Flywheels are more expensive than batteries.

Pumped storage is great, but highly dependent on geography and not scalable due to that.

“Life appointments” should really only extend to something like age 75, with yearly mental fitness tests after the social security age.

That makes sense for a techbro or a financebro, but turning the blue collar labour force into a horde of minimum wage slaves serving coffee and delivering UPS packages isn’t exactly the future that those people want.

I think we are just all figuring it out as we go.

One thing is for sure: users want to see relevant high quality information, not spam. And there is also a huge gray area of not-so-obvious spam.

The fediverse has a superior tool to combat spam, by unfederating instances that produce it.

So I do think that the fediverse will kind of win out. I can also see how there will be clusters within the fediverse with different norms.

Some clusters will not allow any hate speech, others will become a magnet for extremists. And the same kind of fractures will happen to other controversial topics.

Exactly.

The libertarian paradise of Somalia has never really appealed to me.

As for smartphones, it’s no secret that App designers pull every trick they can to increase engagement a.k.a. addiction.

I can definitely see a future where some of the more sinister tricks have mandatory opt-out or opt-in options.

I know the type. Elon is different though.

Yeah, he is overrated by many. But he’s not the typical stupid middle manager, who get brain freeze when presented a simple dilemma.

Fuck, Elon would fail hard as a middle manager. This clock ticks different. I have worked with a lot of people, but I don’t think he fits in one of the common types.

A lot of people expect India to be the country that will displace China as the main manufacturing hub, but Mexico, Bangladesh and Vietnam are actually much better positioned to fill that gap. And there is no reason why a single country should be dominant over a whole industry.

I guess I’m also batshit crazy.

It’s Twitter. Who cares if people can’t tweet for an hour.

I’m with Elon on this, don’t overcomplicate the closing of a data center.

That manager, when asked to do it in 90 days, if s/he was competent should have said: I’ll do it, but you’ll have to accept a downtime risk.

(But aside from this entertaining story, I do think Elon lost his shine. Wasting $40B on twitter and sabotaging Ukraine while simping for Putin and Trump and not paying taxes… yeah, get rekt Elon).

Indeed, but yours is probably cheaper and more effective at cooling when it’s hot and humid out.

For people up north, they will buy a “cold climate air source heat pump”. In temperate regions, an “air source heat pump” will suffice, while down south you will buy an “A/C with a heating mode” (also called reversible A/C).

And it’s not just about whether the coils can defrost. The whole machinery and refrigerant are different to optimize under those conditions. A cold climate heat pump has a setup that is more similar to a freezer than it is to an A/C.

Sorry about the downvotes. People need to re-learn internet etiquette.

Your mini-split isn’t designed to function as a heat pump at low temperature.

In places like Sweden, they also use heatpumps that are designed for those conditions.

In other news, don’t drive in a Swedish winter with summer tires.

The IPCC calculations were always criticized for being overly optimistic. Anyone following this debate knew that we would hit 1.5 C sooner rather than later.

We are definitely going to hit 3 degrees in our lifetime, once the melting tundras release their methane store.

Because normally they make a small profit on the miners. They just didn’t expect prices to shoot up.

I am sure they will change their contracts to have contingency clauses for the future.

I didn’t expect small town USA to actually defund the police first.

The renewables-only crowd is just ignorant about this simple fact.

The future of energy will be dominated by solar and nuclear power. With hydro, geothermal and wind playing supporting roles, depending on geography.

The only question is, how much fossil fuels do we burn until then?

Those who oppose nuclear are really just in favour of burning fossil fuels in the interim. But the inevitable switch to nuclear will come as fossil fuels are depleted.

Nature has given us the atom as the most dense and durable way to store energy. That will never change.

If ever I would need to be killed, this would be my preferred method of leaving the earth.

Happy to see them try it, even though I am against executing people.

With hypoxia, you get euphoria prior to death. No suffering, no pain, just a little high to send you off this earth.

I agree.

Economics, sociology and political science are the trifecta of sciences that cover human societies, rather than human individuals.

Psychology is closer to medicine. It is complex and unpredictable, because humans are complex and unpredictable, but they approach the subject empirically and can actually achieve consistentcy. For example, we are getting really good at helping people with PTSS, ADHD, Autism, learning difficulties, etc.

I would say economics, sociology and political science are at the lowest rung on the “certainty” totempole. These sciences are forever stuck in the “we don’t know what we don’t know, so we are driving blind” mode of operation. They only succeed in analysing and narrating what happened after the fact. At best, they prevent us from repeating some mistakes in the most obvious ways. But they also enable us to repeat old mistakes in novel ways.

The only reason people confuse economics with the hard sciences, is because it has a Nobel prize.

But it really should be seen as an equivalent to the Nobel peace and literature prizes, in a separate league of the physics, medicine and chemistry ones.

Even economists themselves call their science the dismal science.

All this said, Economists are true and capable scientists (well, some are corrupt and biased, but some doctors are, too. That’s not an indictment of the whole field).

Their subject is just difficult to analyze.

The oil and gas companies and their “environmentalist” buddies.

We could have prevented climate change with nuclear power in the 1990s.

Even without solar and wind (they were too expensive at the time) or carbon taxes, Sweden and France managed to get emissions down to 5 tons per capita with old nuclear and hydro technology. If all rich countries had done the same thing, climate change would have been a non-issue.

We can still solve it today with today’s technologies: solar, wind and battery technology has evolved and become affordable. Carbon taxes are politically feasible. And old nuclear technology is becoming more acceptable and gearing up.

Sure, try to help by reducing your energy use where possible and investing in things like home insulation and energy efficient heating and transportation.

But the actual big things that need to be done can only be done by politicians, to force economies to change.

One thing about the greatest generation (my grandparents).

They saw some serious shit and were just legitimately happy we don’t have to see that same shit.

Funny how the coddled Boomer generation is often much more critical of the young, when they had the easiest ride ever.

No, he didn’t. He (or rather, Congress) financed a lot of research into alternative energy due to the oil crisis.

In actual fact, he pushed mostly for coal as a domestic energy source as a response to the oil crisis. His main concern regarding nuclear during his presidency was due to proliferation concerns.

In his defense, the magnitude of impact of fossil fuels on climate change was not as well understood during his presidency. That would take another 10 years.

As I said, 1988 was the year Congress got the expert testimonials and when the UN founded the IPCC.

They’ll just move to the most inhabitable, least affected, parts of earth. Perhaps New Zealand, Argentina or Scotland.

They don’t need bunkers. This is what the billion dollar yachts, private planes and multiple homes in many jurisdictions are for.

Anyway, I don’t think it’s fair to blame only the rich. We live in democracies with free speech and accessible information.

I know a lot of anti-nuclear activists and those people are not rich, but are definitely more guilty of causing catastrophic climate change than the millionaires and billionaires.

Every advanced country could have achieved the 5 tons per capita that France and Sweden achieved in 1990 by using nuclear energy. And that would have solved most of the climate change problem. The reason it is so bad now, is because we squandered the past 35 years and increased our emissions instead of reducing them.