*affects
Oh, 2022
401–410 of 557 posts
Re: Oh, 2022
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cars don’t last as long as you’d think, on average. There will also be a knee in the curve where the ICE fleet drops below critical mass and gas stations start shutting down - and the harder it becomes to find a station, the faster people will switch.
I think ICE cars will see a retro use period like many nostalgic things, so while I agree the daily driver will change, it's very likely that fuel will be seen as some sort of luxury product. Right now fuel is a loss leader for most gas stations, that dynamic will definitely change as ICE vehicles become a toy or status symbol for upper middle class and wealthy people.
Huh, you're saying that gas station sell their main product at a loss and then make back the difference on what… tictacs and slim jims?
Re: Oh, 2022
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Diseases > Before 1492, Native Americans (Amerindians) hosted none of the acute infectious diseases that had long bedeviled most of Eurasia and Africa: measles, smallpox, influenza, mumps, typhus, and whooping cough, among others. In most places other than isolated villages, these had become endemic childhood diseases that killed one-fourth to one-half of all children before age six. Survivors, however, carried par…
You didn't address my direct point (speed of propagation) plus guess what, those wiped out several civilizations in the New World, directly contradicting your entire subthread.
We're vastly richer than the Inca or Aztecs, the most technologically advanced New World civilizations and we know about quarantine and infectious disease, which they didn't. The Inca almost survived getting multiple diseases ten or more times deadlier than COVID at the same time, while being assaulted by people with vastly superior weaponry. It's possible for diseases bad enough to end human civilization to emerge but COVID was never going to be it.
Re: Oh, 2022
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
Global Warming is absolutely a slow motion comet strike. We don't believe the science, because we don't WANT to believe it. Those of us that DO believe it feel like robots, speaking to the rest of mankind in ones and zeros. And it's still 10-20 years away, we all think. We will just move north (or south). We will just move inland or uphill. We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. None of that is true. When…
> We can science our way out of this shit. Not true. Why not? We have a lot of promising developments both in cheap energy production and in reducing the cost to vacuumed green house gases out of the atmosphere. I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still achieve net negative carbon by just ripping it out of the air. Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will…
>I can easily see a world where we change almost nothing about life and still
This is delusional thinking. There is no future where humanity will be able to continue the way it has and still have a non hostile planet to call home.
The math does not add up for carbon capture tech.
There isn't some scientific silver bullet there that will increase the capture yield.
Building the infrastructure will also emit. Powering the installations will take a lot of energy. There would need to be enormous amounts of these capturing station built around the world for them to make any significant dent in what is already in the atmosphere.
The resources and effort required is so wast, and for so little gain, that we should rather use the alternatives that would give us much more for less.
Subsidize farmers to switch from cattle rearing to forestry for instance. Turn swaths of reclaimed land back to its original wilderness.
Re: Oh, 2022
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Honestly we even have the technology to do it now just limited will if things ever get real bad that would change very quickly. COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. If things get real bad people will dig deeper to try to protect their own lifestyle right now, even if that means screwing things up 10 years from now. A…
> COVID tells me that’s highly unlikely. We literally have a movement rejecting known-to-save-lives technology for non-scientific reasons. COVID is different because you need a massive majority, 80%+, to follow certain guidelines (vaccine, masks, etc). For carbon it just needs to happen, anyone can do it. If the tech gets cheap enough Bill Gates will just setup shop in the desert and start sucking.
I think your perception of the ease of/effort required for atmospheric carbon capture is off by a few orders of magnitude.
Re: Oh, 2022
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the comments on Charlie's site, and not by me: Wyvernsridge | January 9, 2022 19:06 | Reply 8: I love these kinds of posts! I would, however, caution about thinking that the end of ICE car manufacturing will be dictated solely by government diktat. It will most likely come earlier and more chaotically because of manufacturers being unable to source parts and components to continue making those cars. The auto ind…
I don't think it's unlikely that ICEs will be phased out as quickly as the optimists are suggesting. Once there's critical momentum things move quickly, so +1 from me. However, all that new electricity demand needs to come from somewhere. Drawing power from the grid at night works great today, but that's because of a coincidental uneven energy demand, which I doubt will last for too long. Once EVs are truly mainstrea…
In a worst case you could just burn gasoline in some turbine supplying the grid and it would probably still be more efficient and cleaner than ICEs.
