myrmidon

38 ms·

721.
by myrmidon 2y ago
It would not hurt, but this just makes no (economic) sense currently, and that's not gonna change any time soon. Right now we don't have any CO2 scrubbing process without significant maintenance or operating costs, so this would
722.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I honestly feel that "uninitialized by default" is strictly a mistake, a relic from the days when C was basically cross-platform assembly language. Zero-initialized-by-default for everything would be an extremely beneficial tradeo
723.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Sure. But thats still very much a lower bound, and it makes a bunch of idealizing assumptions that are hopelessly overoptimistic (assuming your intake gets the full 400ppm of CO2, and you manage to extract all of it in one go). Even from th
724.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Sure. But even if this would be a full tradeoff between product performance and energy use (which it really isn't, you can typically eliminate a lot of power consumption without impacting performance at all in domestic appliances), t
725.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Not necessarily. The problem is the somewhat low atmospheric CO2 concentration; this is why all the "lets just pollute now and remove the CO2 from the atmosphere with some futuristic tech!" approaches are also kinda doomed, becaus
726.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I personally don't buy the whole singularity argument at all; I see no good examples for interesting intellectual tasks that scale well with number of people thrown at it, and I see the whole AI thing developing exactly the same way--
727.
by myrmidon 2y ago
In Germany, I think a big cost driver is infrastructure buildout, from switching coal plants to renewables as well as building new gas turbines, more so than gas price itself (which is <20% of electricity). But the country is already &gt
728.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I personally think tethered caps are fine, pretty sure they objectively reduce wild trash/lead to less cleanup requirements behind tourists and the like. Do you think that the cost/benefit tradeoff in untariffed Chinese cars would
729.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I phrased that poorly, I ment "mandatory labeling" rather than physical package. Screen/battery fixability was a major criteria when selecting my last phone and this was really hard to gauge, I'm hopeful that regulation
730.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I agree with you that battery tech is basically getting better by itself. Anecdotally, I bought at least one phone where slightly easier/cheaper repairability of screen + battery would have made me keep the old one. I think making thes
731.
by myrmidon 2y ago
For Japan, I think allowing income tax redirection to a "home town" is a really good model to keep infrastructure funded in more rural areas that suffer from brain drain/exodus.
732.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I'm not saying that you need laws to make the world better, just that some of them do . This belongs in that category in my opinion because it is something that costs very little in absolute terms (manufacturer has to run some tests a
733.
by myrmidon 2y ago
> I will wager that the cost of compliance will dramatically increase, however. What makes you confident in that assumption? Because I would wager that cost of compliance is gonna be pretty much negligible, because manufacturers have mos
734.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Estimates for the numbers are right there (which I really appreciated). I think the main expected gains here are less from the estimated 0.2% electricity savings and more about longer average product lifetimes (thanks to better repairabilit
735.
by myrmidon 2y ago
A lot of people also just keep their cars for a decade or more, and buy cheaper used cars mainly-- you can not expect such a market to completely switch in a fraction of product lifetime (especially while new tech is still rapidly improving
736.
by myrmidon 2y ago
This is oversimplifying; European EV tariffs are company specific and (formally) aim to counteract state subsidies. From a an average voter perspective, "sacrificing" local industry for a (temporary?) 20% discount on EVs is not to
737.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I think regulation like this is just strictly good (even from US perspective/priorities), because you can not realistically "vote with your wallet" for environment-friendly products when relevant info is obfuscated, falsified
738.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I (unironically) love how the charts are basically "this is gonna save you money by you buying less shit/year, you're welcome".
739.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Nice page! I'm extremely happy about efforts like this. You might argue that the EU is a sprawling, wasteful bureaucracy and you would not be wrong, per se, but they made a lot of useful laws that just simply make the world a better
740.
by myrmidon 2y ago
> Maybe with big enough batteries that can capture this energy, it could become a viable solution? No, it could not. The problem is that lighning strikes are so short, that their middling amount of energy still results in an insane amoun
741.
by myrmidon 2y ago
You don't just need to cover the 350km² with drones though, you also need buffering and/or transmission capabilities for absurdly high amounts of power (=> but low amounts of energy). If you wanted a single buffer for the whole
742.
by myrmidon 2y ago
On what time horizon does this happen? Because this sounds like a wishful utopia to me. I would expect current progress in AI to deliver the equivalent of a veritable army of consultants for very cheap, available to basically everyone withi
743.
by myrmidon 2y ago
You do have a good core point, which is that foreign assets can often just be taken from you in a crisis (even if you're a state actor-- see Russia for a recent example). But things are not as simple as you portrait them. Lets assume t
744.
by myrmidon 2y ago
You need ~4 strikes per hour to keep up with a single large offshore wind turbine (15MW at 40% capacity factor). That would mean 350km² just to match a single wind turbine (at 100% capture efficiency for 5GJ lightning strikes). This is not
745.
by myrmidon 2y ago
This is never going to be economical. Lightning is ~5GJ per strike. That means you'd need ~4 lighning strikes per hour just to keep up with a single large offshore wind turbine (15MW with 40% capacity factor). There is also no realis
746.
by myrmidon 2y ago
That is not so clear. Appstore revenue is ~ $100 billion/y, but Apple makes less than 30% from that. So the question is: Would more convincing compliance have cost Apple more than single digit percentage decreases in Appstore sales? Co
747.
by myrmidon 2y ago
> When Trump said that new manufacturing facilities would be fast-tracked to being able to build their own on-site power plants because the grid is "at risk of bombing", I've come to think that the whole political debate i
748.
by myrmidon 2y ago
I can see your point, but I disagree on this. It is specifically "US hegemony" and not "western democracy hegemony" because the US is so extraordinarily powerful in economy and military. Interests/culture with other
749.
by myrmidon 2y ago
Completely agree with your main point. I do disagree somewhat with point 4. I think this is frequently overstated: Building and operating automated factories is just as wage-dependent as anything else (just the coefficients are a bit smalle
750.
by myrmidon 2y ago
> This not only replaces human labor but enables entirely new types of endeavors. I completely agree with that! I think we are talking past each other a bit, because to me all your examples seem supportive of my main point: None of those

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