It'll be an endless whackamole game where it's cheaper to cheat than to obey, so they'll all cheat. None of them have morals, just a slow-AI program to make money, and they can make more by cheating.
We've got to just eliminate the fuel.
...and I just stopped there.
Windows 7 was maybe an upgrade, in a place or three, from XP? But it was not a downgrade in any respect, either, I was fine with it.
But Windows 10, it does stuff that annoys me, has extra "Handy" desktop bling in it that annoys me, and it offered me exactly nothing that I'd wanted or made me say "that was a good addition". Nothing that made me say "I'd go back to Windows 7, but I would like this one Windows 10 feature".
Is there anything I missed? If Windows 10 has a couple more years, I'll be buying one more used one when they start to get scarce, and that'll be my last Windows machine at all. I've been keeping one in the house because of Excel (don't tell me to use Libre, I'm a very high-level Excel guy and only Excel does it all) but at some point, I'll give up even that. 10 was bad enough, I'm not going to something apparently even worse.
I wrote some really handy and effective "special purpose tools" for excel, with VBA - dialogues that would pop up over the spreadsheet to give you buttons,etc that sped up doing SQL hits, manipulating pivot tables and charts, whatever. There were zillions of special-purpose Excel apps for doing just one thing in an office way more automatically.
Then out comes Excel 2010, and my dialogue vanishes when I click on the spreadsheet. Because they'd gone from every Excel sheet being inside one Excel overall window, to the Word-style "Single document interface" where every invocation of excel has it's own window. And the Macro dialogues all belonged to the special Excel file that holds "add-ins", so they don't belong to the window they're used in. So, you click on the spreadsheet, Windows moves it over top of the dialogue. This made Word and Excel consistent, but offered no actual benefits that I could see - and screwed Add-in Macro dialogues.
And there was no way provided to counter this. The forums were full of enraged "add-in" developers.
I'd always been a little extreme around the office, actually programming Excel, and there are corps that deny macros entirely for security - but this is when I realized that MS just didn't care about macro programming, at all, in any language. It can't be that popular with the IT departments that do the actual buying, only with the final customers that want some efficiency. But for IT, it's just all risk and no reward. That's my theory, anyway: MS is pleasing IT departments by screwing macros.
Can the people always going on about lithium explain how we found enough lead for 11kg of lead per ICE car battery, when eV batteries need only 9kg of lithium...and it's lead that is LESS common "in the earth's crust"?
People are going on and on about suburbs and sprawl and all that, and it's beside the point. You can design cities that way after switching fuels.
Exxon did not just promote oil for cars, but oil for everything. American power was much more about oil-burning before the 1973 spike of oil prices by five hundred percent. That caused a huge recession because we were so dependent on one fuel for nearly everything. We switched power generation away from oil, dropping use for that by 70% within a few years, all of it gone in a decade.
If Exxon had told the truth, or just admitted to the truth when others told it instead of harassing them, calling them liars, we could have switched away many years earlier. It was always technically possible.
Exxon is not just some corner store. It has a huge place in our society, has many privileges that come from that size and power. They should be held to correspondingly greater account.
Invasion of the continent?
"Economists deploy threats to impoverish China if they harm trade interests in the South China Sea", or
"Trade partners remind China that they cannot feed themselves" strike me as credible threats.
Answering drones with drones is like answering nukes with nukes: they're entirely offensive weapons. If they can slip little drones under your radar to damage infrastructure or kill people, your drones can't stop them, only reply in kind.
There was no point in inventing more threats after nukes were invented: threatening them with nukes if they use nukes, biowar, or gas against you, just add "or drones" to the list.
We went through this logic with "enemy states will deploy terrorist networks against us" with "drones" cut/pasted in for "terrorists". Don't fall for it.
Yeah, "100 hours" is assumed to be the needed number, and Form give themselves some contingency with 120.
But - Alberta last Xmas had about a week with no sun, no wind, -40, the gas plants doing 95% of the needed 12 GW. If they can't invent geothermal (and there's nobody better to) they'll need a couple of terawatt-hours on hand for the next of those, with no carbon allowed.
https://www.theintelligencer.n...
The iron-air process, "power from rusting" takes 120 hours to chew through the little nurdles of iron they have in great amounts in a Form Energy system. The factory to build iron-air batteries at scale is now putting up walls, will be up in 2023, start production in late 2024. They already have orders based on their successful demonstrations.
Their target (may not reach it) is storage for a CAPEX of less than $20/kWh of stored energy. Presumably, a $100M facility could store 5GWh, putting out 400MW for 120 hours.
If they work at that price, iron-air batteries (or, perhaps, the "iron-flow" competitors from ESS) may eliminate about 90% of the concerns about electrical storage.
The volts.wtf podcast on industrial heat is still highly recommended, though. There are many varieties of it - you just need to a store at 200C to run a canning factory, or most food-processing, for instance.
...these guys have no sense of humour.
https://boingboing.net/2019/12...
Prasad's Law is about health care spending, but it clearly applies at least as well to education. "There's always enough money to concentrate wealth, never enough to diffuse it."
The other complaint about universities is that they don't pay the actual educators well, the teaching assistants. There's never enough money for them, even when it's raining $100 bills, and they're renovating monasteries...I bet the teaching assistants were still scraping by on ramen.
I've had to put a filter on my news - not on my computer, just in my brain. I get a paragraph into a news story and ask myself "Could this problem even happen anywhere else, or is it just one of those "American Problems" that they invent for themselves? It's become like reading some news from Uganda that a rural person was accused of calling upon evil spirits, and 12 dead in the ensuing riot.
Canada stretches its resources to take in immigrants, over 500,000 last year, as if America took in 5 million, or Britain, nearly a million. Our housing is stretched to breaking, but our culture appears to be in zero danger of turning Asian or African or Hispanic.
We never really accepted the notion that there are special grades of education that equip employees with superpowers, (well worth spending quadruple upon) and while we have a few high-priced universities, mostly it costs under $5000 American for Canadian tuition.
I'm personally sure I was about as well-instructed as the American engineers I worked with, and Canadian regulated-professions of medicine, engineering, teaching, accounting all do about as well as Americans, and have little trouble being certified if they migrate. So I just don't know what your $35,000 average tuition in private colleges is buying your students.
It's just an American problem, like spending $11,000/per-capita on health care, and getting less than all the countries (like us) that average $5K-$6K per capita. There's no reason for foreigners to be briefed on it.
Not forgetting that they may know very for sure who did it, but can't prove it. Under our laws, that's "unsolved".
A lot of murders in Vancouver are gang-related, and honestly, most figure that the killer will get his eventually, live by the sword, etc. As long as we know "that's just gang-related, I'm safe in my lifestyle far from them", we probably don't vote for a zillion dollars to nail the exact hitman every time.
If it had absolute zero leakage, it would be half as bad as coal. Which is still too bad.
Well said that "When the speak of 'climate adaptation', they mean for the rich. The poor just 'adapt' by suffering and dying."
Well, of course, the military, to whom all cash flows, will be the richest adapters of all, with gold-plated adaptation.
Absolutely the only government function where they measure the budget by asking how much society can stand, given the size of the economy. Every other one measures the need, and spends only on well-proven needs.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
