jartelt

95 ms·

361.
by jartelt 10y ago
SF already spends ~$250M a year on homelessness. I don't think more money is what is needed to solve the problem. I think a change in tactics is needed. I am not sure what the right answer is, but they already have ~$25k to spend pe
362.
by jartelt 10y ago
Since the shuttle was designed to do repeated take offs and landings, it was very complicated. Of course the Apollo mission were super complicated as well, but the only had to design for one launch. This is part of the reason why the shut
363.
by jartelt 10y ago
Some employers don't help either. My wife just received an offer from a pretty well funded company (Series B >$20M) and all they would tell her about the options package was number of shares and vesting schedule. When she asked to
364.
by jartelt 10y ago
Without knowing too much about LightSail, the answer is likely due to cost. It is probably much cheaper to buy a bunch of lead-acid or li-ion batteries and put those in your backyard. It is not trivial to put huge steel tanks in the groun
365.
by jartelt 10y ago
You are only incentivized to reduce leaks if the profit from selling the additional natural gas is larger than the cost of reducing the leaks. It is difficult to track down all the leaks because you cannot see a leak with your eyes (like y
366.
by jartelt 10y ago
True, but the natural gas infrastructure is pretty leaky and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. I still believe it's better than coal, but it is not actually 2x as good.
367.
by jartelt 10y ago
The gas tax is paid for by customers at the pump. It is not a tax being paid by the oil companies.
368.
by jartelt 10y ago
Well, Yellow Cab could hardly even get credit payments to work in their cabs, so they are not exactly a technology company. It's not going to be easy for a cab company to clone what Uber (or lyft) have built during the last 7 years.
369.
by jartelt 10y ago
They likely are banking on the network effect of having the most drivers and users. Having a lot of drivers makes pickup times for riders shorter. Having a lot of user makes it easier to pool people together and give lower prices. Plus m
370.
by jartelt 10y ago
I think a variety of things could be going on. Tesla does it's own research on batteries, so it very well could be making batteries that simply last longer than standard Li-ion cells. They also likely try very hard to design the batt
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by jartelt 10y ago
A lot of people do not report issues, so the 700 complaints should be treated as very low ball estimate. Similar to how relatively few people report cases of food poisoning, I imagine relatively few people reported burned tongues/limb
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by jartelt 10y ago
If people kept getting serious burns from plates at a hotpot restaurant, I would really hope that the restaurant would get punished. If you cannot safely provide your service/product, you should adjust your service to make it safer.
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by jartelt 10y ago
They didn't need a cooling process. The coffee was brewed and left in a pot on a warmer. They just needed to turn down the temperature on the warmer. They were literally selling a drink that was hot enough to burn/melt flesh.
374.
by jartelt 10y ago
You are really downplaying the growth of solar over the last 10 years. In many places in the US, utility scale solar is the cheapest power you can buy. Prices have gone down from ~$100/W in the 1970s to ~$0.30/W today. The amou
375.
by jartelt 10y ago
This does not include externality costs to offset the harmful emissions of coal and the environmental consequences of mining coal.
376.
by jartelt 10y ago
We don't have a carbon tax in the US and we don't have requirements for carbon sequestration systems. Yet, the coal industry is still contracting. Now you could remove the regulations that require limiting emissions of things li
377.
by jartelt 10y ago
This scenario is already playing out and it's largely due to market forces. More people are employed in the solar industry now than are employed by the coal industry. Simply put, coal in the US is dead because it can't compete w
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by jartelt 10y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the maintenance cost for a ARES-type rail system. For pumped hydro, your ongoing maintenance is largely going to be maintaining a pumping system (to send water up) and a generator system. Hopefully y
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by jartelt 10y ago
If that was the case, I think you would expect small investments from VCs and strong calls for sustainable spending. Github had a $100M Series A and a $250M Series B, so the VCs were not playing around when they invested. Even if a VC fir
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by jartelt 10y ago
They make the most sense for large installations because you can increase the capacity largely by just increasing the size of the tanks storing the anode/cathode liquids. The rest of the system (pumps, membrane, etc.) stays the same f
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by jartelt 10y ago
A decent 1BR on the peninsula (in San Mateo, Redwood City, Mountain View, etc.) is likely closer to >$2,500 a month plus $200/month for utilities/renters insurance. For transportation, I pay $200/month for a 15 year old C
382.
by jartelt 10y ago
If you get exhausted by working a lot, it's probably best to not work at a small startup or a company that is growing super fast. There are larger (usually public) companies in the Bay Area where people can work 9-6 type jobs and be g
383.
by jartelt 10y ago
I totally agree. If people want to gripe about high rent/COL or lack of public transit that is fine and legitimate. But complaining about lack of things to do just doesn't add up. You can go hiking in Marin or in the open space
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by jartelt 10y ago
Yep - our already built fission plants are starting to go out of business because the power they produce is too expensive. I don't think we should bank on fusion plants being incredibly inexpensive to operate.
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by jartelt 10y ago
But it might not even make that much sense even in that scenario... If our goal is to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it may be more effective to just add the renewable power source to the grid and further decarbonize our grid.
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by jartelt 10y ago
I agree with most of what you say, and agree this is an uneconomical idea. However, I think the more likely scenarios at the end of the process are that the plastic either ends up in a landfill after use or ends up being recycled. Both of
387.
by jartelt 10y ago
There is value to signing a long term PPA that guarantees a set price of electricity for 10-20 years. For example, if Google powers a data center using wind power PPAs, they know exactly how much the electricity for the data center will co