tda

What a great series! Especially impressive to see all the installations and facilities required to process the spent fuel from one temporary facility to the other. And the huge amount of steel and concrete required to do so, for now and decades to come, for a facility that produced it's last usable power how many years ago? Note that this is not related to the disaster, but "happy path" as far as I understand.

From wikipedia:

The three other reactors remained operational after the accident but were eventually shut down by 2000, although the plant remains in the process of decommissioning as of 2021. Nuclear waste clean-up is scheduled for completion in 2065

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

Before the first few dozen nuclear reactors have been properly decommissioned, within a reasonable timeframe and for a reasonable budget, I think we have absolutely no business building more of them and burdening future generations with them.

I paid €3900 for 22 panels, 7.2kw system here in the Netherlands. I did install it myself (but the whole package was delivered and the electric connections done by the supplier), and the panels and inverter are cheap Chinese brands. As I didn't situate them ideally and they lose efficiency as the heat up quite drastically I expect to generate between 4500 and 5000kwh. That should save me about €800 a year so this is a pretty solid business case.

So to me the US prices seem even more ridiculous

I feel these kind of solutions where the hard shoulder is used as an extra lane are used to sneak in widening roads.

When an extra lane is suggested, NIMBY and/or environmental concerns will immediately raise objections and kill the proposal. So instead, the idea is to use the existing road in a more "efficient" way by making it "smart". This is of course ok, as it's not like we're adding any road, just using the existing road in a better way. After some time, accidents happen and people clamor for a hard shoulder, which should be ok environmentally as its not adding extra road, its just a hard shoulder for safety and not meant to drive on (and who can object to safety). And in the two step process, somehow we ended up with a widened road whilst completely avoiding the discussion if we want a wider road or not.

I sometimes also use this tactic in software if the PO's are non cooperative. First build the feature but hide it in a dev menu/behind a feature flag. No harm adding a feature if it's not available right? And then some time after it was implemented without explicit approval, I propose to enable the feature at zero cost, it is already implemented anyway.

You can also view the idea of smart roads in a more benign way of course. As cheaper way to experiment if adding an extra lane could be worth it. In the Netherlands it is done a lot, usually only during rush hour. It is then often paired with a stricter speed limit, so when the 4th lane is open the speed limit is 100km/h instead of 130km/h. But as the speed limit is 100km/h during day time anyways this is less of a change than it used to be.

Wealth stored as money is already taxed in a way in the form of inflation. I would much rather have a tax system based on consumption of non renewable and finite resources. Primarily that means tax on materials, fossil fuels and land.

Own a lot of land or a big house = pay a lot. Use a lot of fissile fuels = pay a lot. Leave your wealth in the bank and living like a hermit = pay very little. Basically align the tax system with your (or your company's) environmental footprint.

That really depends on the parents I would say. My kids watch about zero linear ad riddled TV and YouTube, because we don't have a TV. They do get to watch Netflix, NextTube and Disney+. And various educational programs that are streamed ad free online. That at least limits their exposure to advertising, though some shows are basically advertisements for cheap plastic toys (paw patrol, fireman sam) and we disagree if they are allowed.

Haven't heard that name in about 27 years. Thanks for bringing it up

I love the TLDR's. Instead of opening some ad-filled site, working my way through all the cookie banners and enabling just enough js to let the actual load, I can actually get the gist of it in about 10 seconds. Also, I prefer high information density, and pieces that start with the conclusion instead of some slow buildup to their point.

longest train according to wikipedia is 18.000 feet (3.4 miles). If a 40ft containers needs a 60ft car, and they are double stacked, then you can fit 30022 = 1200 TEU of containers on that train. A single large container vessel has 20.000+ TEU of containers onboard. So nope, trains are a lot smaller than container vessels

So can you technically "hide" data in a ZIP file as a form of steganography? Just add it to the zip file but mark it as deleted. Then any common zip utility will skip it, but a specialized one could extract that extra information. This would be easy to miss as the size of a zip file is always different than the sum of the size of the files it contains.

And of course googling zip file steganography reveals this is not a new idea: https://aroralakshay2014.medium.com/hide-it-lest-find-it-zip...

I fail to understand why they didn't/don't use the tugboats to wash the water away. Even small boats can cause a lot of scour with their bow thrusters along a vertical quay wall (which the Ever Given is in a way). The erosive power of a 16MW engine is really something to not be underestimated.

I never saw then try to use the prop wash of the tugs to wash away the sand instead of the slow digging with excavators. The canal is deep enough in the center, really the fastest way to move a lot of sand over small area is by washing it away. Especially is the area is hard to reach with big equipment. As soon as the ships propellors were freed it just have been trivial to free the stern by just goin full steam ahead. On the bow side, I wonder if they tried using the bow thruster to do the same (actually does a container vessel even have a bow thruster?)

Yes you are right. I put it anyways because votes matter, being angry on the Internet does not. And the tough on crime mentality that lead to this is pushed harder by Republicans than Democrats.

I completely agree. This is a bit of a process though, look at how Texans with variable rates responded to extremely high (90 times normal rate) prices: some just said f*ck it and managed to use 10-20K USD electricity in a few days.

You can get a better price if you can guarantee availability, but there is also a market for variable supply.

