spangry

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451.
by spangry 10y ago
Hey thanks for the links. I'll probably take a little while to go through these; it often takes me a few listens to 'get' a piece of music (regardless of genre). I don't know if anyone else gets this, but I find after li
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by spangry 10y ago
It's hard to go past Chopin's "Fantaisie Impromptu". I quite like Yundi Li's interpretation of the piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvm2ZsRv3C8 And one from my favourite composer, Claude Debus
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by spangry 10y ago
Piano's another good one if you're looking for something more melodic. Although I think drumming is where it's at if you'd find value in the social aspects of music (it's harder to play piano in a band). Now that I
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by spangry 10y ago
Yeah I really don't understand why people have this notion that population growth is necessary for economic growth. It doesn't even follow that aggregate (i.e. non per-capita) economic growth results in a higher average standard
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by spangry 10y ago
Thanks for the link, it's an interesting read. It definitely seems like the big challenge for MSRs is of the materials/chemical engineering variety. I guess some of these could be designed around: for instance I've heard Kirk
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by spangry 10y ago
My thinking is pretty similar to yours. Especially the point on subsidies, although I would modify it slightly: if subsidies are employed (explicitly, or implicitly in the case of 'nuclear insurance'), governments should aim to ke
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by spangry 10y ago
Huh. That's some pretty impressive efficiency. I don't know why, but the thought of a train carrying a brick uphill only to bring it back down again strikes me as a little bit comical :) Very interesting though. I wonder how far t
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by spangry 10y ago
I guess the flipside on centralisation is it allows you to build much simpler (and much less) transmission infrastructure (unless we're talking about a scenario where everyone is 'energy independent' at the household level).
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by spangry 10y ago
Yeah it's possible he's overstating the case, although he seems to have gone in to quite a bit of detail estimating the costs. But you'll see from some of the comments above those might be distorted. My own very crude back of
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by spangry 10y ago
I'm not an engineer so I've probably got this wrong (would appreciate a correction). The Westinghouse AP-1000 (a Gen3+ reactor) produces 1,117 MWe of power. Say we want to replace all coal plants with nuclear. 2013 world electrica
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by spangry 10y ago
This is a good question. I suspect the answer is no, given most of the exuberant headlines about renewable costs don't even factor in the renewable intermittancy problem (which massively increases the total cost of generation and trans
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by spangry 10y ago
Your point about the materials challenge for MSRs is very true: for the designs I've seen the 'solution' is super corrosive. However, I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge, and its more a question of dura
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by spangry 10y ago
Indeed. Production and use of solar and wind cause more deaths for GW/H than current nuclear fission (which is responsible for around 19.5% of the US' energy generation [0]). The problem is that deaths from nuclear generation are
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by spangry 10y ago
Me too. I recently read about these hybrid battery-capacitor thingies that sounded pretty promising. I'll see if I can dig up the link. EDIT: here we go - http://www.nature.com/articles/srep04315 . Lithium iron ph
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by spangry 10y ago
Sorry you've completely lost me here. I thought the problem was mainly that we haven't figured out a way to control the sun or the clouds (soon though, soon...)
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by spangry 10y ago
I couldn't agree more with your point about electricity car take-up. I've made the same point in the past but it's always gotten a lukewarm reception. In my mind, it's probably our best chance of achieving sufficient sca
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by spangry 10y ago
Not at all, and sorry I guess I misspoke. Whatever works: pumping water up hill, spinning flywheels etc. all sound fine to me. It's simply a question of whether it meets current energy demand, environmental impact, and cost. Come to th
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by spangry 10y ago
If cost-effectiveness is a factor, unless Tesla manage to reap some pretty massive economies of scale, realistically we should be talking about recycling lead-acid batteries (like the one in your car). They are, by a pretty large margin, th
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by spangry 10y ago
It gets worse. Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology, the intermittency problem of renewables makes most of them a non-starter from a cost perspective. To cover 'always on' baseload demand, you ne
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by spangry 10y ago
That paper says that Ireland did have a limited transfer pricing regime (which they hadn't really enforced, or in PWC's words "Owing to these uncertainties, it is not believed that this section [1036] is applied in practice.&
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by spangry 10y ago
I'm only going off what I've read in these comments (most of which are pretty suspect, to be honest). But it sounds like Ireland have opted to not enforce their own transfer pricing rules by making some kind of special administrat
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by spangry 10y ago
The endgame is a monopoly, at which point they raise prices to the monopolist profit maximising level and extract those sweet sweet rents from consumers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing This practice is
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by spangry 10y ago
I have a different view on 'transparency': something is 'transparent' if you can see the internals of that thing at any given moment. Time is a critical factor for transparency: What if, instead of the next meeting being
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by spangry 10y ago
Oooooh! I haven't heard of this guy, but sounds like something I'd find very interesting. Thanks for the link!
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by spangry 10y ago
I suspect this is part of a bigger problem, one that I continually see in the public service: people undervalue expertise. There's this strange belief that 'generalists' can do just about any task well. But I've never fo
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by spangry 10y ago
You might be interested to read about William Deming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming He was brought in by MacArthur during the post-WW2 occupation of Japan to help get their industry running again. You
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by spangry 10y ago
Although the OP's quote is not nearly as extreme, it does remind me a little of this: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell... It's a design brief that explains how the new Pepsi l
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by spangry 10y ago
I just pray they don't outsource their voice signature database. Imagine if someone got their hands on that...
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by spangry 10y ago
I used to work there. The scanned returns probably make up a bit, but they simply have lots of data (e.g. last 10 years of tax returns for every taxpayer, bunch of data matching DBs, enormous maze-like website, maps to buried treasure etc.
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by spangry 10y ago
Yeah that's right. It wears off in about 60-90 minutes. Many of the commonly taken opioids (especially if taken orally) last much longer than that, so if the person experienced a severe overdose it's a good idea to monitor them fo

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