laurencerowe

4 ms·

31.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Living in San Francisco I've not seen the taxi exemption for California anywhere. New York City taxis are exempt like most of Europe. My kid is too young for a booster city. It's pretty impractical to take a child seat or booster
32.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
My kid is 2. New York City and most EU countries (including Spain, Portugal, UK, France) allow children to ride in taxis without a car seat. This makes it far more practical for people to live without a car - hard to imagine in most of the
33.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
I think this is more a design problem with US road infrastructure. City streets are much wider than in other countries which encourages drivers to drive more quickly and allows them to pay less attention. We'd have far fewer pedestrian
34.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Other than Alaska it’s almost certainly cheaper to just over provision solar panels and curtail excess generation in the summer months as solar panels are cheaper than batteries and grid connections. To completely decarbonise we probably wi
35.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Driving is very safe at city speeds for those inside the big metal box. Less so for the pedestrians and cyclists on the outside.
36.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
> Inside San Francisco, using public transit except for directly between BART stops is incredibly slow. For almost all journeys e-bikes dominate the speed discussion, and cars are second. The biggest constraint for us that made us take p
37.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Robocars most certainly exist. They’re probably about 5% of car traffic in San Francisco. I’ve not taken one yet (taxis/ubers/Waymos are mostly impractical with a young kid in the US as you must use a car seat unlike in most Europ
38.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Cars in the US cost pretty much the same before taxes as in Europe. If Ford can build this truck in the US for this cost there seems little reason it couldn’t build it in the EU for a similar cost. Whether it will offer this body style or n
39.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
The UK has had substantially less wage inequality than the US for a long time. The UK “wage squeeze” is median/minimum wage which has gone from the 1/3 to 2/3 since ~2000 as the minimum wage has been raised. But the relevant
40.
by laurencerowe 4mo ago
Best of all go during the summer solstice when there is free public access. It’s really quite fun. During the the 1980s and ‘90s there were regular clashes between new age hippies and police stopping them from reaching Stonehenge during sum
41.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
Augmenting intermittent renewables with nuclear doesn’t really make sense since nuclear is all fixed costs whereas gas generation is mostly fuel costs which makes it economic to run part of the time.
42.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
It might not be quite that good in less sunny countries. Similar modest overbuilding of wind and solar in Denmark is simulated to get to about 90% with 12h of storage. This is still good enough though. https://xcancel.com/en
43.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
The problem is that nuclear reactors are huge so you're never going to build that many of them compared to wind turbines (thousands) or solar panels (millions). France plans to build a series of six reactors for its EPR2 programme with
44.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
> By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes. This really depends on the amount of battery storage installed. In California we now see ba
45.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
The UK hit a record of 42% peak solar generation around midday one day last month. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...
46.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
I found making single line changes in Bun’s zig code led to very long compiles compared to doing the same in Rust code. It was a while ago though and maybe I was doing something wrong.
47.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
In my experience Bun in Zig compiles more slowly than Deno in Rust.
48.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
In the UK direct debits don't require 2FA (but do require approved forms either online or on paper) but you can also very easily get a refund for any direct debit taken from your account so I assume it's simply not worth the scamm
49.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
That's a very reasonable concern, though given how central Visa and Mastercard are I suspect it is probably necessary to regulate their structures within the EU so that intra-EU payments are not reliant on non-sovereign infrastructure.
50.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
Cash handling also costs businesses money so I'm not sure it needs to be free, just strictly regulated.
51.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
EU regulations limit those interchange fees to 0.2% for debit card transactions and 0.3% for credit card transactions so total costs are much lower for businesses. Cards have replaced cash even for small transactions in most European countr
52.
by laurencerowe 5mo ago
Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily
53.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
I think that’s probably important in some places. I don’t know how important it is generally though.
54.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
> Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint). This seems a lot but for utilities which still have coal plants it seems accurate if the reduced demand
55.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
> The “DeepSeek moment” comparison is a bit hyperbolic, but the underlying point holds. If sodium-ion can deliver 15,000+ cycles at a fraction of lithium’s raw material cost, it could fundamentally reshape the economics of grid-scale sto
56.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
New batteries have gotten so cheap it likely makes reuse of used batteries uneconomic. Average costs of a new utility scale system are around $125/kWh of which $75/kWh is equipment of which $40/kWh is the LFP cells. https:&#
57.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
This is not possible since it is ambiguous. It is impossible to parse “ http://127.0.0.1:gopher/ “ since that would be valid as either “scheme://user:host/“ or “scheme://host:portname/“. “ http:&
58.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
FWIw I’ve had no problems with smells from our Ubbi Steel diaper pail which uses regular garbage bags. (Do use thicker bags though.)
59.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038. Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two
60.
by laurencerowe 6mo ago
That ignores operating costs and battery costs are falling fast and your assumptions seem overly pessimistic. A 2025 project in Italy came out at $120/kWh made up of $70/kWh in equipment and $50/kWh in engineering and grid co

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