The only hygeine product you actually need is soap. If you have a source of wood ash and fat you can make that.

There are also meteorlogical and transportation infrastructure reasons for California to have a higher concern about air pollution than most other states. If you look at the cities in the US with the worst air pollution by various metrics, usually California cities hold four of the five worst spots. So California is more affected by auto emissions than most states, and has enough scale to have clout with automakers.

Well, no. Power delivery is not *meaningless*, in fact it's quite important. For some applications wattage delivery may be a much more limiting factor than watt-hours of storage.

Consider a hydroelectric storage facility like the Northfield Mountain facilty. That facility has a storage capacity of 8.7 MWh and can deliver it at 1.17 MW. This balance between storage capacity and power is no accident; Northfield was designed to take power generated by the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant during off-peak hours and shift it to peak consumption hours within window of several hours. For that reason the facility needed to have roughly twice the power output of the nuclear plant it was designed to work with.

I think you're thinking in terms of keeping the grid running for a day or so with restricted supply. Sure, for that use case total storage capacity would be a limiting factor. But for grid stabilization, the engineers are thinking more in terms of minutes of operation. For example the extremely economically successful Hornsby Power Reserve in Australia is designed to generate peak power for about 10 minutes to help prevent rolling blackouts, and up to three hours or so of load management assistance.

Power delivery may be the Achilles heel of some of the new grid storage technologies that look simply amazing in terms of dollars per watt-hour of storage. The energy stored in a battery is useless if you can't get it out when it's needed.

Well, Texas is performing a kind of experiment along these lines of running a minimally regulated grid with low barriers to entry. So far the performance hasn't been notably superior from a reliabiltiy standpoint, but to be fair it's the first of its kind. It isn't exactly untrammeled capitalism either, in that the grid is controlled by a non-profit corporation controlled by the state government.

Just to clarify what is otherwise a valid point: Uyghurs are less than 1% of China's population, about 11 million in total. So while stuff you buy from China *may* have been partly made with Uyghur slave labor, it probably isn't.

But what it is *very* likely to have contributed to making something you buy from China is labor from ethnic Han (Chinese) internal migrants. There's 295 million of *them* and their working and living conditions are horrific. They are a permanent, hereditary legal underclass that cannot receive government protections and benefits where they work because of laws from the 1950s intended to keep peasants and their descendents in rural areas growing food. They can't protest or organize to improve working conditions because the Communist Party is supposed to represent workers.

Well, no. In this case the popular fad came from people jumping on research results, albeit rather early.

Shelf stable, sure. Ultra-palatable, no. The way manufacturers make ultrapalatable is by putting copious amounts of fat, sugar and salt into them, all of which are fine in *moderation* but bad for health in excess. Ultrapalatable doesn't even mean nice to eat. Think "Cheet-Ohs"; you might enjoy a few, but way past the point you're enjoying them you continue to eat them compulsively, without any real pleasure. Real food doesn't work that way. Even if it's incredible, when you've consumed a modest quantity of it you don't want to eat any more. That's a *good* thing.

This is what I suggested is the extreme limit of what is politically possible, but it's not going to be easy. It's not close to how it works today. Additives are declared GRAS (generally recognized as safe), not by the FDA, but buy the manufacturers, and the FDA vetoes that if it has a problem with the data submitted by the maker. In any case anything in use before 1958 is grandfathered as presumptively safe. This includes many additives such as carageenan which are now looking like a problem.

Even if there were independent scientific review in the approval process, which there is not, the problems with UPFs are cutting edge science and wouldn't be grounds for rejecting an additive yet. There needs to be funding for new science to zero in on the problem additives, and that's not going to be popular with industry because many profitable products are going to get banned.

So the bottom line on UPFs is that if you can afford to do so, you should avoid them. But we have to recognize that not everyone can do this.

It's more indifference than malice. And the effect of regulating UPFs on the poor is going to be complex, with no outcomes that are both happy and easy to achieve.

