torpfactory

Thermodynamics places limits on heat engine efficiency. For a gasoline engine it is about 35%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermody...

I have a theory that one of the core problems is that American businesses just expect to make too much money. Everyone seems to be aiming for 30% gross margin or more, and then working to get monopoly power or regulatory capture in order to achieve that.

When I work with businesses in China they sort of expect cutthroat competition and I'm sure they're not seeing 30% margins. Low a behold stuff is a lot cheaper there, beyond what you'd expect given the labor price difference.

I'm not so sure I would bet on it. I think China would rather "reunite" without force, but Xi has put his personal imprimateur on "reunification". Nothing gets people to forget about economic anxiety like a good old-fashioned patriotic war. At this point, I think a lot of it is bluffing- better to have the Americans give up on defending Taiwan without a shot being fired. Better to make the Taiwanese think that "reunification" is inevitable and forget about notions of freedom.

I don't think people realize just how complicated these machines are. A remote off switch just works faster than the alternative. A steady stream of parts and experts from various locations around the world is required to keep these things operating smoothly.

Without the ASML service contract most would be unusable after a few months. The amount of technology brought to bear here is really only possible because of worldwide cooperation among thousands of vendors and tens of thousands of engineers. These machines are an extension of some pretty impressive institutions (ASML corp, for example), not just metal and glass.

If China were to invade and if Taiwan or the US fought back, we would all be in a world of hurt, economically. Taiwan makes most of the high end logic chips the world uses, and China makes many of the lower tier, but still necessary chips for things like power management, etc. With sources for these devices offline, a lot of economic activity would begin to halt. We really must avoid war at all costs.

It's worse than that:

> Me: Give me a small sample code in Ruby that takes two parameters and returns the Levenshtein distance between them.

> ChatGPT: <<Submits working Ruby code that is slow>> But here is some C# code that is faster. For tasks like this a lot of programmers are using C#, you wouldn't want to get left behind.

I don't buy that Microsoft's involvement does much to prevent spills. Exxon, for example, cares about spills mostly as a function of 1) regulation, 2)reputation risk and 3) employees who do care about things being done cleanly. I guess Microsoft's software could maybe enable the employees a bit more, but fundamentally the reasons they are safe have to do with incentives, not technology.

I mean, I think there is a reasonable argument here: Microsoft has corporate environmental goals and then as a matter of profit takes money from interests working in direct opposition to those goals. It does smack of hypocrisy, no?

I'd like to debate a few of your other points: "Let's make the extraction of the life blood of all industry on the planet less efficient, less streamlined, less clean." - People often make this argument and I agree: oil is the _current_ life blood of all industry. The oil companies would like to keep it that way and have for years fought a very effective campaign to avoid responsibility for the externalities of oil production and consumption. They have slowed or blocked progress towards a _future_ where oil is not the lifeblood of industry. That is what we really need to get to as a species, don't you agree? There are no physics-based reason why some other technology couldn't power our lives. There are cost-based reasons why oil is currently the winning solution. This only works because we don't price the externalities, the _future_, yet to be paid cost of oil consumption. Fossil fuel companies have stood in the way of progress on renewables and exterality pricing for decades now.

"Which come down to not using oil and gas on one hand, and having health and goods on the other hand. And you can't get the second without using the first."

I think that very much USED to be true but is now definitely NOT the case.

We can make the switch to complete renewables, or at least make a 90+% reduction in GHG intensity. Not quickly and not without short term cost but it is finally possible without bankrupting us. At this point we are fighting inertia and monied interests who would prefer the energy status quo. Hydrocarbon energy is wildly profitable and very convenient but we shouldn't act like it's the only game in town any more.

Back when I was in semiconductors in the US (worked for a prominent wafer fab equipment vendor), there was a push to improve efficiency by logging all your hours, describing the projects you were doing, and giving them subjective importance scores. My manager was like- "Don't waste your time on that, its worthless. Everyone ends up reporting they are working 110% on the most important projects if you ask them."

