poutine

Stick and frame is an excellent construction technique. Built to modern code it'll not creak in the wind nor rot away. Further it can be framed by one person if needed with nothing more than a pick up truck and a local hardware store. It'll not fall over in an earthquake. Renovations are easy. Insulating is easy. It's a carbon sink. And best yet, it's much cheaper to build.

Wait, a GoPro works in vacuum in space? Even one derived from that? That's pretty cool. What did they do to it to make it work in such a crazy environment?

With proper winter or all-weather tires you'll actually get better stopping for a heavier vehicle (the tires will have more friction as a function of the weight so less chance of slip even though you have more to stop).

The RWD is a bit of a different beast than the AWD. It's much easier to get stuck on that one due to its weight when reversing up a hill.

As a former driver of many Audi quattros and a Canadian who lives on top of a hill with a AWD Tesla 3 I can say it's the best handling car in snow that I've driven (given clearance limits of a sedan).

The instant reaction speed of its electric traction control to slippage will vastly outperform any manual transmission. You can drive like an idiot with the pedal to the floor and the car sorts itself out.

This is a great summary. Advocates of renewables really need to focus on the storage issue. Solving this at scale will be key. Until then it’s all about nukes.

And this could possibly be overcounting, population could be 1.28B not 1.4B:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...

So given that it's so cheap you've converted your home to be 100% solar with battery storage and went off grid, right?

Probably not. As you'd like to have power for those dark winter days where you don't see the sun for weeks on end and any viable battery storage will only last a day or two.

Dont get me wrong, I love solar, I'm building a house with it. But outside of select niches there's no viable storage for solar or wind that deals with seasonal intermittency.

Wind even has major long term intermittency issues. This just happened in Europe: https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...

This used to be true, while it's hard to quantify it doesn't really seem to be true anymore.

Yes. I have a portable induction plate we use for things like hot pot. I don’t have an apples to apples comparison though. The cooking itself doesn’t influence co2 though it does spike pm2.

Yup. It’s require by code. They’re usually installed at such low CFM that they don’t help a lot against short term blips from cooking though.

My wife and I have allergies and are poor sleepers, as a result I religiously monitor air quality in several points in the home in order to manage the air. I find CO2 ppm over 1000 provides for headaches and poor sleep. Having a modern well sealed home means you rely a lot on an HRV to exchange the air, but sometimes you need to open the windows.

After all the monitoring for years I can attest that the gas cooktop has a massive influence on poor air quality. The vent hood helps, but does not eliminate CO2. Keeping CO2 under ~700ppm in occupied bedrooms takes some work.

For my next house that I'm building now I've put in induction, will never do gas again. Also supersized the vent hood and HVAC systems.

Indoor air quality is such an unappreciated topic in home construction.

Modern houses are far more complex undertakings than houses built a decade or two ago. This translates to cost.

Take a look at something like the BC Energy Step Code https://energystepcode.ca/ and its guidelines on thermal bridging: https://www.bchousing.org/research-centre/library/residentia...

It produces better buildings, but this is all new and expensive. Expand this sort of thing all out to all the other components (electrical, plumbing, foundation, etc) of modern, compliant buildings and you get the idea.

Agreed. This used to be a big problem late last year for me (2021 M3 FSD). But I can't remember the last time it happened.

All manufacturers can suffer from poor repair times, not only Tesla. Especially these days.

I waited six months for a brake booster replacement in my Audi SQ5 as it sat in the service center. They did give me a loaner the whole time though...

And if you like Supreme Commander there's https://www.sanctuary-rts.com/

You're in luck https://www.beyondallreason.info/

While housing has indeed gotten more expensive you can't compare absolute prices.

First you're getting a vastly different product today than in 1946. Consumer demands are far higher too.

Also to compare affordability the metric for most people would be the median percentage case of mortgage payments vs the persons take home pay. When measured this way it's been hovering around 30% for the past 40 years in the UK.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-house-prices-unlikely-cra...

And yet the Navy has a pretty good safety record.

100% absolutely ok :)

You can blend hydrogen in to existing natural gas infrastructure at up to 10%.

There's an Australian dual fuel plant going in to service in a couple years that can do from 5% to up to 100% hydrogen in the future.

While you can't use existing natural gas infrastructure, the logistics of hydrogen are pretty similar, otherwise blending and dual fuel systems wouldn't be possible.

https://www.austrade.gov.au/news/success-stories/australia-a...

The neat thing about hydrogen is that in the short term you can supplement natural gas with hydrogen using the same or similar generation plants. In the long term deploying hydrogen infrastructure is pretty similar to managing natural gas which we already do at scale.

Solar + hydrogen storage probably is the only long term mass scale alternative to nuclear short of fusion.

The US Navy has built hundreds of nuclear reactors in much shorter timeframes. There's nothing intrinsic about nuclear that demands such long builds. It'd need to be done at a societal level with some sort of standardization and mass industrial process. The French more or less did this for their nukes for instance.

With solar you need to store for use when there's no sun. Relatively doable for overnight with batteries. Outside of niche solutions like pumped hydro it's practically impossible for longer periods such as during the winter or just a string of overcast days.

Green hydrogen has some promise, we'll see over then next decade or so.

If you want hours of battery storage sure, not if you want seasonal storage. That makes solar+battery a niche, not something you base your energy economy on. Besides, even if you did there's not enough minerals being mined to do battery grid storage at scale to move entire economies over to it.

This isn't so simple.

Solar and wind are not just intermittent on a day to day basis, they are intermittent on a seasonal one -- as we saw last year the wind can not blow as strong for months at a time. Much of Europe could be blanketed with a large weather system for days cutting the sun and so forth.

Even flow batteries simply can't store enough energy, hydro storage is limited by geography and other solutions are currently niche and have yet to prove scale up. Green hydrogen probably has the most promise as a large scale storage technology that's close enough to natural gas to make workable.

Energy is so critical to our civilizations that you can't just make assertions that it'll be OK, you need to be certain. Getting it wrong can be terminal.

This isn't true. Costs of housing have spiralled out of control outside of Toronto and Vancouver -- here on Vancouver Island in Nanaimo the house I built in 2018 for $950k is now worth near $1.5M. Up 20% in the past year. It's nuts.

Not just a problem with Tesla. My Audi SQ5 with the 'Advanced Drivers Assitance Pack' will happily drive in to a stationary car in front of me.

It's a problem with radars, they don't detect stationary objects well.

The solution is economic, just not via tariff or tax. Clean energy must supplant dirty energy at scale. The only way for this to happen is to make it cheaper so the developing world will use it instead.

Carbon taxes and tariffs would work yes. But you're imposing serious costs on people that they haven't shown any desire to support. Further, tariffs would disproportionately impact the poor in the developing world.

By and large the CCP shapes the internal narrative with respect to China, and increasingly globally. Social connections be damned.

The Chinese will think what the CCP wants them to think.

I say this as someone who has lived in China and with family in China.