snewman

16 ms·

121.
by snewman 4y ago
They are not cheap after you factor in costs for installation, the framework, land, etc. Increased efficiency means you also need less of all those.
122.
by snewman 4y ago
CO2 to hydrocarbon fuels (not ethanol, but methane and potentially liquid hydrocarbons as well) is exactly what Terraform Industries is planning to do. https://terraformindustries.com/
123.
by snewman 4y ago
I'm not sure why I'm jumping in to defend interviews, but... this merely proves that interviews are not perfect at evaluating competency. Suppose that the result of a typical interview is X% determined by competency, and (100-X)
124.
by snewman 4y ago
That makes a lot of sense. Intuitively (I haven't tried to run numbers on this), the big efficiency problem with a car – gas or EV – is not that it's using "unnatural" forms of power, it's that you're hauling a
125.
by snewman 4y ago
A very good article here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/years-after-shuttle-...
126.
by snewman 4y ago
Part of the issue is that this rocket doesn't just use hydrogen, it uses cryogenic liquid hydrogen, which apparently is even harder to manage. To quote from an excellent writeup [0]: > Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze thr
127.
by snewman 4y ago
This is confused: water vapor is indeed a fairly potent greenhouse gas, but it remains in the atmosphere for only a short time. Adding water vapor to the atmosphere, even in large quantities, does not result in any non-rounding-error impact
128.
by snewman 4y ago
The lifetime of the launch abort battery is indeed a factor. It is normally rated for 20 days, and they extended the rating to 25 days for this launch, but when that time is up the entire vehicle stack does need to be rolled back to the VAB
129.
by snewman 4y ago
Ah, fair. A single eruption will not perturb the long-term trend, but we're discussing the short-term incident in Pakistan, and a single eruption can have notable short-term impact. (I don't know anything about whether the speci
130.
by snewman 4y ago
GP said "long-term climate trend" and then mentioned centuries. Yes, an especially large eruption can influence things for a year or two. But then the effect settles out.
131.
by snewman 4y ago
https://www.fleetzero.com/ is proposing to build electric ships and, yes, swap batteries. They build the batteries in the form factor of a shipping container, so existing port infrastructure can be used to perform the swap.
132.
by snewman 4y ago
Transitioning to sustainable electricity is necessary but not sufficient, we also need to address methane, cement and steel production, and a bunch of other things. Regarding the urgency of methane in particular: https://climatee
133.
by snewman 4y ago
I think it depends a lot on where you work and what sorts of projects you work on. I've been programming professionally in Java for the last 16 years and I have never encountered Spring. Nor do I typically see the stereotypical sort of
134.
by snewman 4y ago
Best I can recall, that was written by someone at Velocity (the publisher, as discussed by boffinAudio's sibling comment). No idea where to find it online. I believe I still have an unopened boxed copy of the original game somewhere in
135.
by snewman 4y ago
Spectre co-author here. Neat to see this! The backstory of Spectre is that we wrote a straight-up Battlezone clone just as a hobby project, then decided that it was worth commercializing and so we fiddled around just enough to make it not b
136.
by snewman 4y ago
Even with consistent supply, for a high value low weight item, ocean shipping does not make sense simply from a time value of money perspective. Also, it makes planning that much more difficult, you have to adjust orders that much farther i
137.
by snewman 4y ago
This is so exaggerated as to be silly. The cost of "things" has many components, and only a small fraction of them trace back to the hourly wage of low-paid domestic workers. Increasing low-end wages by 10% does not result in 10%
138.
by snewman 4y ago
This glosses over a lot of important considerations. For instance: methane, despite having a limited lifetime, has much greater climate impact than CO2. So by converting some of the carbon they ingest into methane, cows add a substantial wa
139.
by snewman 4y ago
We need to do many many many things. Halting the combustion of fossil fuels is absolutely #1 on the list, but it's a long list. That initial sequestration can't make up for ongoing use of fossil fuels, sure, but it still has nonze
140.
by snewman 4y ago
Nice. Yeah, the numbers in press articles are basically always wrong; it's just a question of whether you can notice the error. https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers
141.
Justify Every Word(climateer.substack.com)
1 points by snewman 4y ago|0 comments
142.
by snewman 4y ago
[OP here] thank you! I see those ratios for 20 vs. 100 years everywhere, but I've never been able to put together a mental model that explains them. You've supplied the missing piece.
143.
by snewman 5y ago
OP here. I agree that there are a lot of problems with the Times' coverage; I deploy a heavy skepticism filter and I subscribe to various newsletters for perspective, analysis, and deeper coverage of topics I'm interested in. That
144.
by snewman 5y ago
I'm not sure this would help. The error was likely in thinkspace, not a literal typo. The real problem is when people toss around numbers without deeply understanding them. I don't think there's any simple fix for that. You s
145.
Everyone gets numbers wrong, even the New York Times(climateer.substack.com)
120 points by snewman 5y ago|140 comments
146.
by snewman 5y ago
I don't specifically remember whether there were other motivations for that requirement. Possibly a desire to support "tag" style interfaces, where an item can have multiple tags applied. But it may have mostly been the Photo
147.
by snewman 5y ago
I worked on the original (long since superseded) implementation of the metadata store for Google Drive, i.e. the system which was responsible for tracking file / folder relationships. The requirement to allow an item to appear in multi
148.
by snewman 5y ago
Sorry, but how could an anarchy possibly address this problem? The emissions from a coal plant somewhere across the ocean affects my weather here in California. In an anarchy, are you saying I would get a voice in the operation of that remo
149.
by snewman 5y ago
The idea of "protect the rainforest" offsets, and "avoided emissions" offsets in general, is as follows: 1. Party A is planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as cutting down an acre of forest, or operating their di
150.
by snewman 5y ago
I agree that the concept of "buying time" has merit. One good way to apply that would be a cap-and-trade system, with a gradually shrinking cap. Trading offsets within a cap-and-trade system avoids the criticisms I'm making.

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