391–400 of 481 posts
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There’s such an amount of implied or perceived shame attached to using these government safety nets in America. I’d be surprised if anyone who was benefiting from them worked in coal.
And that is by design. There is a reason why people get food stamps and not just 1000 dollars on their bank account.
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Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline. I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop. It won't get cheaper than solar though.
Oil is processed using fractional distillation, we're not making the kerosene, in some sense a fraction of the oil "was" kerosene and we just split that out from the rest. It's not important that the kerosene was once a dead organism, we can technically just make it with energy, carbon and water, it's basically a narrow range of hydrocarbons so you synthesize a suitable mixture of CxHx chains and that'll work for e.g…
The question always is who is gonna pay for it?
Societies have other priorities much higher on their list compared to energy cleanness.
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Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings. So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).
Maritime shipping is targeting synfuels or ammonia. Hydrogen is not dense enough for ocean crossing voyages, too much cargo space is lost. They see the writing on the wall.
The whole point of transitioning away from fossils is to protect human life, not to eradicate it in seconds.
Since the 1990s the US has removed over 1,000 dams. If those dams were still producing power, then how would that affect their claim?
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FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("I…
Not to be cynical, but what does it look like when most candidates aren't acceptable to a majority of people?
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
approval voting is insanely good at this.
This isn't a good thing unless it's paired with storage and transmission upgrades. Every time this kind of story posts I make this same comment and am met with the same probably well-meaning but ignorant responses. Solar generation is easy and cheap and simple. Actually getting that power where it needs to be, when it needs to be there is complex and expensive. You either need to store it or you need to transmit it v…
Check out the crazy amount of battery additions in California in 2025 and planned for 2026. It’s gunna be fine
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> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) More or less. Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years…
Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowin…
Morality aside, it really doesn't seem like a great system.
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Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity? I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp. OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.
Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows. Another fun anecdote related to Theremin: > Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet s…
Slaves cost money. You have to feed and house them. Plus, they require security to keep them inline.
They have to be more productive per dollar than a free individual.
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Niagra falls doesn't run at full capacity because it takes away from the attraction of the falls themselves, and tourism is important there. They turn up capacity after hours, and the falls slow down.
Not only that, they use the gravitational potential of the falls to store massive amounts of energy when there's a surplus. Way cheaper to hold or even pump the water back up to the reservoir at the top than build lithium batteries. So yeah, as a local, can confirm they turn Niagara Falls (partially) off at night. Thanks to the Falls and several nuclear plants on Lake Ontario, Upstate NY and Southern Ontario have som…
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Old panels are continuously being replaced with new panels. This is happening now with a few year old panels. So many free old panels available, because new ones are producing 590W/panel. Over 25 years, there will be a lot more advances, panels that will be printed by textiles, or painted on surfaces, or grown by bacteria.
How big is a panel?
Panel manufacturers can also do odder sizes as required. Example: q-cell does a 94x51” panel. This is 6x22 cells, but different sized cells as well.
Most panels are 6x, because that results in an open circuit voltage of just shy of 50V, which is convenient for code compliance.