laurencerowe

6 ms·

1. 61.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter. Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with ne
2. 62.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Googling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3]. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope... [2] https:&
3. 63.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns. Cumulative emissi
4. 64.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Absolutely fascinating. Now watching some of the others in the series.
5. 65.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   This is nonsense, heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differentials. I suspect we don't see them much in San Francisco only because there is so little need for heating and cooling the potential savings are smaller.
6. 66.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Solar is surprisingly useful in the UK since it is anti-correlated with wind power, the UK's largest electricity source. Solar peaked at 42% of UK electricity generation the other day: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026&#
7. 67.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   > What is Canada supposed to do when it's ~6000 km from the equator and might not want to rely on the US for electricity regardless? Most Canadians live quite far south. Toronto is on the same latitude as France’s Mediterranean coas
8. 68.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Thanks for sharing! I'm not sure your table under Why Clone is quite correct. 10x 512MB idle VMs should not take 5GB on Firecracker if they are started from snapshots since the 512MB memory file is mmap'ed with MAP_PRIVATE so is c
9. 69.▲
   by laurencerowe 6mo ago

   Very low historical life expectancies are driven by childhood illness and maternal mortality. If you made it to 15 your life expectancy might be somewhere in your late 50s. There isn’t data for life expectancy at 15 before 1950 for India he
10. 70.▲
    by laurencerowe 6mo ago

    Thanks for the clarification. It is completely impossible for WAL mode since that uses shared memory. I must have conflated that with non-WAL mode in my mind. From https://sqlite.org/wal.html > All processes using a data
11. 71.▲
    by laurencerowe 6mo ago

    1.6GWh for €1B which seems about 5x as expensive as lithium-ion grid scale batteries. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Construction-start-for-world-s-...
12. 72.▲
    by laurencerowe 6mo ago

    As others have pointed out the electricity price is only set by gas when gas is needed, but that's only part of your bill. Renewables now make up over half of UK electricity generation and they are financed through Contracts for Differ
13. 73.▲
    by laurencerowe 6mo ago

    SQLite’s locking is not NFS safe so this would not work.
14. 74.▲
    by laurencerowe 6mo ago

    The orange peel is going to decompose and produce CO2 either way. Methane is produced when there is not enough oxygen available while decomposing, which certainly seems a possibility if it's dumped in big piles.
15. 75.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    I believe they only offer up to 100mbps. Having 1Gb down from Comcast is definitely useful at times. I just wish I could get more than 30Mb up.
16. 76.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    We have an ISP (Monkeybrains) that offers this in SF but it’s only up to 100 Mbps each way. I recently tried AT&T fixed wireless which runs over the mobile network but it seems too congested to offer high speeds so ended up back with Co
17. 77.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco. Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.
18. 78.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    Again opportunity costs. It almost always makes sense to spend the money on the most efficient means to achieve the goal. Money spent paying farmers and ethanol refiners to inefficiently produce 25% lower carbon fuel could instead be direct
19. 79.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    Opportunity costs essentially. The effort that goes into growing and refining corn ethanol could be better spent on reducing fuel consumption instead of dedicating five acres of land to provide the equivalent net yearly fossil fuel consumpt
20. 80.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    Passive house standards first gained popularity in Germany and Scandinavia but it seems the principles have been adapted to quite a wide range of climate zones now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
21. 81.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of g
22. 82.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    I can get somewhat close from the Census Person Income in 2017 all data tables: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p... That has numbers of people in $2500 income intervals. Calcu
23. 83.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    Life in the US is definitely more precarious than in Europe but that has been the case for a long time while median real earnings after stagnating from about 2001 to 2015 have been growing well since then. https://fred.stlouisfed
24. 84.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    I don't think that's quite right, it would be the average of the inverse hourly wage not the inverse of the average hourly wage. >>> import statistics >>> 1/statistics.mean([10,30,100]) 0.02142
25. 85.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    Average != median. This measure seems to be so high because there are so many low paid workers in the US due to low minimum wage. Median workers in the US have some of the highest hourly wages at PPP in the rich world and they have been inc
26. 86.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    I'm not convinced we'll ever see mass deployments of batteries to homes, not because of the fossil fuel lobby but because of the economies of scale from installing grid sized batteries at strategic points in the transmission netwo
27. 87.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    The value of the metals will depend a lot on the battery chemistry. LFP batteries don't need nickel or cobalt and sodium-ion batteries can also replace the expensive copper foil on the anode with cheaper aluminium foil. I'm somewh
28. 88.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    There's just not much gas left in the UK North Sea. > Industry body Offshore Energy UK (OEUK) claims that more oil and gas could be extracted by 2050. However, the ‘High Case’ scenario for future production in a report for OEUK woul
29. 89.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    i686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.
30. 90.▲
    by laurencerowe 7mo ago

    A case can be made that nuclear could potentially be cheaper than renewables plus batteries in Northern Europe when targeting 100% zero carbon electricity. (It seems unarguable that renewables can get to 80% zero carbon electricity more che