This sounds a lot like what is already use in the M1 Abrams tank, so scaling up sounds more than plausible. I'm not as sure what's new or different, though.

Honeywell_AGT1500

College probably still helps in overall career earnings, but less so right out of college the way it used to. There are two simultaneous changes that make this true. One is the increasing cost of college, the other is in the inflation of unskilled labor salaries, driven upwards by societal pressure and drastic minimum wage changes. (For example, NYC's trajectory toward a $20/hr minimum for pizza delivery: www.convenience.org ) Because there's little corresponding push for increase in salaries for entry level positions that need college graduates, the initial pay differential that used to be there has dwindled, at least when you consider takehome pay after college loan repayments.

Over the course of a career, those with college degrees are likely to increase salary faster over time, and eventually pay off college debts, but that benefit will come far later in life than it used to. In the meantime, those who elected not to go to college may actually enjoy a modest lead in take home pay, since they won't have the college debt to start with, and they will start earning it about four years earlier.

Also various medicines are technically PFAS, like Ciproflaxin antibiotic, while others need PFAS in the manufacturing process. It's really not all that shocking that the EPA may be choosing to allow PFAS needed for medicine or for protective gear and seals for human safety over a Don Quixote windmill tilting approach. What might be useful instead is some more research on how to dispose of them so they don't stay in the environment forever.

You're correct, five nines, I knew there was something wrong with that percentage. The grid is a bit more complicated because of carrying capacity on individual lines versus the overall system, too. Nonetheless the principle holds of using poisson process stats to calculate necessary peak capacity and working in that direction.

Decades ago the telecom companies figured out how to provide adequate quantities of circuits to serve large numbers of customers with "nine nines" reliability (99.9999999%). You don't build distribution capacity for the average case, you build capacity for the peak case, using a statistical process to help you calculate the peak. For the phone companies the peak model was Mothers' day, when everyone sometime during the day typically calls their mother.

For the electric industry it's probably something else, and they probably know what, but they need to start building for it, and we need to recognize that it's a cost of "electrifying" the country and moving away from other sources of energy, rather than externalizing the costs of things like EVs and renewables. The "we can improve capacity without adding lines" is a recipe for failure and disruption when the statistics reach an unfavorable peak.

I'm not against nuclear but I don't think we had it solved then. To really advance, we need plans that provide for exponentially more energy production cheaply and reliably. We're talking about renewable projects that produce megawatts and low gigawatts when we need to be thinking about how to someday produce Terawatts and Petawatts. It's those kind of energy sources that will help us move forward as a species. If we could get to virtually free clean energy, then problems like fresh water go away--desalinization becomes cheap. We could position ourselves to harness new sources of raw materials like asteroids. Etc.

Also, the space capitalists like Elon Musk are kind of crazy, but they aren't wrong that someday we need to be moving toward a future where we get off this rock and find a way (at least over millenia) to move beyond our solar system, if we want humanity to have a really long term future. A future built entirely on economizing and reducing energy usage doesn't get us there, especially if it pushes us back a couple of generations in tech usage. Efficiency is fine, and we need to address climate change short term, but ultimately we need to keep an eye on how we level up.

It's maybe a harsh way to look at it, but it's possible that if we're not growing, we're decaying.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2783/

If my employer tried to keep my office thermostat that high, I'd go after them under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Sustainability be damned, keeping temperatures low is important to people with multiple sclerosis and similar conditions to avoid triggering flare-ups.

Unfortunately, one denial also allows for multiple other denials. And pushback on attempts to gain approval on anything related seems to be the trend:

https://www.mainepublic.org/2021-10-25/a-1-5-billion-lithium-deposit-has-been-discovered-in-western-maine-but-mining-it-could-be-hard
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/business/economy/electric-cars-us-nickel-mine.html

The problem is that under this system you're more likely to find people willing to agree to fund an experiment where they ACTUALLY lob a tac nuke at Mars than something to bring back some rocks.

Lead lined cables haven't been in use for a long, long time. Which means none of the telcos that exist today are companies "responsible" for putting them there, that had to have been Ma Bell back when it was a government-sanctioned, hyper-regulated monopoly that basically acted like an arm of government. Until they decided it was too big and broke it up. So in this case, it doesn't seem all that outlandish to put it on government to clean up the mess.

By that logic, we should also adopt ultra-liibertarian structure of public services, to ensure that nobody is forced to bear the externalities of others' costs. Fares on public transportation must pay the full cost of offering the service. No welfare or social security programs paid for by others' taxes. No subsidization of health care. Etc.

Is that the system you want?

People working in the trades get screwed because there's so much pressure to bump up minimum wage so high there's little benefit to having any marketable skills. So a high school kid delivering Pizza in NY as summer job makes $20/hr because that's the minimum wage they're setting. And raising the floor that high drives up inflation and cost of everything so however much more someone with real job skills makes it isn't enough.

On top of that, now everyone wants Joe to be able to go to college, get a loan, and have it paid back through the work and taxes of everyone else, like the people in the trades who are trying to make a living doing skilled work but still only making $10/hr more than Joe and his summer job. And that's a shame. There's too much forcing the system to work in ways it doesn't to meet some kind of social ideal, but the reality is economics are so complex there's always an unforeseen negative effect, and more likely than not it's the people in the middle who get screwed.

I agree with the idea that kids learn better when they are allowed to read something they are interested in, and that's exactly why we can't just "let the teachers teach." The last time my son's school did this, he ended up with a slate of "diversity literature" pushed at him that was both horribly written and completely inappropriate for the class. (By inappropriate I don't mean LGBT or such, I mean the teacher pushed books centered around inner city murder and suicide issues, in a class containing a few kids my son interacted with who were under treatment for known clinical depression/suicidal ideation concerns.)

What we really need is to end the "no child gets ahead" system of teaching that tries to drag everyone to the lowest common denominator in a vain effort to eliminate disparities between different classes and races. Then really let students learn at their own pace, even if it's above others, and keep them interested.

By “going all techie” I mean do it right, not don’t do it. I advocate for treating climate change like any engineering problem. Find the 80 percent solution on carbon issues for now, get the most bang for the buck while you make it reliable, then work your way up. Don’t try and squeeze every last percent of carbon out at once and fail in the process. Do the math, take the time needed, make it work.

For me that means I personally choose a plug in hybrid versus all electric until I’m convinced other challenges have been solved. I would love solar power on my house roof and my next one probably will have it but it isn’t economical for my current one with surrounding trees etc. I worked on improving better insulation but nobody is going to touch my gas stove, and I will probably always want a natural gas line as backup for other options. It’s far cleaner than coal or oil. Etc.