yungchin

Not sure if this other scandal has a name yet, but it's basically a combined diesel+petrolgate, and certainly involves more than just VW: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/apr/05/bmw-daimler...

"Between 2006 and 2014, the commission suspects that the “circle of five” carmakers ... colluded to limit, delay or avoid the introduction of selective catalytic reduction systems (SCRs) and “Otto” particle filters."

I'm not sure this is bad news for Tesla, I'd say it's mostly bad news for the rest of us.

Tesla has reached enough scale to be more or less sustainable (in the sense that they don't need to be posting losses anymore), and I'd imagine they can continue to grow, if more slowly, without the rapid expansion of battery production capacity that this story is about.

But the great aim behind the gigafactory (at least, how I read it) was to drive battery cost down very aggressively, that is, working on the supply-side economics. This would then make EVs (not just Teslas) accessible to more people sooner, without all the subsidies (which have been a demand-side hack that didn't even work very well). If this means a slower clean transition (and I think it does) that's a sad outcome.

Yes, we've got this on our shower drain. In this configuration it does better than a degree or two, recovering some 50% of the heat, in fact.

I think when I did the numbers for our heat pump, a catastrophic leak that would release all its refrigerant would result in a GHG contribution equivalent to a year of emissions from our (previous) natural gas heating. Can't find the figures now so do check before quoting me on it ;)

Alternatively, Mitsubishi has been selling a first-generation product that uses CO2 as the refrigerant (the QUHZ model). It posts a COP of 3 for producing domestic hot water (that's pretty good) - I'm not sure why they don't post the COP for room heating, maybe it's not great. But I'm curious what the second-generation product will do!

You could do some heat recovery from the sewer, but it would be a yucky affair - they already tend to clog even without heat sink fins in them :)

Here are some calculations suggesting that the numbers simply don't add up for ground-source heat pumps at urban population densities: https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_152.shtml

> Enriching the soil with compost also helps increase fertility. As a result, the overall size of vegetables increases, diluting the amount of lead they contain. The effects of using compost can be striking. In the study, addition of compost cut the available concentration of lead by as much as one-half.

This is a statement that's technically true, and at the same time practically wrong. If the context is that I'm going to be eating tomatoes from my garden, what's likely to happen is that if my yield doubles, my consumption doubles (unless I have a massive garden and can't eat everything I grow). So now I'm eating the same amount of lead, just in a bigger package!

Yes but going by these numbers, even 1 hour of use a day would produce a marginal profit on every scooter added. An hour sounds attainable. And coming up with clever operations hacks that push utilisation towards two hours a day sounds like the sort of challenge that most startup founders would love to be dealing with :)

(edit: another comment in this thread mentions the current batteries only last one hour, so that probably limits daily usage.... taking the long view that's ok I think, because at this point it seems a safe bet that batteries will be a lot cheaper in a few years time.)

> Like one would say, what about the effects of water vapor on climate change?

Is that a skeptics' thing? The answer is, water vapour is yet another positive feedback. https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.htm...

> Perhaps it's not. AMZN is a for-profit entity. Their shareholders come first. Profit comes first.

The good news is that that's a myth, apparently: https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

They limit themselves to only those solutions which have been vetted by the scientific process, and that could be readily implemented with currently available technology. In a way you're right that that's not an optimistic take, but in another way there's a lot of optimism there: they show that adding up the impacts of only that limited set of solutions could already achieve drawdown!

I'd recommend reading The Procrastination Equation. It sets out a simple model of how your brain makes these choices, and makes it clear what all the levers are to help you "game" your brain. It explains why shorter productivity cycles are so powerful, for example. It also sets out that there's a lot of variability in how sensitive individuals are to changes in the parameters - this is just a fact of life: you - and I! - may be more predisposed to it than most other people, so we have to work harder to battle it.

One very interesting parameter is how valuable - to your mind - the outputs of your labour are to you. It's of course not an easy parameter to change, but it's good thinking about it. Is your procrastination telling you something about your work?

The context for that quote was missing I think (that is, missing from the original article, not your comment), but it makes more sense if they're talking about turning rock into fertile soil.

You would have had a whole succession of different types of plants to slowly work the rock surface. Then humans show up, rip out all the trees that kept that hard-won top soil in place, and it all runs off out to sea in no time. Basically it's about places like Iceland, not Iowa, I guess.

If we're to believe https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601514/germany-runs-up-ag... then the Germans didn't quite "have to [...] start building coal fired plants", but they have trouble stopping people from building more coal fired plants, because that is still economically lucrative.

Indeed this is due to missing options in the installer: with some manual fiddling, it's long been possible to make grub boot from encrypted disk (thus removing the need for a separate /boot and its space issues): https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1062623

You could probably fix this on your system without installing from scratch, but it would take some careful planning (mostly wrt backups!). You'd need to boot from a recovery cd or such, copy /boot into /, edit /etc/fstab accordingly, and then follow the last few steps in the bug report above (from the chrooting onwards). I'd probably test this in a VM first.

I did, but I (perhaps naively) took it as someone cheerfully geeking out about something cool their friends built, and which they're now interfacing with.

I do appreciate you're pointing out this alternative take. I guess what clouded our discussion is that we mixed questioning their motivations (the investors thing) and their judgement (ie is zcash a good choice?). I missed the latter, focusing on the former only.

Thanks very much for this. Based on the one or two private individuals featuring on both lists, I'm inclined to think your original post was exceedingly strongly worded.

I couldn't decide whether to up- or downvote this: it sounds like equal parts 1) information worth bringing to people's attention and 2) slandering a team that seem really nice fellas to me. So I looked both companies up on CrunchBase, and can find zero overlap between investors declared there. Where did your information come from?

