shaqbert

As the production costs with windpower decrease due to the technological progress, the question of grid storage and grid interconnection becomes more pressing.

E.g. in Germany, they frequently have days of negative energy prices, where producers need to pay to feed energy into the greed because of overproduction of energy on windy/sunny days [0](in German). Without storage and grid interconnection, there is only so much renewable energy from intermittent sources like wind and solar you can handle.

[0]: https://blog.energybrainpool.com/bereits-103-mal-in-2017-neg...

Why does software cost so little?

When you look at the value created by tech, the productivity gains from buying solutions instead of rolling your own, the possibility to focus on your own competencies vs getting distracted by maintaining your own re-invention of the wheel...

Or maybe, just maybe, it is priced just right.

You are right. My point is moot.

Alas, when we could not even fix Hanford with money in the past, I am a little worried about doing it with less cash going forward.

Not that surprising given the current leadership and budgetary direction at the Department of Energy. Micheal Lewis ran a great piece [0] on the Nuclear facility safeguards about a year ago, and it appears it is quite prophetic...

[0]: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/department-of-energy...

Sounds like you need a young gun co-founder to complement your expertise with the energy and enthusiasm of youth.

You need a headless CMS like Contentful[0]. They have a free developer tier which is great for static sites, especially when you pair it with the super awesome React based static site generator GatsbyJS[1].

[0]: https://www.contentful.com/ [1]: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-starters/

Well yes in terms of Plutonium in general, but not the weapon grade P239 kind of material that is very pure... For those you need a specific reactor dedicated to one cause.

In context, here is a great video from the Belfer center on nuclear bomb making and what are the hard parts [0]. Getting the fission material is the hard part, and in order to get plutonium nukes you need a enrichment plant, i.e. a reactor that is not meant to produce energy but breed plutonium.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVhQOhxb1Mc (at min 47, he starts talking about the hard parts)

The key issue with N26 is their poor unit economics. Right now, they are losing money on most of the checking accounts, as they foot the ATM wholesale fee (though they limit it to 3 "free" ATM withdrawals per months).

The issue is that they don't have enough premium services to compensate for the "loss leader" like regular banks do. The hope from Tencent and Allianz is that they will add these now, and then move to great unit economics, but for now they are bleeding red ink.

In general, mining is very responsive to price signals. If a given commodity becomes dear, prices go up, and mining recommences. A couple of years later, all is back to equilibrium.

Our planet is fully of all elements. True, some deposits have higher grade ores, right on or underneath the surfaces, and are more accessible via transport links than others. It all comes down to price.

While innovation to substitute an expensive ingredient from a potentially unreliable supplier is laudable, from a chemist/metallurgist point of view I wish there was more innovation in mining and cleaning up the process of getting rare earth in the first place. Every rare earth element increases option value and the potential to make further progress.

The main reason rare earth are expensive is that they mining is done in decades old tech fashion, and dirty as hell. China does not seem to mind as much, as long as it is controlling a strategic resource. Finding higher concentration deposits, and improving the process of extracting the rare earths elements is something I wish to happen more of...

Indeed it is. Joel had a great analyis on what went wrong[0] at FB (and to some extend Twitter). They were optimising for the wrong metrics, forgetting user utility and happiness in the process. Fixing this will mean making less money. But also a much higher chance of long term relevance.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/01/12/birdcage-liners/

Why did Larry Lessig not find more support amongst the tech billionaire crowd? His open source policy programs on fixing US democracy ought to be a magnet for hobnobbing billionaires at the very top of Maslow's pyramid.

Actually, it is quite the opposite. Once an enterprise software company has crossed the $40m revenue threshold, has low churn, and growth is >2x, you got yourselves a winner.

Now Snowflake has grown 3x over consecutive years, and with all these big enterprises coming in, there has gotta be a true advantage.

Now the question is if this current advantage can survive an upgrade of say e.g. the capabilities of Amazon Redshift, that moves the latter to almost feature parity.

If they are smart, they will do some self regulation to preempt the government from coming in. Giving more transparency and empowerment to the users, and explaining a little more what they are doing, and why they are doing it, would go a long way.