Anyways the fabs in the US always had lower employee efficiency because the Taiwanese and Korean fabs would always show their employees managing to get installs or maintenance done in record time without any using any overtime. What was happening was simple wage theft: employees were expected to complete unpaid overtime. That was the culture, which rolled downhill from the TSMC and Samsung fab managers: your teams either work unpaid overtime or they find another job.

Occasionally US based personnel would go over to help if there was a big install effort or something. The local account teams didn't like doing this because the US guys wouldn't work unpaid. Thus the install hours would start creeping up and it made them look bad.

I think pharmacies should have two sections: one for drugs that have been scientifically studied and are FDA approved. Another section (separate aisle) for all the bullshit supplements with a big disclaimer (sometimes called the quack miranda warning): "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease." Right now these products are often co-mingled.

There was a case in the 90s I think of a Canadian weather balloon that they tried to shoot down with (fighter plane) guns and had a pretty tough time of it. Guns at that altitude too could be an issue as you lose control authority in thin air and the gun destabilizes flight controls even more.

The big question is why China would send a balloon. My best guess is it carried electronic warfare sensors to try and collect specific information about US radar and missile capabilities. They may have in fact wanted us to shoot it down, ideally first painting it with advanced radar (both air and ground based) and then firing an advanced missile at it. Data could be streamed out until the moment of impact and used to create better ways to jam or avoid US missiles. Sending it over sensitive sites may have been an attempt to force the US to take such action.

I’ve heard rumors that it was shot down by an AIM 9X, which is IR guided, a good choice as its seeker doesn’t use radar and thereby expose the terminal radar guidance information. I’m going to go way out on a limb here and theorize the delay was due to brand new upgrades required to the AIM 9X software to be able to lock on to and hit a balloon, which they probably were not originally capable of.

You're making very aggressive assumptions about amount of use the EV battery would be subject to, to the point of this being a straw man. You're right that people wouldn't agree to have their expensive EV battery trashed by multiple 0-100% discharge cycles daily. You wouldn't get any takers if that was your offer.

A more reasonable expectation is that people would lease a portion of their capacity. Say 20% for argument sake. You could even place other limits on it "never below 50% and above 90% on weekdays". In this example the power company gets to use between 50% and 90% state of charge in your battery on weekdays and pays you a small fee or other compensation in return.

Being able to do “ignition” reliably means you can do experiments in a regime where the energy from fusion starts to become a large part of the reaction. Dynamics in this regime are non-linear, so being able to actually test there is fairly important. Updating models and simulation inputs based on these results should make some further progress possible. This device is significantly different than a power reactor, but other efforts might see a benefit from a better understanding of reaction physics during “ignition”.

You kind of have to choose what sort of destruction you want: either you can have marginally more mining for the minerals required for battery production or you can have ecosystem wide damage due to further global warming. There is no free lunch.

The key technological innovation is a fully integrated thermal management system which cools and/or warms the battery, inverters (and any other electronics), and cabin. Ideally it should use a single heat pump (much much more efficient than resistance heaters), with fluid loops to transfer heat energy from where it is generated to where it can be used (or wasted) most efficiently. This is a large ask from a mechanical design perspective since it involves many separate teams and impacts many subassemblies. Software control is also fairly complicated.

Most manufacturers have not opted for a fully integrated system (thus cannot transfer waste heat to where it might be best used) or have not incorporated a heat pump (and are really wasting a lot of energy on resistance heating), and pay the price in cold-weather range. Heat pumps are the obvious engineering solution, but integrating them with the rest of the vehicle systems is not straightforward due to quirks of heat pump performance. The Model 3 was the first Tesla model to use the integrated heat pump system, and only after selling for 3 years using a resistance heater. I guarantee Tesla knew about the heat pump approach but spent years getting to a productizable, performant solution.

Cold weather range loss will be a reality for both ICE and EVs, but there are no physical reasons why the range loss can't be kept to a modest amount.