It's no so bad actually, 35km of the canal doubled just a few years ago for a 4.2 Billion in less than a year, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal_Area_Development_Pr...

If all permits are waived and enough money is paid you could mobilize a few Cutter Suction Dredgers (like this on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBCfX-XRM1A) in say two weeks. Working from two sides you can probably dig the bypass in a month.

It would be much easier to just widen/deepen canal to get it unstuck. I'm surprised they haven't tried washing away the sand around the bow using the prop wash from a bit tug boat

would make a bit of sense, but isn't it more fun to think of BigFarma as a bunch of conspiring, greedy MBA's with no morals that will do anything for a profit?

And I've heard insinuations that they are not in a hurry to apply, cause they can hide behind the lack of approval for their lack of European deliveries, and in the meantime export vaccines at a premium to the UK. Not sure if any of this is true, but it would be quite a thing. Hope they just get nationalized

What a horrible landing page. Is it a stand alone product? Does it integrate with my SQL database? Is it a server side application or a client side thing? What is the pricing model? So many questions, zero answers

Am in the process of exploring kafka to do something similar, and I think it will work but requires quite a complex setup (compared to an incrementally updated materialized view)

Wow great, I was not aware. Looks like everything I could hope for, congratulations on this great release!

I am a big fan of SQLAlchemy, though I often use it more as an advanced pythonic query builder than as an ORM It can sometimes be a bit more work to write something in SQLAlchemy than raw SQL, especially when doing complicated queries, but I really like composing the queries with python functions, defining CTE's, window functions, computed columns in separate functions.

And very important: any query I can write for postgres I can write with SQLAlchemy. But as I work a lot on an application with some complicated JSONB columns, I must say the syntax for set returning functions is kind of awkward. But the session and transaction management, query composability, ORM options, and overall Pythonic way you can use SQLAlchemy really beats putting (semi) raw SQL in your code. And as a bonus you can do linting, type checking and refactoring of you queries.

Thanks for all the hard work Michael!

You are correct, let me rephrase that:

I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.

I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic "recycling" doesn't*

* if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same

Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is.

Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.

For the record, I do recycle plastic.

A strong argument against nuclear is that the costs and benefits are very spread out in time (random numbers follow) say: 10 years of construction, 50-70 years of operation, 10 years of decommissioning. Who is willing to make an investment in an unstable region that will pay itself back in 20 years? And then save money for another 20 years to pay for decommissioning?

Unless of course a military coup happens and contracts are nullified, or riots, or conflict or etc..

And even worse, how can you ensure someone will be around willing to put in the effort to safely decommission something that has no more value? Even in the most developed and stable nations this is and will be a challenge. Who wants to put in the effort to clean up the previous generations mess.

Why solar not an option? The Sahara is really big, has plenty of sunshine. And population in a lot of upcoming economies are already used to supply limited energy grids. Maybe they can more easily adapt/grow into a power grid that meets demand 95% of the time, but sometimes not. Would be vastly cheaper than guaranteeing to meet demand 99.99995% of the time. Just like developing countries that never got around to landline POTS don't really miss it now. They just skipped it and went straight to mobile. Supposedly Mpesa makes it easier, cheaper, faster and safer to transfer money in Kenya than any system available in the US.

Though not so nice, there are ways to "stabilize" sovereign foreign countries to ensure energy stability. Just look at US middle eastern politics. Not saying we should, but I'd rather have the effort got to solar power in the northern Sahara than extracting fossil fuel from Saudi-Arabia

I would like to see the numbers; how much overbuilding would be necessary. Even if you need to install say 50%-100% extra capacity to meet demand in winter, solar power would still be perfectly economically viable. And I'm sure a valid use for excess power in summer can be found, e.g. desalination. Fresh water demand is surely higher in summer in the Sahara, and otherwise fresh water is easily stored

Some (often desirable) properties of RDP for timeseries is that is preserves details at extreme events and does not shift peaks. Very useful for e.g. seismic data. I have compressed tons of data with 1% subsampling with hardly any information loss

Additionally we will need to live with a supply constrained electricity net. Sometimes there just isn't more available and variable pricing will be needed to reduce demand. Of course the Texas power crisis showed that even if prices rise 50x some people will stubbornly keep using power regardless and basically go bankrupt. But perhaps this is just because nobody is used to actually matching demand to supply vs the current situation where supply is always matched to the demand at all costs with (rolling) blackouts as the only effective measure to reduce demand.

I imagine that in a near future where most cars are electric (and thus transportation is a significant part of electricity demand) it should be quite easy to temporarily reduce demand, even in winter: just stop commuting for a few days (at least all office workers). Also big industrial consumers could be incentivized to reduce demand when supply is too low. It might require some design adjustments, but shutting down most industry and working from home for say 0-5 days a year is surely more cost effective than massively overbuilding renewable energy supply, making giant batteries.

Priorities should probably be 1. More grid interconnections (even out supply variability), 2. cheap long term storage like hydro, 3. demand reduction. I think we need all three to transition to a 100% fossil free future.

Nobody concerned about the ability to feed themselves should rely on or even have to consider red meat; red meat has historically always been a luxury product, not a staple food. That industrial farming, externalized impacts en perverse subsidies has made you consider red meat to be a staple food available cheaply and unlimited to all is what is really worrying.