [https://jwmza.com/polymath], which is a new comprehensive markup language meant to define long-term compatible, human readable documents and websites/document structures which intermix existing standards like (La)TeX, HTML, CSS, Markdown etc.

Perhaps the underlying language and concepts here will mix with the effort to decentralize messaging as well, as messaging is fundamentally the asynchronous bidirectional transfer of documents of mostly text and sometimes other media or information.

I built a little service on AWS running on load-balanced EC2 (runs nginx for HTTPS and an internal Node server which securely performs the operation) with a simple API that takes integers and returns the integer plus 1. It's pretty useful for whenever I need to perform addition by one in another web app.

You have a good point but of course the split is adjusted to that consideration.

I don't believe in profiting from life-saving medication or anything like that, so my intention is to drive rapid growth with my activities in the energy, software, and automotive sectors to fund the less immediately profitable goals.

Make money solving the problems I can first, and later use that money to fund the further-off ones.

Currently this strategy is working well, as my assets are growing at above 2000% annually.

> Shellenberger is a nuclear lobbyist

I think it is extremely foolish to make caricatures of people. Twenty years ago, Elon Musk was a software startup guy who had no idea about anything hardware - but that's only because nobody bothered to consider the full human behind the caricature.

Mike Shellenberger was an anti-nuclear activist for much of his early life and has always been (and is still) an environmentalist. Furthermore, he may be a lobbyist now (I'm not sure if you are right or wrong), but he ran for governor of California a few years ago. He has been very explicit in explaining his reasoning for shifting from anti-nuclear to pro-nuclear in multiple talks and articles.

Take a look at the full human, and your justification for scrutiny fades away. Everybody should be scrutinized to an extent, but he is not fundamentally a biased lobbyist with financial incentives.

> Germany has much to do for carbon efficiency, but for total emissions it is somewhere in the middle.

This is the problem, man. Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on renewables and they still have high GHG emissions - all they have to show for their massive spending is a couple thousand extra deaths per year and higher electricity prices.

If you gave my company the same amount of money, we'd have the entire world to net zero emissions within two decades.

Goes to show the inefficiency of government funded programs, and the awful incompatibility of renewable energy with a reliable, affordable consumer electricity market.

> I like to use current numbers, because extrapolating development is often pretty close to lying.

We can use current and past numbers: for its entire existence, nuclear fission has been the (a) safest, (b) highest fuel density, (c) least waste-producing, (d) lowest emissions, (e) most reliable mass energy source humanity has ever had.

The new generation of reactors will only improve this divide between fission and everything else. If you are against extrapolating development and want to rely on established numbers, you must conclude [fission > renewables]

I know I'm biased, but I'm also right about all those superlatives.

As of the Q4 results posted a few hours ago, TSLA has risen from a closing price of around $580 to over $650 in the after hours market. This is a stock that was trading for just $185 within the last twelve months - a 350% multiplication in price.

Stock:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

Here's the PDF of the results:

https://ir.tesla.com/static-files/b3cf7f5e-546a-4a65-9888-c9...

> I also think supply of nuclear fuel can be an issue, although there are some concepts for other types than uranium.

There are 3 fission fuels occurring in nature: Th232, U235, U238

Actually, our reserves of Uranium are greater (by energy available to generate) than all of our Coal, Oil and Natural Gas reserves combined.

Our Thorium reserves are even greater than those.

In fact, Thorium is extracted as a byproduct of Rare Earth Metal extraction, and so we currently mine enough Th232 per year to replace the entire global energy and fuel industry even though there is no demand for Th232 extraction. Kind of mind blowing.

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> [fission] it is expensive in deployment

I don't see where this idea comes from - in real life, regions which are powered by more fission have significantly cheaper electricity than those who are powered by less.

---

> the problem with nuclear waste

I genuinely don't think there is a problem with nuclear waste, and that this concern is a myth / misunderstanding based on a mix of fear-mongering via conflation with nuclear weapons and a lack of comparison.

Consider the following: all energy sources have waste products - nothing is 100% efficient.

Fossil fuels pump literally billions of tonnes of toxic gas into the air as their waste product. It moves around, we can't store it, and it is responsible for the deaths of millions of people each year through air pollution.

