thinkcontext

Except this article telling you that.

In theory it could. The advantage of enhanced geothermal is it allows for a much wider variety of sites to be used compared to conventional geothermal. So, it may be possible to create one near an existing district heating system and use the excess heat for it.

> There are more than 50+ existing projects using EGS starting from the 1970s! What exactly is the "world's first" here?

First commercial operation with a grid connection. You'll notice that those 50+ are listed under the "research and development" section.

The new thing is using new-ish fracking drilling techniques to create a geothermal resource. Conventional geothermal relies on finding very specific geology which is why its so rare. Enhanced geothermal can (in theory) work in many more places since it can create the geology needed to produce electricity.

Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.

Musk said under oath that they use distillation for Grok.

That's a fair point to make. It was impressive what they achieved with 90s hardware. Of course OCR to general object recognition is a big gap in how interesting it is.

We didn't have big enough compute and data to do interesting things with them until recently. That changed with ImageNet in 2012

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/03/1011616/ai-godfa...

I wonder if that's an indication that they are not distilling which limits how good they can get.

They can be resold, they have great value for anyone wanting to provide their own power to a DC. Demand is so high they might be able to make a profit.

Wouldn't you want more data to learn if its "fine" vs "not fine"? If you learned that small departments were significantly worse than larger ones on use of force, corruption, etc wouldn't that inform a decision?

Well, how fine grained do we need to get? A police force with 5 officers is pretty fine. In this case law enforcement is being taken over by the county (of which there are 254 in Texas) so its still pretty local.

> Last week, the [state] agency sent a letter to the city notifying it that its five-member police department would be closed effective Sept. 18. Law enforcement duties will be transferred to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office until a permanent solution is found.

> The agency said its investigation found the department failed to meet minimum standards and failed to provide sufficient evidence that it provided a "public benefit to the community." The department also failed to provide resources to its officers, including bulletproof vests and an evidence room.

The US has many thousands of little law enforcement jurisdictions like this. The argument for it is local control but in practice you too often get situations like this one. Poor quality, abuses, corruption, good-old-boys network, lack of accountability, frequent unnecessary use of force, etc. Large police organizations are certainly not w/o problems but at this point there are accountability mechanisms and modern standards.

The WaPo did an excellent article a few years ago looking at the fragmented LEO landscape

"Most police departments in America are small. That’s partly why changing policing is difficult, experts say"

https://archive.li/05zA7

> The NASA/ESA MSR was of substantially higher quality

If it doesn't happen then its of worse quality.

Grok did ask its users what it thought about the right wing fever dream of genocide of white people in South Africa so its definitely relevant to one's consideration of the product.

> I'm curious if you feel the same about re-migration of Belgians from the Congo?

Can't say I've ever heard anyone implying that colonialists leaving Belgium was unjust. Colonialists is actually not the right word, more like extended occupation, only slightly better than the enslavement of the Leopold II era. The Belgian's were less than 1% of the population and all but an ancillary amount worked in exploiting the native population.

> And the problems haven’t been completely ironed out: the first launch attempt of Starship’s flight test 13 was aborted automatically by the vehicle’s flight software at T-0 (right before liftoff) this past July when several Raptor 3 engines failed to start

And several engines failed to relight on the booster for flight 13. I believe ice in feed lines is viewed as the most likely cause.

> The problem with Solar is once someone buys it they can continuously use it for a long time with out participating in the economy.

An odd statement. That could be considered a "problem" for an incumbent energy provider, like say Exxon. But it would be considered a solution for an energy user who would now have more money to devote to something else in the economy.

None of those are ready to deploy, they are in experimental testing. They have several phases of that still to go before they can get a license.

There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.

Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.

NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.

Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.

Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.

> The US isn't expanding fossil fuel extraction, its quite the opposite.

Not according to the federal government's data. BTUs from fossil fuel production set a record last year and is on a faster pace this year. Your bringing up a few coal plants is only tangentially relevant.

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_3.pdf

> The US could switch every ICE vehicle to EV's and install solar and wind turbines in every inch of the country and it won't combat what's going on in China, India and other developing countries that rely on coal for cheap energy.

Are you familiar with the concept of necessary but not sufficient?

In any event the war with Iran is speeding up the future that was coming anyway. China's EV and solar exports are surging throughout the world. Both China and India have said for many years that their emissions would rise and then fall.

For those that don't recall or weren't around the Obama administration send thousands of medical and military to assist with the 2013-2016 outbreak. A big part of what they did was construct medical wards, but they helped with treatment, PPE, testing infrastructure, etc.

That outbreak had 11K dead and things were on the verge of being a lot worse. There were beginning to be neighborhood level lockdowns to prevent spread and civil unrest. Its difficult to play what-if games but it certainly was a very serious situation.

From what I've heard this outbreak is spreading faster than that one at the same stage.

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

The US has travel restrictions, therefore you are incorrect that "western countries don't even entertain the possibility of preemptively denying travel from these countries until things get under control"

https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/situation-summary/returning-travel...

Depends on how easily the Canadian electricity can be replaced. The market is pretty tight right now.

This would seem to be an issue MAHA would want to engage on. But they instead seem to be focused on issues for which there's no evidence or even substantial negative evidence like vaccines. What a wasted opportunity to actually improve public health.

Isn't this what Elon Musk has unironically claimed he is doing with grokipedia?

Maybe a non-event for safety but what about getting the plant operating again?