rgmerk

34 ms·

541.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Airbus is experimenting with fuel cells for airliners; I believe the idea is to use the fuel cells for cruising and use gas turbines when more power is required.[0] Joby Aviation (the air taxi developer) also bought a company that's be
542.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Yes, that's all true. Lithium-air EVs could be significantly lighter and cheaper than current-generation EVs. But even if that doesn't happen EVs are going to represent the majority of new cars sold in the quite near future.
543.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Commentators thus far seem mainly interested in applications in cars, in the event this ever makes it out of the lab. Frankly, cars are not the big deal here. Existing battery technology is good enough for most light vehicle applications, a
544.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The obvious response to this is to make calls to DV hotline services free. The cost to carriers would be negligible.
545.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Rewriting stories for children to reflect the values and anxieties of contemporary culture has occurred forever. For instance, see “The Family Shakespeare” by the Bowdlers. Interestingly, critics seemed to pan it for similar reasons to HN’
546.
by rgmerk 4y ago
How often/long does your power go out? Americans on this site always mention grid failures as a concern about electric heating/cars/whatever. While I won’t claim that power failures never happen where I live, because they do…
547.
by rgmerk 4y ago
I was hoping that Carter was going to live to see Guinea Worm eradicated: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/jan/25/g... With any luck it might be achieved by his 100th birthday.
548.
by rgmerk 4y ago
"Collapsed" is oversimplifying the situation. The project was a joint venture between a multibillionaire mining magnate Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest and the Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes. For whatever reason Forres
549.
by rgmerk 4y ago
It might be technically possible. The most ambitious project along those lines I’ve heard of is proposed from northern Australia (with lots of room for solar panels) to Singapore (which does not have a lot of room for anything). 5,000 km o
550.
by rgmerk 4y ago
19,000 Americans died as the result of a gunshot (excluding suicides) in 2020. 60,000 premature deaths were estimated to have been caused by air pollution in 2019, mostly from sources that were operating within regulations. Was this bad? Y
551.
by rgmerk 4y ago
That's like pointing to Climeworks and saying that direct air capture is a solved problem. There's no doubt we can do it if money is no object; whether we can do so at scale cheaply enough to be worth doing is another question ent
552.
by rgmerk 4y ago
What this comes down to is that you just can't arbitrarily choose a random number and hope that it meets your needs. You have to understand what properties you actually care about and choose a (P)RNG that has those properties.
553.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Bulk H2 is not currently shipped. There was considerable fanfare in 2022 when an experimental hydrogen carrier shipped hydrogen from Australia to Japan: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/worlds-first-h
554.
by rgmerk 4y ago
This is interesting, but it does strike me as a little surprising that if there’s a lot of extractable hydrogen available we haven’t had more indications of it already (yes, I read the article). It’s worth noting here that a disadvantage of
555.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Yes, but a) we need a lot of hydrogen for chemical processes such as fertiliser making, and b) particularly in northern latitudes, there’s a mismatch between peak solar production and peak energy demand. If there was abundant cheap clean h
556.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Water reservoirs are naturally renewed. You’re still rate limited, as most irrigation zones around the world have found out.
557.
by rgmerk 4y ago
My boss cares a lot about performance and reliability. I work for a financial services firm. We are consistently highly rated for customer service. One of the reasons that is the case is that our website is fast. It takes a lot of work by
558.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Haven’t tried stir frying yet (and I’ve read claims that any home and even restaurant wok burner can’t match the flavour from the very high-power outdoor gas burners used on the streets of Asia) but low temp induction works just fine, th
559.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Have you considered that you bought the heat pump equivalent of a Ford Edsel, rather than the tech being fundamentally bad?
560.
by rgmerk 4y ago
Governments are influenced by what other governments are doing in a variety of ways. At a basic level, governments are full of people who have an interest in public policy, and they read publications that cover public policy matters from ar
561.
by rgmerk 4y ago
88% of US households already have heat pumps, and 66% of households have centralised heat pump systems - otherwise known as air conditioning. If you can afford to have them just for cooling, you can afford to have them for heating as well;
562.
by rgmerk 4y ago
It comes down to a few issues: a) The USA pays more for drugs than the rest of the world does. b) private health insurance is really inefficient. c) The US doesn’t do public and preventative health very well. d) The US wastes money overtr
563.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The world’s biggest lithium mines are in Australia, where miners earn extremely good wages and safety standards are at least as good as the US.
564.
by rgmerk 4y ago
The claim that lithium ion battery production is as bad as petroleum production is ridiculous. The scale of mining required to produce a lithium-ion battery and the solar panels to charge it is far lower than required to produce and refine
565.
by rgmerk 4y ago
To appreciate the early stuff (and I agree there’s a lot of filler on the early albums) it’s interesting to listen to what else was around at the time. Any vitality of the early rock and roll artists was long gone and the charts were fille
566.
by rgmerk 4y ago
A small town in Iceland (which is pretty much all of them except Reykjavik) would do the trick. But then you have a crappy range of very expensive food at the local supermarket, pretty much everything else you have to order in or pick up fr
567.
by rgmerk 4y ago
We work on a Delphi application still (monolithic internal platform for a company in the financial industry). Our multi-million line main application builds in about a minute. The IDE is a buggy POS though.
568.
by rgmerk 4y ago
I’m pretty sure Wing, Walmart and the other very well-capitalised companies developing drone delivery services want quieter drones.
569.
by rgmerk 4y ago
I assume you’ve never been to Australia. It’s the middle of summer (daytime temperatures are around 100 degrees Farenheit every day) and that road is one of the most isolated sealed roads on Earth. I’m sure it can be done but it’s not exact
570.
by rgmerk 4y ago
For mine, the thing with group tours (aside from Other People) is that they are often the Disney World version of the place you’re visiting.

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