Renewables production has the same issue (although different gases), and also tends to pollute the water and local environment with other toxic chemicals and metals.

Nuclear fission produces the most dense, least amount of waste of any source, which is solid and easy to manage. We know where quite literally all of it is, and it doesn't hurt anybody or negatively affect the environment in any way as long as you keep it store somewhere.

As far as I'm concerned, nuclear energy does not have a waste problem, it has a waste solution. Global warming is the problem with energy waste, more specifically it is the problem with hydrocarbon waste.

---

> Another example is Norway that uses 98% hydro power. Sure, they have topological advantages not available everywhere. But technologies like this could open up more possibilities.

Agree with you. Renewables tend to vary in effectiveness based on location - in those locations which are well-suited for them, I think they should be used! Though I'm not sure what you mean by "could open up more possibilities" - we've had hydro power for thousands of years.

---

> I doubt that Germany closing plants was a terrible decision.

Note the following excerpt from Mike Shellenberger on Twitter:

  Germany’s renewables experiment is over. 

  By 2025 it will have spent $580B to make
  electricity nearly 2x more expensive & 10x
  more carbon-intensive than France’s. 

  The reason renewables can’t power modern
  civilization is because they were never
  meant to.

  A major new study of Germany's nuclear
  phase-out finds

  - it imposes "an annual cost of
    roughly $12B/year"

  - "over 70% of the cost is from the 1,100
    excess deaths/year from air pollution
    from coal plants operating in place of
    the shutdown nuclear plants"

Yup. That's why we need to exceed the TPES with clean energy. We also need to significantly expand TPES if we are going to eliminate most of the remaining poverty in the world, to improve mean QoL.

I'm hoping fission can scale to about 2 EWh annually in the next several decades. Should be noted this is quite aggressive scaling. 500 PWh is more than enough to reach net-zero emissions.

Oooh, this is a great one. You're absolutely right "the sector is ripe for disruption"

Your list of points is great, if you can figure out a way to deliver a service like that it would be incredible.

I think one of the biggest challenges for current publications is the tie to advertising model - advertising business model forces products to decrease in quality over time. Same thing happening to Google and Facebook, but super apparent in news sites. They're fucking awful these days, I can't read a single article without ten huge popups and a paywall.

Are you working on Zipline [1] ?

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbRVNxL44c

No I'm John Morrison, it says right there in the username. Usernames never lie ;)

I hope to convey this in the least volatile manner, but I must bring it up.

> I learned how important energy storage will be to enable renewable energy to displace fossil fuels.

The above is a reasonable statement, however, your website says the following:

> We can’t quit carbon without energy storage. To stop climate change, renewables must replace fossil fuels.

> Without energy storage, renewables will fail to reach even 25% of the energy market by 2040. This will cause global temperatures to rise over 3°C, a level which will cause catastrophic climate damage.

Those are not only misleading but outright lies. Now, I won't hide my bias here: I work on nuclear fission. But here's the reality: there are many possible pathways to net-zero carbon and limiting global temperature rise to well below 3°C (below 1.5°C in fact)

To just list a few:

* Massive adoption of nuclear fission alone

* Development & massive adoption of nuclear fusion alone

* Shift from coal&oil to natural gas, cleaner fossil fuels + scaling carbon capture/sequestration

* Shift from fossil fuels to renewables + storage (probably not alone)

Or any combination of those, in addition to a number of alternative approaches.

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Edit: Also, it should be noted that the energy sector alone only represents about 1/5 of the emissions problem. In order to get to net-zero GHG and stop anthroprogenic climate change, the clean energy sector needs to expand well past the current global TPES and supply net-zero electricity that allows for the decarbonization of the other main contributors:

Agriculture, steel+cement+plastic, transportation, buildings&appliances, and flora loss leading to lost carbon stores (deforestation etc)

Even if renewables and storage could supply 100% of our electricity or even total power supply, you would still only be 1/5 done solving climate change. There is no unitary solution.

---

Acting as though renewables are necessary, instead of one of multiple options, is denial or malicious. In reality, renewable energy is nowhere near capable of reliably and safely taking on a large portion of our energy supply globally. It is expensive (you can make claims about unit cost, but what really matters is country-scale - look at German electricity prices vs. just about everywhere else), it is dangerous, it takes a lot of land area, and it is the least reliable.

