853 karma · joined November 10, 2016
The time horizon for those issues is not compatible with electoral terms. There is no incentive for any politician to tackle such big issue. Even though it might become existential. We would deal with the externalities until we get swallowed as it becomes unavoidable. The more we wait and the more painful it would be.
Texas became the 8th larger economy thanks to the increasing oil production (larger than Russia or Canada). But Texas should invest that money (like Norway or UAE does) as it won't last for ever. When oil is gone (or too expensive to extract) people will leave Texas, and Texas will be a wasteland with orphan wells everywhere polluting underground water.
In general, it would be wise for US to get an exit plan, for when oil would not be so easy to extract (yes it is more difficult now, but the oil price is still high enough). Oil price can be counter intuitive as it is the main fuel of the world economy. So, if the production declines, the price can go up, but not too much. At some point, economies would shutdown, and the demand would fall sharply. Only the countries that would be out of oil (i.e. using electricity from nuclear, solar, wind, hydro) would continue to be humming. The other countries would enter in chaos, unrest and war. Which would generate economical migrations and more chaos.
Again countries should plan for peak fossil fuel, and even if they are lucky to have some oil underground, they should plan to massively transform their economy to electricity and transition the production from fossil to more sustainable production like nuclear, solar, wind and hydro.
For context:
"Arizona households use 66 million Btu of energy per home, 26% less than the U.S. average.
The combination of lower than average site consumption of all energy, but above average electricity which is relatively expensive, results in Arizona households spending 3% less for energy than the U.S. average."
source: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/sta...
So people in Arizona are using a lot less energy than the rest of the country, and only pay marginally less. Someone is making even more money on the energy bill.
And yes, solar is not perfect, and sometimes one needs some extra electricity on the grid (peakers). For a 16,000 household community, maybe batteries should be considered ? It is not like they have an heavy industry requiring high energy consumption 24/7. It is a small community (houses, and RV parks).
For instance, a Tesla Megapack 2 costs $1.5M and delivers 3.854 MWh so to replace the 98MWh gas peaker, we would need 25 x Megabuck 2, for a cost of $37.5M. How much the gas peaker is going to cost ? We can run the cost on maintenance too, which I suspect would also favor the battery solution.
Nonetheless, I see this Microsoft initiative as a canary in the AI coal mine. I would hope Apple would learn from it.
I would really like to have a AI companion that runs locally, on my dev laptop, tailored for my developer's needs. Something optimized for the hardware, and yet with tight privacy.
Apple... your turn!
I was wondering if having people over 60-70 or even 80yo running most of the things that matter in this world, was missing the radical optimism of youth.
That is why I like students protesting, even if misguided or not well expressed. It shakes the carefully assembled (and sometimes also misguided) world order we are living in.
Sometimes complex problems need to be revisited from fresh perspective, and have the "wizened nonagenarian Australian with little time left on this earth" to fuck off.
1. It requires the occupants to vacate
2. It is expensive
3. It is difficult to estimate the change it would actually provide
George Lucas created a great story with rich visuals from lots of various prior art, that I find interesting to understand (e.g. source: https://www.wired.com/2016/01/valerian-laureline-star-wars/)
When Harley-Davidson and other moppet/scooters would be all electric, that would be quitter.
We have been discussing this with my neighbors. We are both committed to eventually pull the trigger to retrofit, but the initial estimate is $70K and one apartment being under heavy construction for months...
When I was 1yo my dad was driving on the highway, got distracted, and ended up on a highway portion that was under construction. He was driving full speed, when he saw a barrier, late enough that he swung the steering wheel to avoid the barrier, and ended up driving on 2 wheels before the car felt back and stopped. No baby at the time, my grand-ma was holding me in the back (good old years when cars were lighter and less secure).
Random things can happen on the road, including wrong signage. As long as the car can assess the current state and graceful transition to a safe spot, it should be fine to throw at them random signage.
R R R R R R R
R R O O O O O
R R O O O O O
R R O O O O O
R R R R R R R
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7475584,-122.44409,3a,75y,89...
The City or the owners should put some bollards and be done with this once and for all. In the past 15 years they had some many cars crashing into their houses.
Comparing nuclear and wind is a bit apples and oranges. One is intermetent and one is not. The lifespans are different too, as nuclear usually last 60 to 80 years, when wind farm is 30 years. As mentioned in the article the cost of nuclear is artificially inflated, like for redundant safety measures, and specifically in UK by the financing used (most of the cost come from interest).
We need to build cheaper and more nuclear power plants, and more wind farms too.
And this is only counting with the old nuclear power plant designs. The current Gen3 and coming Gen4 do not need nearly as much as the previous generations. They squeeze more juice out. (source: https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/academy/pdfs/nucl...)
We might unfortunately (because of the chaos that it will create) ran out of oil before uranium.
Fossil fuel crunch will eventually happen, and it would not be pretty, unless we electrify most of our economies (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...) and replace all the fossil fuel based production... This is the national security issue that every country should put as a priority.
Talking about bad perception, fear of radioactivity is also disproportionate. It might be because it is not something we can really feel with our senses, and so it has this magic/unknown aura. People working in nuclear power plant receive less than radiologist technicians, dentists, or fly attendants. Which probably means that the safety might be too high. We should be able to drop from few notches. If coal was the agreed standard of death/TWH then nuclear could kill 800 times more per TWH. The public safety standards for coal and oil is well accepted. No one when building a multi GWH coal power plant screamed for the caused deaths. An yet, with nuclear kill 800 times less, it is always seen as something that will wipe the neighborhood. It is irrational. It might be because of the bomb of the same name. Even though they are totally different designs (nuclear power plant do not detonate large amount of explosive to start a reaction).
It is fine to be cautious, but we have to stay rational. We should not diminish the risk of radioactivity, but current nuclear power plant designs are safer, and when they fail (even when a tsunami hits it) it does not kill as many people (source: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec... https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2324/)
There and XKCD for everything: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
Solar is still very small (and intermittent) when it comes to production, for instance, less than 2% for US (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...). This single new UK nuclear power plant alone would account for 7% of UK production according to the article.