What we're talking about is the product of technology that allows businesses to take cheap (and indeed federally subsidized) ingredients and transform them into ultra-palatable, shelf stable edible products on an *industrial scale*. This makes them really, really inexpensive and available to people who live in areas with low availability of fresh food.

If you calculated food inflation simply based on the foods that mainstream medicine and nutrition want you to eat, it'd be a lot worse. A diet of fresh, whole, minimally processed foods is expensive -- especially vegetables and fruits which are federally classed as "specialty crops" and don't receive significant government subsidies like corn or soy. Even meat is indirectly subsidized; it comes from animals mostly grown on subsidized crops. A recent study out of Oxford concluded that vegetarian diets are more affordable than omnivore diets, but to arrive at this conclusion the study included the impact of diet on medical costs. This kind of long term orientation is something you can't expect of someone who has to buy his food in a dollar store with very little money in his pocket.

The problem with visionary public policies is the unintended consequences. In this case in the name of improving everyone's health, some people are going to pay for that worthy goal by going hungry. To ban UPFs without providing for replacements that will be available to those people is just as indifferent to their welfare as leaving them to have to subsist on that junk. We'd need a moon shot scale program to make high quality real food available to people who are dependent upon UPFs to make ends meet. That's not a bad idea, but it won't happen in the US.

Since an outright ban on UPFs without such a program would likely be catastrophic, what we need now is a lot more research into exactly what it is about UPFs that is problematic. At present the science is convincing, but highly imprecise, starting with the definition of UPFs itself. Take emulsifiers, one of the most common class of UPF ingredients and important making industrial edible products ultrapalatable. They all pass FDA tests for being acutely toxic and carcinogenic of course, but it's beginning to look like many of the common ones, like maltodextrin, carboxymethylcellulose and polysorbate 80, may be harmful to the gut microbiome health, which is believed to be a key factor driving increasing rates of obesity and diabetes. Others, like lecithins and diglycerides don't seem to be harmful, so if the science pans out it would make sense to ban *some* emulsifiers but not *all* of them.

Accelerated research, followed by surgical strikes against specific problematic additives is an achievable and worthwhile goal, because it benefits all consumers and doesn't harm politically powerful agribusinesses as much. Similarly efforts to subsidize the production and distribution of high quality food is something that could conceivably be achieved for similar reasons (it'll put money in the pockets of agribusiness), although there will be opposition to efforts to get that food into low-income areas.

Because that's what we ask of them. We want them to tell us whether a thing is good -- how many stars? Thumbs up or down? Seondarily, we really want them validate *our* opinions about a thing and get mad at them when they don't.

It's pointless. If you like something an expert's feelings about it shouldn't change that. And it's hopeless. A movie you can spend a tolerably entertaining mindless hour and a half on isn't going to land the same with someone who isn't allowed to turn off his brain. Imagine having to watch hundreds of movies like that a year and have to pay attention because it's your job. You'd be cranky about it too.

But there's another role a critic can play besides handing out stars for works of art. He can increase your enjoyment and appreciation of something, even it's something that you didn't personally enjoy. Maybe he can convince you a movie you didn't like is at least interesting. A competent critic can also help you understand why you like a movie, or see why it might not work for other people.

In other words, a great critic doesn't just validate or invalidate our opinions, he helps us make our opinions better informed and more nuanced.

The existence of a lunatic fringe in the movement unique to libertarians. Everyone has philosophical convictions, but almost nobody has been educated in with no engineering background.

People don't choose a political philosophy after an exhaustive and critical examination of the alternatives. They latch onto a movement that sounds emotionally appealing. So you've got to expect major blind spots when it comes to how they expect to be treated and how they treat other people. Every Utopian revolutionary movement promises liberation, probably sincerely, but they end up delivering a new set of opressors with different rationalization for their shortcomings.