I don't want to spend a lot of time here stomping on renewables, but there is plenty of reason to, and my main point is that I feel it is unjust and immoral for you to claim that renewables "must replace fossil fuels" if we are to stop climate change. It's just not true, and you need to admit that.

The energy industry is arguably one of if not the most important backbone of our modern society, and responsible for the safety and health of billions of people. Whether you're working on the generation or storage side, it is all our responsibility to be honest and make true claims - not to spread biased misinformation when it benefits your particular solution.

I'd like to finish by making it clear I'm very happy you're working on your tech and I hope you succeed in making it the best it can be - renewables are certainly trending to higher adoption and we need reliable, efficient, scalable storage solution in order to avoid dangerous outages and other grid issues.

You bring up valid criticisms of existing solutions, although I do think you should also be fair to those. Most things in life are a trade-off: maybe pumped hydro is a better majority solution for the grid, but lithium ion is an incredibly important, successful and expanding technology that needs to be given credit for its wide range of great applications.

I hope this response has not been inflammatory: I just very much care about maintaining a truthful public discussion around energy. I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you can take something useful from this.

A while back, I posted a list of my long term focus problems here [1]

Short list:

* Pollution and the climate

* Privation

* Avoidable death

* Interplanetary settlement

* Liberty and communication

* Transportation

My primary focus is developing and commercializing reliable clean energy, because I believe that is the most effective way to further progress in the majority of the above problems.

To that extent, I've come to terms with an inability to spread my focus across all of them simultaneously and drive great results so instead I've taken an approach of working on a few of them full time myself and investing in efforts that work on others. My intent is to keep ~100% of my net worth invested in these main problems (either in my own or somebody else's projects) in perpetuity.

In my personal life, I've also recently been spending a lot of time thinking about health and purpose: how to build discipline, how people can/should decide what to do with their life, how to stay healthy and built fitness, etc.

Side project: in my free time over the last few weeks I've also been thinking more about how to create lasting models for information and media, and so I'm building a markup language / static site generator in that pursuit [2]

[1]: https://jwmza.com/long

[2]: https://jwmza.com/polymath

Thanks! I think we've reached a productive agreement.

I do share your frustration with skeptics in life who just debate, I think this is a natural frustration for people who have an action bias and prefer to make things happen.

The world will always need those kinds of people, though, to keep us on the right track.

> Observations of biodiversity loss are, for me, sufficient to move beyond the debating and towards the changing phase.

There's a lot wrong here.

(a) Over the past two centuries, we've been doing hundreds of crazy new things we've never done before. Correlation =/= causation: you can't just assume biodiversity loss is mostly caused by atmospheric carbon (btw: it's not)

(b) You're painting me as a caricature that has no link to reality. I'm not "waiting for science to lock" and spending my time "debating" instead of taking action, I've been working on clean energy development&commercialization for almost my entire career, and it is my primary long term focus in life.

That being said, I think there's very good reason for other people to spend time debating these issues instead of just rallying for radical political fixes to CO2 emissions. Like I've been trying to explain, the science is not at all settled on the subtleties of what we should do long term.

-

> Also greatly concerning, but elements of the same whole which needs to be addressed. I think we’re on the same page here - ... effects which cannot be foreseen.

I completely agree with you here - you're absolutely right.

You also bring up very good points about why increased CO2 is nasty - these are accurate and CO2 is fundamentally a toxic gas so of course I'm also leaning towards the "the ideal level is probably below today's level" side - but I don't know yet. With so many different factors to consider, we can't just look at any one thing like human cognition and ignore the other pros / cons.

> That’s assuming we’re talking about humankind and society as the thing we’re really seeking to save here.

I don't think we need to "save" humankind or society (or the planet) - all three of those things are extremely resilient. Some portion of humans will survive just about anything with maybe the exception of a nasty gamma ray blast.

My concern is that GHG emissions will probably cause countless millions of avoidable deaths, negatively affect billions of human lives and cost us trillions of dollars long term in addition to ruining the natural environment and biodiversity.