Eliminate subsidies and mandates for ethanol in gasoline. 14-16 million acres of land devoted to a mono crop of corn requiring copious fertilizer and pesticide. Basically this converts oil into a slightly larger quantity of ethanol with some of the most productive farmland in the world.

I don’t think my problem is being able to get the words from my brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is composing meaningful written communication, a process which is unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.

Serious question: Where do you get that rhetoric from? There has been next to zero actual restrictions forced by the federal on lower levels of government. Most of the restrictions are decided at the city and county level and plenty don’t have any restrictions at all. And conform or die? Who is messaging that death is the penalty for not following the nonexistent restrictions?

The issue is that while mines produce relatively localized environmental damage, climate change will produce globalized damage by ecosystem collapse and sea level rise. The sum total of this damage will be far greater than the marginal increase in mining required for battery production. Shifting, for sure, but the scale of destruction is the real question.

There really isn’t that much lithium in today’s “Lithium ion” batteries. A few percent by weight. Much more Nickel, Cobalt, Aluminum, Carbon, Copper, and Iron than Lithium. Lithium metal anodes would push that number up but that flavor hasn’t really solved it’s lifespan problems yet.

I have a pet conspiracy theory that spam calls have significantly reduced the effectiveness of political polling.

Definitely sounds like an EMTALA violation. You aren’t allowed to release a patient who is in that bad of shape, regardless of ability to pay.

My wife was an ER nurse until recently and they were often in a bind with abusive patients who refused treatment. They couldn’t release them for fear they’d quickly degrade, and they couldn’t keep them around because the staff would get hurt. ERs are kind of the dumping ground of society.

In Tennessee a physician may give a vaccine without parental consent.

https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/health/documents/Mature_Mi...

The really crazy part is that they never did a full up integrated test of all those systems together and in sequence before arriving at Mars.

Stainless strength is ~1600MPA at -200C, Titanium is ~900MPA. Density difference is 8.0g/cc vs. 4.5g/cc for titanium. So at low temp, strength to weight ratio is about even.

Maximum working temp for stainless is ~800C vs ~600C for Titanium, therefore requiring a smaller heat shield. Some parts of the vehicle will require no shielding or insulation.

So strength to weight is a wash at low temp (fully loaded with propellant), stainless is better at high temp (re-entry) and Titanium costs ~10x more. Aluminum is also cheap and easy to work with but will require larger heat shields. SpaceX is making a trade-off between weight, re-usability, development cost, and development speed. I really think between the marginal performance benefits and significant manufacturability challenges Titanium just doesn't bring a lot to the table.

Stainless maintains better strength at ultra low temperatures, is an order of magnitude cheaper, and can be manufactured more easily with a vastly larger set of forming and joining options.

Wolves by and large do not attack humans:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wolf_attacks_in_Nort...

We might be afraid of them but that fear isn’t grounded in reality.

I think the core difference is the level of tailoring and the automation of that tailoring. Newspapers, magazines, television, and radio have all had the same incentives in the past, but architecturally the approach was one to many. At first the internet was more of the same, but today social media companies construct optimized engagements for each individual, automatically and very effectively. This is a one-to-one optimization.

Furthermore, social media supercharges the engagement by piggybacking on our social nature - people are usually responding to stuff their friends posted or commented on. This both allows disinformation to be received as more truthful (my friend sent it, why would they lie?) and simply makes it more compelling (I get to be happy/sad/outraged with my friends).

Put it all together and it really is different than before. It's fine to compare it to historical changes in media. I don't agree that it's just more of the same though, the differences make this a whole new animal.

Electric planes will replace car and bus trips before they replace gas planes. Short range, on demand, point to point, cheap travel could really be a game changer. Think what you used to do as a two hour drive- battery electric planes will be able to do that, a distance that today isn’t economical because of the high cost of jet and turboprop maintenance and fuel, and the need for runways. All those commenting- “but the energy density” are right, but don’t miss the forest for the trees. The sky is an underutilized asset.