If the current draw is low enough relative to the battery capacity, it might not matter. We should be careful not to extrapolate our most recent experience with backlit color LCDs to a device like this. In a transmissive color lcd panel, the backlight sucks the lion's share of power in the display. A reflective display draws only an insignificant amount of current, and still much less than a color panel when backlit. That's how watches run for a decade or so on tiny tiny batteries.

This is much more like a Palm Pilot from 25 years ago than a laptop. The tiny 3 watt hour battery ran the grayscale display of a Palm V for 20 hours of continuous use. Granted this is a much larger device with a higher resolution display than the palm, but we can expect it to have something like a 30 watt hour battery. Most users will probably go several days between needing a charge, which is not quite as long as an e-paper device, but a lot better than the smart watch battery life that consumers seem to tolerate.

The real wild card isn't the tech, it's human behavior. What the founder has done here is create a device that would scratch his personal itch. That's far from the guarantee there's a sustainable market for the device that entrepreneurs who operate that way assume. Will people buy it when it costs a lot more than an iPad and the pitch is that it does *less*? Will this draw pragamatists after they've exhausted the rearly adopters?

Like I said, new technologies will be looking to reduce lithium. But you really can't beat lithium for its electrochemical properties. Lithium batteries have other advantages besides mass energy density, like charging and discharging rates and high efficiency. This easily offsets their disadvantages. They also at present enjoy massive production economies of scale. It'd be good to have less lithium-dependent technology, but at present lithium ion batteris are really tough to beat.

I think flow batteries and liquid metal batteries are really promising, although the liquid metal battery people are having funding issues right now.

It's not so much that nuclear operates *best* at full load, so much as that you don't save signifidant money by reducing the the plant output. So as long as you get paid *something*, it makes more sense to sell power even if you can't make an econmic profit. As long as you're paid *something*, that's better than being paid *nothing*.

In that way nuclear power somewhat resembles renewables; when you have power the only thing you can do is sell it, even if it is at an economic loss (i.e. a less-than-normal profit). For that reason I think grid storage holds as much promise for improving the economics of nuclear power as it does renewables.

People like the idea crash programs in renewables or nuclear to address climate change, but really if we could get a little more consistent funding into grid storage technology, that's where the next marginal dollar would net the biggest bang. Just mainly through private investment, the price of grid storage has come down precipitously over the past ten years.

That is certain to transform the economics of renewables and nuclear, but the price of lithium is going to be a limiting factor in future price drops in grid storage. New technologies that use no lithium or less lithium could continue the downward price trend for another decade, hastening a transition to a mixture of nuclear and renewables. The problem is these investments are more speculative, and therefore investment money responsive to external economic forces like the Fed raising interest rates.

Just because we use as single word to refer to human faculties collectively doesn't make them one thing (e.g. planning). Billions of years of evolution have furnished us with a swiss army knife of cognitive abilities from being able to proto-count (subitize) to being able to infer where other people around us are directing their attention.

A lot of our intelligent behavior is being able utilize these disparate capabilities *together*. For example, I notice the people around me are looking at some other people, who are looking back; I recognize that some of these people are in my in-group and other are outsiders; I perceive (subitize) that there are more of them than of us. There are some people who can't do this because they aren't as capable as other people at various links of the chain, and yet these people are often highly "intelligent" in other ways.

As we build AI tools, there is little point in them unless they *exceed* human abilities in some manner. So arguably we have already AI tools that, on certain tests with well-chosen constraints, are smarter than humans in a very narrow and specific way -- certainly in their ability to process large volumes of data. What we won't get at first is that kind of seamless integration of different kinds of mental capabilities. This integration is so natural and effortless for us we call all our highly disparate abilities by a single word.

If you look at economics that throws out the external costs of coal.

Globally fossil fuels recieve seven trillion dollars annually in public subsidies. But that's just a drop in the bucket compared to the costs it is allowed to pawn off on other parties. If fossil fuel users had to pay the externalized cost of pollution, then the world would be running on nuclear power right now.