This is, however, a slow process compared to a human lifetime. It's a really slow, big problem that will do a lot of damage if we don't focus on solving it before it becomes even worse.

> We could also talk about biodiversity

I'm very unsure whether GHG emissions are a leading cause of biodiversity loss in recent years. We do so much other bullshit (global shipping alone basically destroyed the natural barriers between ecosystems) and have already plunged nature into a mass extinction before the industrial revolution even began iirc

There's a lot of things humans do that cause extinctions. We should probably be addressing all of them.

I appreciate the passion in your view but this is not a wise way to think about it.

Currently, the science is not settled on whether warming has so far been net-good or net-bad.

Everything in life is a trade-off: when the temperature rises, there are more deaths due to extremely high temperatures, but less deaths due to extremely low temperatures. (This is just an analogy, there are countless actual examples of trade-offs in this case)

It may very well be that warming has up until this point, and perhaps even for a little longer, has been and will be a good thing overall. The world has been a lot warmer and a lot colder in relatively recent times.

I'm far more concerned about the effects of air pollution, acidification etc than a slight increase in temperatures (do not misinterpret: I say more concerned, both are concerning)

> You understand that we’re currently at ~415ppm and that this is the highest the atmospheric level has been in the entire history of humankind?

This is also highly misleading. We were well above 500ppm for the entirety of 50mya - 250mya.

Homo sapiens is extremely young, we are born of an ice age. 415ppm is among the lowest CO2 concentrations of all time, ever.

> I can demand a long lasting, repairable, sustainable appliance (and most products) until I am blue in the face, no corporation is willing to make and sell me one.

I can't tell if this is ideology or a mistake, but this is not true. Firstly, if you demand something that can be reasonably built, somebody will sell it to you for the right price. Remember: corporations are just regular folk trying to make money, like everyone else in modern society.

Second, if your argument is "Well, it would be so much more expensive" then this is kind of your own problem, not theirs. Corporations have achieved incredibly affordable production through economies of scale in massive markets. They cater to the demands of large groups of consumers who are willing to pay what it takes for their needs and luxuries. If nobody else wants what you want, nobody will build it for you except you.

Claiming that corporations won't make you a 'long lasting, repairable, sustainable appliance' means (a) you haven't asked or looked, or (b) you aren't willing to pay for the qualities you demand.

> it requires government to regulate to get corporations to all do their bit.

I agree with you here.

> Lets also not forget ... makes you feel worse.

I agree here too - you're right. Advertising is awful, and I don't know what we should do about it, I haven't put enough thought into that issue.

Spivak's Calculus & Calculus on Manifolds are both fantastic books to start with (they're named calculus but they're really more analysis)

There's a Youtube channel 3Blue1Brown which is fantastic [1] as well. In fact, his videos are among the best if not the best for visually illustrating beautiful concepts in mathematics. The concepts covered are almost always widely applicable in problem solving and useful to know.

He's got a wide variety, but the series on Calculus and Linear Algebra are good refreshers for the two main subjects applicable to real engineering.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

> It seems reality doesn't match your beliefs.

France is about 75% nuclear, Germany is about 10%

French electricity is about 2x cheaper than German, and they have much lower emissions.

Since Germany has shut down nuclear plants in favor of renewables, it has been forced to increase coal and has actually increased total emissions and accident deaths significantly.

Ontario, Canada is about 60% nuclear and its electricity prices off-peak are about 10x lower than German, on-peak about 5x lower.

Nuclear is the safest, most efficient, and more reliable energy source all nations that have it and those who have more have more affordable energy. Reality has shown this consistently for now almost 80 years.

> and also gives one an appreciation of just how powerful of a greenhouse gas CO2 is

It should also be noted that the total atmosphere (dry + water) is about 3% water vapor by weight and H2O makes up the majority of the greenhouse effect.

CO2 isn't a problem because it's the biggest greenhouse gas, it's a problem because it's the one (the biggest anthroprogenic one) pushing us over the equilibrium where net warming is zero.

I agree completely.

We are all responsible as consumers, in every country.

People like to blame the western world or "corporations" - no, it is your (our) fault as individuals. Corporations only emit when consumers demand their product/service.

