71–80 of 133 posts
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Fossil fuels are a finite and dwindling resource, and its use is possibly causing an extinction event. The human race can't really afford to buy the cheaper option here.
An alternative to that is to sit and do nothing.
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People don't want to hear this but Windows in 2020 is probably more reliable than desktop Linux. Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
Hmmmm.. yes it is probably more reliable as a desktop with equivalent features. When running a simple tiled WM Linux is solid. If you look at the wider eco system, Windows doesn't look so hot. I've just moved from a Linux based work place to a Windows based work place. The number of times the main file server has to be restarted because it's doing something weird is crazy. This never happened at my old job. The Linux…
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Because you do not get to be a billionaire by pissing away all of your money on a fool's errand. Fusion is a black hole of broken promises that will not delivery a single watt of useful energy to consumers in your lifetime and additional funding from Gates won't change this. Fission works. Fission delivers today. Fission gets the job done. Making fission cheaper, easier to deploy, and safer will have a much bigger im…
Becoming a billionaire and trying to push the envelope are different activities, although sometimes they align. And as you describe, when a guy catches some important near term thing that nobody sees - that's where he finds billions. But the unreachable areas are sometimes not that unreachable. Look at the space industry companies. If you ignore the flagship ones that popped up in a scale of mere years then moving ou…
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People don't want to hear this but Windows in 2020 is probably more reliable than desktop Linux. Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
They have improved a lot, but there are still the forced restarts, as well as the poor document recovery of the office suite. Together this is a bad combo as I'm constantly worried I might have lost some data in the documents I work on. They have improved the document recovery quite a lot in the last two years, but they still manage to make the process rather confusing, so sometimes I accidentally save the version wi…
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Windows is reliable for general public.
People don't want to hear this but Windows in 2020 is probably more reliable than desktop Linux. Windows isn't what it used to be in 1999. And desktop Linux QA standards are nothing to write home about, unfortunately.
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Intermittent sources are usually quoted as peak. That is multiplied by a typical capacity factor to determine average load. For offshore wind, 60% is a reasonable number I think.
Seems to be more like 40% [1] and it's worth noting that in a lot of geographies you still need full backup for wind farms as the wind speed can drop low across the whole country/continent. [1] - https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors
Of course managing intermittence is not easy and free, but nobody is talking about a 100% wind-power grid, and the current installations can absorb a fair amount of intermittence with extra investment... And wind and solar are becoming so cheap that you have a lot of space to pay for managing intermittence - that can be using differently the current installations, developing a demand-response market, and doing some thermal and electrical storage...
[1] see for example https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... keeping in mind the average capacity factor include older equipment with low capacity factor... and that offshore wind is "just starting"
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I thought about this quite often. I do think one of the biggest possible changes could be a new religion based on 'working together', sustainability, education etc. but without any god figure. Build up this religion in form of a hierarchical network. Bring in everyone and give them a chance to do things together. Make basic rules which do not exclude too many people but make those basic rules clear and do not allow a…
I don't mean to be flippant, but what you have described sounds an awful lot like the economy. In the book Sapiens , the author describes organisations, money, Capitalism, Communism and more as religions without a deity. The detail that you included which stopped me from calling this utopian is "form of a hierarchical network". It is of course important to recognise that a classless society is impossible. As for solv…
I don't wanna look through a catalog of different organizations doing different things.
I wanna build and do things together with similar minded people.
345MW for "$1B", which is presumably the delivered cost. Add another $1B for running, insurance, and decommissioning (or show me real numbers). Walney is a new nameplate 588MW offshore wind farm; it will average close to the same delivered energy and cost $3B.[1] If Terrapower can actually deliver at roughly those costs, they might make a real contribution to our energy future. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotlan…
I'm not sure if this is a valid comparison. It feels to me that the wind farm wins when both cost the same simply because it does not require manned operation and it consumes no fuel. You're unlikely to run out of skilled personnel by deploying too many wind turbines.
This is great. We could pave the world with solar panels (that need replacing every few years), mining up tons of politically sensitive rare earth elements, and covering over what remains of our ecosystem and we would be close to what we could achieve with modern, safe reactor designs and our virtually unlimited supply of thorium fuel
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This is a pretty horrible attitude to have, but to try to make something positive from this, which problems do you think Gates or someone in his position would be better suited to solving?
I thought about this quite often. I do think one of the biggest possible changes could be a new religion based on 'working together', sustainability, education etc. but without any god figure. Build up this religion in form of a hierarchical network. Bring in everyone and give them a chance to do things together. Make basic rules which do not exclude too many people but make those basic rules clear and do not allow a…