Re: Oh, 2022
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is that having such high fatality rates is a problem for a virus that hopes to become a pandemic Somebody forgot to tell that to smallpox, which had something like a 25 or 30% IFR before vaccines came around. And there were lots and lots of pandemics of that!
People got sufficiently tired of deadly smallpox outbreaks to mount vaccination campaigns, eventually we managed to vaccinate enough of the globe to make the virus extinct.
It still took pissed off communists with an axe to grind after getting hit with at least two smallpox epidemics to propose and support an eradication campaign.
Re: Oh, 2022
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's unlikely that ICEs will be phased out as quickly as the optimists are suggesting. Once there's critical momentum things move quickly, so +1 from me. However, all that new electricity demand needs to come from somewhere. Drawing power from the grid at night works great today, but that's because of a coincidental uneven energy demand, which I doubt will last for too long. Once EVs are truly mainstrea…
In a worst case you could just burn gasoline in some turbine supplying the grid and it would probably still be more efficient and cleaner than ICEs.
That's true for gas fired plants so I expect it would be the case for light liquid fuelled ones. You wouldn't burn petrol in them, because that fuel is very specific to piston engines (turbines don't need toxic anti-knock additives, for example).
As far as grid stability though, in more advanced countries it's relatively easy to build out more grid capacity, just expensive. Only in politically troubled countries like Australia and the USA does the "but how do we create an effective market for building the grid" dominate that discussion, and result in a poorly functioning grid but also (obviously) a badly broken market in providing a grid. Back when I was exposed to economics electricity grids were a cliche example of things where markets are inappropriate and inherently unworkable - they're a natural monopoly. Even the most die-hard capitalist isn't going to suggest two or three independent grids supplying every building... well, maybe in Texas :)
I'm in Australia, and the big advantage we have over much of the USA is being closer to the equator... only about half our current houses have solar PV on them, and less than a third of commercial buildings. We could get 20% more electricity just by fixing that, and it would be conveniently close to demand as well.
Re: Oh, 2022
#409> low-lying coastal nations like Bangladesh And lots of other places. About 1 billion people live along coastlines at 20 meters or less above sea level, and 200 million at 5 meters or less. I live in a wealthy country but well within the 5 meters range and am already having to think about whether it wouldn't be more prudent to sell my house today, now that it's still worth something, and emigrate to somewhere with a…
the immediate personal need to not live in a flooded zone is one thing to consider another thing to think about is the global geopolitical/civil war/economic possible disruptions and consequences of something like potentially half to 3/4 of bangladesh's population becoming international refugees. imagine what happened with syrians around 2012-2015 and people trying to get into europe multiplied by a factor of 50. and…
Imagine if all those desperate engineers in Bangladesh decided that rather than nuclear weapons to match India and Pakistan, they wanted them to build an Orion ship. A really, really big one. Think lofting 100M Bangladeshis into space. And moving to Mars.
That would create a whole different sort of climate change.
Re: Oh, 2022
#410Regarding spacex in this, my starlink terminal recently hit a milestone of 0.00% ICMP loss to terrestrial ISP things in the pacific northwest. Averaged over 5, 6 hour periods. 20 icmp pings every 60s, basically a default smokeping install set to once a minute. Previously it was running somewhere around 0.15% to 0.60% which was still totally usable... if you put a similar test setup on a noisy/oversubscribed coaxial c…
I'll go as far as to say that Starlink is now so good i honestly believe it's going to change the other industries and not just its own. As an example I've been looking at properties outside of suburbia since testing a friends Starlink terminal. I know i can get proper broadband on par with cable anywhere. It's changed my personal long term future plans. I think it's going to change a lot of things.
There's not enough satellites to be useful yet, terrestrial astronomy is still possible. They'd need to have ten times the current number to stop it, and that's not due to happen for a few years.
I reckon if they put their mind to it they could cause enough pollution to make cellphones unusable, maybe even open-air wifi. They're smart, I'm sure they have the technology, they could make the whole EM spectrum so dirty the whole sky would glow.