ZeroGravitas

6 ms·

91.
by ZeroGravitas 2mo ago
Electrification roughly halves total energy use in an economy. Fossil fuels are very inefficient compared with alternatives like EVs and heat pumps and renewables.
92.
by ZeroGravitas 2mo ago
Slightly less than half now as of the most recent figures. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-generates-less... > That [coal] share was well down from 65.5% in 2016, previous NEA figures showed. >
93.
by ZeroGravitas 2mo ago
It's a cliche now to say we're past that as in Idiocracy they listened to the smartest person to solve their problem. We're now onto Captain Planet baddies. Ridiculously childish cartoon carictatures of greed and evil are now
94.
by ZeroGravitas 2mo ago
> One time we invited Richard Hanania to a prediction market conference. There were five or six news articles about it, and I can’t remember whether any of them mentioned the word “prediction”. As far as our reputation was concerned, it
95.
by ZeroGravitas 2mo ago
Weirdly, one of the arguments Musk advanced was that is was all a front for the CIA, which I'd guess is closer to hard power that he was dismantling. Not something you'd expect to hear from a big military contractor.
96.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
In part because the communist government actively targeted former South Vietnamese military personnel, civil servants, and anyone who had collaborated with the United States. It was a civil war that the US got involved in, and they supporte
97.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
> Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953
98.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Isn't this the guy that double counted everything? Because he counted when something got bought and then counted the subsidy used to buy and added then together?
99.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
You've learned well from Smil how to make problems seem insurmountable by intentionally not approaching them with an engineering mindset. We know how to do 80% of electricity, 80% of low temp hearing, 80% of transport all while saving
100.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
They are saying economics is the primary weakness i.e. nuclear costs more than renewables even if you don't have fancy cooling methods that would increase the cost further.
101.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Yes but by a weird coincidence most of that heat can be provided by heat pumps at a similar 3-5x ratio.
102.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
The Capitalists Will [outsource the manufacturing of] the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them -- original quote attributed to various famous communists https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/
103.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Also promoting German language and culture (I think technically an independant charity but I guess there's a lot of government financial support): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe-Institut
104.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
China mostly builds them on the coast to use sea water cooling. The desert one you refer to is an experimental prototype I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
105.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
I think both nuclear steam and car engines are affected by high ambient temp, gas and coal engines too. That is after all why they bring in water or air to car radiators, to cool them. Probably only a single percent or so for a few degrees
106.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
I'd love to see an engineering writeup of the full end to end charging times from a user perspective. There's been multiple times in software engineering history where just logging all the things and what time they take has reveal
107.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Matt Ridley the coal-mine owning climate-change denier? I guess disasters might be his area of expertise since he once crashed a bank and led the official pro-Brexit campaign, but the other stuff seems like a conflict of interest.
108.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Everyday people are generally more pro-renewables and climate action. The politicians can be targeted with bribes by anyone affected by the transition. A classic collective action problem as described by Mancur Olson.
109.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
The propaganda has done it's job here, because your base assumption is that dealing with climate change is a cost. But all the research suggests dealing with climate change is the cheaper option. There's complexities there but you
110.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
> thus exploding their CO2 emissions Except their emissions have continued to go down. Whether you count just electricity or economy wide. And even before this "explosion" they were about half the US on per capita economy wide
111.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Maybe I'm less of a fan of epic ancient poetry translated from dead languages than the average man in the street but none of these make me interested in reading on.
112.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Distilling can be done by fast follower closed models too, so this argument against open models doesn't hold up.
113.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Maybe their own companies would make more money and pay more tax if American companies would stop breaking the law all the time.
114.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Sodium batteries use a relatively similar process to lithium, so I'd say overall that has sped up their adoption in manufacturing. But the economics part is true, people looked to sodium as lithium prices went high and then enthusiasm
115.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
See also lFP batteries from A123: > In October 2012, A123 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was thrown into a narrative of Obama-era green energy failures with defunct California solar company Solyndra that had received hund
116.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Tangentially related Good news: You can avoid about half the greenhouse effects of flight by slightly changing the flight plan to avoid cloud forming regions Bad news: this generally wasn't counted before and when counted roughly doubl
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by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
> In 2016, Kennedy said of Trump, according to newly uncovered recordings: “He’s not like Hitler. Hitler had like a plan, you know, Hitler was interested in policy." https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/rf
118.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Yes and their metric considers that things are "getting better" because those undeserving rich started a war and killed over half a million people and caused about 2 million causalities. Their argument for why we don't need w
119.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
Billionaire Russian oligarchs starting a war is not an improvement in the market failure. It is in fact much much worse, even if they got poorer at the same time. People do this a lot and count the money they made with their monopolies and
120.
by ZeroGravitas 3mo ago
"Darling candidate" is overselling it but there's a solid chunk of anti-vax, covid-truthing, lab-leak is-proven-fact, JFK just wants better food nutballs on HN. They overlap with the climate deniers, the nukecels, libertarian

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