> Eating less meat or a carbon tax (i.e taxing the working poor) is not a solution.

As for taxing the poor, that's fixable: the legislation should have all revenues from a carbon tax returned as per-capita "rebates" (I'd think of it as a Basic Income paid for by polluters).

I'm sure someone else will chime in to name the logical fallacy you're setting us off on. It's completely besides the point whom these actions were targeted against. And if they objected to her on merits, they should have objected to her on merits, not restructure the organisation in the way they did.

Ah, thanks, those threads are great reading. Yeah there's not too much new here, although I was surprised to read that some employees and customers got out, apparently in protest to the pay raises.

If we all came around to taxing mining externalities as we should, then yes. Currently the carbon footprint of mining the lithium and all the other havoc around it are not correctly priced in. So now recycling looks bad, because moving batteries back to a recycling centre involves relatively more human labour, and without accounting for externalities, human labour apparently turns out the most expensive bit.

Nasty economics at work: the price of lithium is low enough that recycling is not really cost-effective, so most of them end up in landfill (including the nickel and cobalt components...). But recycling is actually possible so enough publicity may bring people around. Tesla eg does care about recycling: http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/jun/10/tesla-bat...

It always bothers me that newspapers usually omit hyperlinks to relevant information. Here's a paper by the guy they interview in the article: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/245612

"[...] two-stroke scooters, vehicles that constitute a small fraction of the fleet, but can dominate urban vehicular pollution through organic aerosol and aromatic emission factors up to thousands of times higher than from other vehicle classes."

(PS: don't make that into an argument for cars and against scooters though. By reducing congestion, people opting for scooters can help all other road users pollute less. So electric scooters should be a priority - http://www.etatrust.org.uk/2014/05/scooters-vs-cars-vs-lorri... )

According to the article, he was very aware of the investigation: tax officers interviewed him about his bitcoin assets.

Submitted this mostly for this bit of insight:

If technology is constantly creating new jobs, why aren't we seeing more employment and wage growth? Bessen argues that many workers today face the same problem textile workers faced in 1845: until technology is standardized, it's difficult to profit from investments in new skills.

Early textile companies built their looms in slightly different ways, and they were constantly tinkering with them. These differences made job-hopping difficult. Someone who had mastered one company's equipment wouldn't necessarily be more productive at other mills in town.

> It seems fair to ask for a minimum level of work contributing back to society

I think BI proponents argue that specifying what counts as a contribution leads to economic inefficiencies, in the broadest sense. Does taking care of your own children count as a contribution? Or sitting in the pub and making other visitors happy by your presence? What about writing software and putting it on Github? And for the latter, should you get a minimum number of stars to make it count? How long should the list of "useful activities" be, that the Department of Civil Contributions would maintain? And how much money would we spend on civil servants who determine whether your edge case qualifies?

The result would be that people end up doing artificially much of what counts as "contributing", and too little of some things that aren't specified as "contributing", but that society actually still benefits from.

Would some people just sit on the couch all day, and really contribute nothing, by any standard? Yes, probably. So the premise here is that the number of true freeloaders is small enough, that it would be inefficient to worry about them. I personally don't know any true freeloaders, which leads me to think that that's probably a fair assumption.

I'm not sure what you mean? If I hold more shares, I get more dividends. That's not redistributive, unlike what groupcurrency proposes.

Edit: ah wait, I think I know what you mean. When I wrote they have "no built-in basic income", I meant "no built-in Basic Income" - as per the context of this thread.

But there's a difference: Apple shareholders don't see their shares redistributed at a steady pace - Apple shares don't have a built-in basic income.

The reason why I think even a single exit might do a lot to the price of MusicianCoins, is that financial success (not only in the music industry) seems to follow some sort of power law: a very small number of members amass a large part of the wealth [1].

Do people behave like this in real life (ie abandon their group when they strike success)? Well certainly not most people - men like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates haven't taken up citizenship in some tax haven to opt out of US taxes - but IIRC one of the Facebook founders did.

There are at least two reasons why it may be a bigger problem for MusicianCoin than it is for the USA: 1) the group size is bound to be smaller, so a single such event would cause a bigger shock, and 2) it's a much easier decision to sell your crypto-coins than it is to move country.

Of course this is all arm-chair economics on my part, and I actually hope you're right that in practice it's not such an issue - I love the idea and would love to see it work well.

[1]: see these sort of numbers, where the top 1% pay 23% of taxes: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/14/8406445/tax-state-local-distri... - and I reckon what would have been really interesting is if they had broken it down to how much of that 23% is carried by the top 0.1%

How do you prevent members from only enjoying the upside?

Example: say we're a group of musicians, starting a MusicianCoin group. I happen to be a fairly shameless participant, so I enjoy the basic income while I'm still bootstrapping my career, but one day I hit it big, and now my concerts are all sold out for the next year (and of course, tickets are sold in exchange for MusicianCoins).

Do I give back to the group? If I want to do that, that's easy: I just sit on my newly earned pile of MusicianCoins, and wait for the steady rate of minting to dissipate the value away to other members of the group. But what if I just exit my position immediately? By trading my MusicianCoins for dollars (thereby putting downward pressure on the value of MusicianCoin), I'm avoiding giving back any of the value I created, I think?

I think this is what makes it fundamentally different than a tax-based basic income: you can't (legally) opt out of taxes.

I posted the same link in this thread already, in another context, but it's relevant enough: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling... "The result from this process is that we are able to recycle about 60% of the ESS materials and reuse a further 10% (by weight). We currently plan to landfill only the benign fluff, which comprises about 25% of the ESS, but we expect to nearly eliminate this in the future when our volumes get higher and we can justify the effort required to separate and reuse the plastic."