Flamanville - cost overrun. Olkiluoto - cost overrun. Hinkeley Point C - cost overrun. You see the pattern? The bane of the nuclear industry is not safety, but cost. Too expensive and risky to build and decomission.

That one is really meant for small things.

Alas, for massive sites with lots of content, Netlify's other services plays nicely with other tools. E.g. his AT&T dev proposes GatsbyJS, Contentful, and Netlify in combination [0].

[0]: https://hackernoon.com/contentful-and-netlify-the-dynamic-du...

TL;DR:

- the 2nd stage with passive graphite divertor tiles ready to fire up plasma tests again

- now temperatures of 70m centigrade for the ions possible, vs. 10m for the 1st stage tests

- operation of up to 10 sec next

- 3rd stage planned for 2 years after is supposed to prove operation for up to 30 sec

More likely that when you don't get it, that you're probably not the target audience. B2B companies typically have pretty narrow target personas, wither their very own set of needs and challenges. They need to get it. The rest does not really matter.

A couple of years back, when rare earth prices were high and China restricted exports, the media was full of scaremongering stories about how we gonna see our industry shut down, etc.

Turns out that prices are a strong signal to start mining. While rare earth sound like a scarce resources, they are essentially prevalent across the globe in very low concentration. The existing mines are usually places where the concentration is a tad higher. But once prices are high enough, a lot of marginal deposits all over sudden become commercially viable.

In my country, arbitration is NOT legally binding. That said, the court ruling is often the same but much more onerous costly and time consuming. Thus arbitration rulings are accepted 9 out of 10 times.

I know it is intentional. It is the easy way out to minimize friction, potential litigation, social backlash. All short term cost.

Alas, the long term cost of being opaque is lost trust. I much rather have Google give a straight answer. Especially when there is publicity around a case. That way a lot more people would see that Google actually is mostly really reasonable, and that there is another side to the story.

Just hit "report spam" in Gmail and before long their email domain gets burned. That hurts much more than some shaming list.

The crafty companies use dedicated and disposable domains (e.g. facebookmail.com) for their more "aggressive" forms of email marketing. Alas, most spammers are not crafty.

The automated canned answer is what rubs me the most here. There is a professor who trusted Google's Gmail and Blogspot product, gets the Axe for some violation of Terms of Service or Quality Guidelines, and does not get a clear and straight answer what specifically he did wrong, or how he can remedy the situation.

I wish one of the Googlers reading this here could reach out internally what is going on here.

I'd wager though that the professor's Google account did something wrong, and might be even a serial offender in Google's eyes, so as to warrant a ban. Question is though if the professor himself did something wrong.

Tom Scott has a very educational video[0] on why electronic voting is a really bad idea.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

On the neutron absorption challenge: There are big advances in material science, especially with a FLiBe salt blanket fill. The challenge is more on the engineering side, i.e. how can you build it so that you can do maintenance and replace the blanket on a regular interval in a fully automated manner without interrupting the service of the fusion plant for too long.

Problem w/ the ARC reactor is that it is just a design. The real life engineering challenges are still daunting. E.g. for the supra conductors at the Wendelstein 7-X, which provide a much less powerful magnetic field, just assembling and connecting the supra conductor cables for each module was a mind blowingly complex and fickle process that was described at length in this (unfortunately German) super awesome podcast [0].

[0]: http://alternativlos.org/36/

TL'DR:

- this swedish government study analyses CO2 emissions from battery pack production

- for a Tesla S3, the emissions at purchase are 17.5 tonnes of CO2

- That means 8.2 years of driving to just break even with an equivalent petrol car [0]

- for the smaller battery Nissan Leaf, it is 5.2 tonnes of CO2 and 2.7 yrs of driving to break even

- vast advances in battery production are needed to have climate impact w/ electric vehicles.

- Or battery production close to abundant clean energy sources.

Additional source: [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

TL'DR - some Uranium deposits have unnaturally low concentrations of Uranium U-235. There is proof in the footprint of the occurrence of fission products that this must be due to natural fission having taken place way in the past.

While your statement is indeed true, the German way of calculating unemployment is actually more conservative than the US way. There the ones who stop looking for work are dropped from the statistics...