We are all humans: anyone who can help make the future better, should.

> compete for space with PV

PV << Fission in cities, so this doesn't matter. My hope is all green rooftops whenever possible. (I should note that this isn't trying to replace actual agriculture - it would be a small minority, the main purpose is to make cities nicer and do something with the wasted surface area.)

> That would be news to me

It's actually not news at all, we've been having net forest cover growth since we began recording it centuries ago. There's never been any long term deforestation trends on net.

(This is not to say that there haven't been awful local deforestation periods, and you're right about old forest vs. new forest, but globally it has always gone up since pre-industrial time)

> has anyone shown that this can be done with a lower GHG footprint?

It's a more physically efficient process. Why grow the whole cow and have it run around losing heat for months when you can just grow the meat you want in the end?

> Chicken doesn't release methane, has a lower overall land and carbon footprint. Still less efficient than staple crops of course.

This is all true but you can't really just replace red meat with white meat or vegetarian diet. Some try but it will never work globally.

> Africa can get a pass.

As an African I disagree w/ this.

But you're right, global powers like the US/EU/China should and will likely contribute the most.

Of course I don't mean to suggest we should actually split it up by country - it's just a nice mental model that splits by ~40 million person groups.

> deforestation

There isn't net deforestation globally, though.

> ruminant methane

Yeah, this is one of the hardest ones to fix, but I think lab grown meat will get there eventually. Like I said, I'm not optimistic animal agriculture will have sufficient technology to eliminate most of its emissions in time - that's why we need CCS in the meantime.

My point is, the energy industry will be ready with extra capacity to power clean agriculture solutions when they are ready.

> It's not like we can solve our problems by electrifying tractors.

I don't think that's the route we should go.

Primarily indoor farming seems to be a much better long term route for plants, I prefer if we eventually get rid of most rural farmland and slowly shift it back to nature.

Cover our flat city rooftops with small farms and trees, and produce most plant agriculture indoor very close to the consumer in indoor vertical farms. Controlled environment + indoor climate, more resource efficiency, almost no risk of infections, no need for most of the chemicals we use today.

This is true.

We should be able to reach net-zero emissions in the energy industry by around 2040 (optimistic, but realistic target), and even produce enough clean electricity to power clean electric solutions in transport/agriculture/industrial/appliance sectors (which are the other main contributors to net GHG emissions).

The only problem is that a lot of this technology is still missing / not adopting fast enough. Electric cars and cleaner farming will probably get there in time, as well as lots of electric appliances and clean steel.

I'm worried about these though:

- Cement/concrete

- Aviation (electric is on the way [1], but maybe growing too slow)

- Livestock (synthetic meat promising, but once again maybe progress too slow)

- Shipping

- Appliances/civilian buildings: long lifespan to replace systems with electric alternatives, people won't just throw away a working heating system / stove etc

For those, we need CCS or reforestation efforts to be accelerated.

Our best bet in my view is to focus most investment in nuclear energy short term, with large minorities in CCS and transport+industrial electrification, and get electricity prices super low (and TPES super high)

Once we have abundant, clean energy worldwide, we will be able to easily reach net-zero emissions and even induce net cooling if we feel we have overshot the ideal atmospheric carbon level.

(In fact, we should be able to move it either way depending on our needs)

Net zero goal isn't about stopping climate change, it's about putting the control in our hands and having the ability to shift temperatures and GHG levels in the optimal direction in perpetuity.

[1] https://heartaerospace.com (YC-backed)

> For steel the possibilities are hydrogen or electrolysis, both are being tested by some companies.

We already have steel recycling plants today that shift ~100% of emissions to thermal energy source, with a hot enough nuclear reactor (G4 MSR, maybe something in fast spectrum, maybe fusion) you can effectively eliminate the majority of steel emissions globally.

> Cement is the biggest "we don't really have any good alternative, at least not any time soon"-issue.

Bill Gates posted about this recently [1,2]

[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Buildings-are-good-for-peo...

[2] https://www.carboncure.com/

I think looking at the total rate is naturally going to feel heavy.

Instead, consider this: per country on average, that rate is between one every 4 years, and 2 every year, until 2050.

That's not bad at all.