unchocked

Recertification now goes through a Green energy minister. This is pretty much pulling the plug.

Tangentially, Kalman filters were first applied in... tracking flying objects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter#History

Hard to say, but you'd think there are landlines to the nukes.

I try to read these polemics to uncover the seams of my own techno-optimistic worldview.

This one, I think, centers around the idea that technological solutions don’t solve social problems (which has merit).

But at least superficially, I don’t understand why the author polemicizes against technological solutions for technological problems, and seems to argue that (unspecified) social solutions for technological problems are more appropriate.

On a deeper level, and more subjectively, I suspect that polemics like these are motivated by frustration about our relative powerlessness over social problems, as compared to the effectiveness of solving technological problems with technology.

National security considerations encourage geographic dispersal of strategic assets.

From a normative perspective, terminators are self-evidently dangerous as all hell and should be prohibited.

From a realist frame, I don’t think there will be a deal. Narrow national interests are too divergent w/r/t/ capabilities, intentions, and alternatives. Furthermore, verifibility and consequent trust is weak.

I hope to outlive this age of spectacle.

You’re not wrong, you’re just missing the point. It’s that laws should be enforced by people, not by machines.

That’s a feature, which rhymes with the author’s argument: that there are politics and that people decide norms, and whether or not you agree with the decisions, having immutable code just go ahead and enforce/permit/control whatever is a dystopia that we should not want.

Not crystal clear after reading the paper - does this result in a glassine (no ice crystals) frozen food that can be maintained as such in an ordinary freezer, or does it require specialized storage (i.e near the triple point)?

Autarky on Mars, sure now. But now, the richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building 1,000 Starships to build a city on Mars and I'm pretty sure he's going to pull it off.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1461235511511633922

... the second richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building the a city in Earth orbit.

Great! That's cheap for what you get. As soon as we've built out a few $trillion in battery storage, we can get going on long-term hydrogen storage and distribution!

The Chernobyl exclusion zone, terrible as it is, doesn’t hold a candle to the realities of climate change.

Geological repositories are the solution for long term storage. They are not only technologically feasible, but actually constructed and waiting for use.

Ignoring the solution is not the same as there being no solution.

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

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

There are no guarantees. You need to compare vs. the safety of burning coal, for the climate and for human health. You need to compare it with how sure you are that renewables & storage will satisfy our energy needs tomorrow, or the safety of not having enough energy to go around.

That said, nuclear is pretty safe. I would live next door to a nuclear power plant, and if I did I would be likelier to die slipping in the shower.

Finland is a hero on nuclear energy development. After the US bailed on Yucca Mountain, Finland is the only country I know building a stable geological waste repository. Great to see the realist Greens coming along on nuclear as well.

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

* to be anti-nuclear is to be anti-climate, and pro-coal.

I've been prodding friends in the climate movement about their community's historical opposition to nuclear power lately. In my view, opposing nuclear power after 1989 (Hansen's testimony to the US Senate) is anti-climate.

I've held up France as an example of where we could be in an alternate history where states did not bow to anti-nuclear activism. Unfortunately, from the article, it seems France is heading in that direction as well.

> In October 2014 the Energy Transition for Green Growth bill was passed by the National Assembly and so went onto the Senate. This set a target of 50% for nuclear contribution to electricity supply by 2025, and capped nuclear power capacity at 63.2 GWe, the level at the time. This meant that EDF would have to shut at least 1650 GWe of nuclear capacity when its Flamanville 3 EPR starts commercial operation.

A sad decision to see in the only pro nuclear power democracy. And a sad decision for climate, because for decades past and for decades to come, anti-nuclear is pro-coal.

*edit, the French government also seems to be slow-walking the tragic mandate:

> In October 2016 the government postponed until after the 2017 presidential and National Assembly elections any decision on which, if any, reactors would close in order to reduce the nuclear share to 50%. In 2017 France postponed its 2025 target for reducing the share of nuclear to 50%. In December 2017 the French President stated that nuclear is "the most carbon-free way to produce electricity with renewables." In November 2018, a draft of the country's new energy plan confirmed that 2035 was the new target date for the reduction of nuclear's share to 50%. The plan states that 14 of the country's nuclear reactors will shut down by 2035, 4-6 of those by 2030. However the plan also states that the option to build new nuclear reactors remains.

If you can ban public deployment of facial recognition, you can also ban public deployment of engagement maximizers.

It’s time to start regulating algorithms.

This is great - now we can have algorithmic production of output from data-driven script bots!

Between the noise of self-driving singularlists, and that of self-driving impossibilists, it's great to see plodding, sequential progress like this.

It's the thing that will most predictably change everything. Anxiety is anticipation with a negative outlook. Living under a power structure that's so inefficacious, and a culture that's so in denial, I think the kids would be crazy to be anything but - not only anxious - but more anxious than the rest of us are.

Good. There is no better use of state power than ensuring public health. Supreme Court resolved this in 1905 w/r/t smallpox.

It is a long bet on renewables+storage. From easiest to hardest (and most efficient to least efficient):

- Renewables+batteries are already cheap enough for a few hours storage

- Flow batteries can go overnight to weeks

- Synthetic fuels (i.e. hydrogen, or synthetic hydrocarbons made with green hydrogen & CO2 captured from the air) can be stored indefinitely and transported globally

Yet it's absolutely required for synthesizing hydrocarbons from CO2 so, there's that.

I mean, pick any fuel you want, their utility as stores of energy are all based on hydrogen content. So we're going to kick the fossil habit and still have fuel of _any_ sort, we're going to have to learn to produce and utilize hydrogen at scale.

Grey and blue hydrogen are transition fuels. They build a market for green hydrogen to fill. It's going to be a little messy along the way.

The scooter shop could have a protection arrangement. The laptop repair man clearly does not.

I find it odd that the author dismisses hydrogen storage largely based on the requirement to mine water for electrolysis and then goes on to propose using ~12,000 tonnes of water for thermal energy storage.

It's bad. It's really bad. And it's already here. So we need to talk about minimizing the forcing and the effects, and stop pretending like we are going to somehow avoid catastrophe.

That means driving emissions toward zero, and carbon removal, and solar geoengineering, and adaptation. All of the above. Climate change is already happening and we're still way behind the curve.

I'm pretty sure that commodity retail has always, for my living memory at least, been a pretty stressful, insecure, and low-wage position.

Amazon's scale brings welcome visibility to the problem, and offers employees the chance to unionize, but I'm puzzled by upper-class culture's seemingly new discovery that commodity retail is a shitty job.

It's been a long time coming - manufacturer's been working on this for at least about a decade.

What's important about this fuel is that it should work in _any_ application that requires leaded gas. The most demanding applications are a small % of the engines overall, but get the most hours and burn the most fuel. So we've been waiting for a drop-in replacement that can supplant leaded gas entirely (market is too small for multiple aviation gasolines to be effectively distributed).

Of course, this is going to continue to take way longer to roll out than it should, but this first approval is a very big deal.

You're conflating chronic and acute exposure. Pop epidemiology 101.

Honestly I'm okay with that.