Solid concrete is more expensive, but foamed aircrete that has the density of hardwood or pine has long been a standard, approved building material in Europe and alleviates your concerns. Plus, it's insulative.
While this technology could be useful for bespoke (i.e. luxury) designed homes, it doesn't really make sense for low cost housing. It's bit like the idea that we will replace injection moulding machines with 3D printers. It doesn't make sense because injection moulding is dirt cheap if you are making large quantities.
Define cheap. As long as society is letting people go homeless and saying we can't afford to house them, isn't there something to shoot for? Not that it's not outrageously expensive; as is, Salt Lake City found it was cheaper to pay rent for an apartment for homeless people and give them a chance to get on their feet, than to criminalize them and constantly feed them through police custody, courts, and jails for, say, sleeping on a bench.
We can and should build decent homes in bulk. We should give people solid walls so they aren't hearing their neighbors snore in the next flat over. They should be in-fill in areas where employment and education are accessible. Yes, there's definitely room for 3D printed innovation here.
I should add, though, that there are other concepts for 3D printed homes, say, with earthbags and rebar, laid with the same tube sandbags as you'd see with emergency flood barriers and levees. https://3dprint.com/7716/earth... These are potentially flood-proof, fire-proof, and nigh impervious to hurricanes and earthquakes. An earthbag dome can weather a direct tornado strike and lose nothing but maybe a few windows.
But similarly, there are concepts that could upgrade the slums that the global poor live in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm excited to see what SQ4D could contribute to this field. It just doesn't make sense for anyone to be crushed by the cost of rent, or kept out of housing altogether. I hope they shake up our ideas of what's possible, and beneficial.
You're exactly right. If, hypothetically, you're demonizing people, making cartoon caricatures of them, you can't understand or predict them. If they actually are up to something that's hurting society, you're not going to know how to fight them effectively. There are truly insane psychopaths in the world, at least 19 times out of 20, and yes things do happen that would blow most people's minds, but those are corner cases.
Darn touchpad, meant to write:
There are truly insane psychopaths in the world, and yes things do happen that would blow most people's minds, but those are corner cases.
Wish Slashdot would let us edit and simply keep the backlog to keep us honest, but until then, I've learned my lesson about unreliable input methods.
You're exactly right. If, hypothetically, you're demonizing people, making cartoon caricatures of them, you can't understand or predict them. If they actually are up to something that's hurting society, you're not going to know how to fight them effectively. There are truly insane psychopaths in the world, at least 19 times out of 20, and yes things do happen that would blow most people's minds, but those are corner cases.
One should try to imagine a rational actor in another life, another social in-group, another set of interests - even in their worst enemies. Then you can figure out what conversation and what strategy you and the rest of society need to have.
I can't say enough good things about this op-ed about why movements for change should come from a rationally informed place:
Cults aren't just Jim Jones and grifter gurus. They are a composite of things that can all be present in varying degrees, and all of them are toxic even in low-dose.
If it tries to force people to skip a blood transfusion that could save their lives, it's a cult.
If it demands that people believe only the "news" that comes from its insiders, and cites itself for evidence, it's a cult.
If it uses jargon words that mean one thing to the person off the street, but slow-walks people into an alternate meaning, it's a cult.
If it pulls out the stops to attack former insiders who dare to leave, and threaten their standing or safety, it's a cult.
But all of those things can happen in more subtle levels than drinking the poison kool-aid. Anyone who's gotten out of extreme fundamentalist religions or militia movements or whatever can tell you that.
Q-Anon was just a rehash of stuff that's been around for decades, and as someone formerly raised in cultish Pentecostalism who got tons of retribution when I left, I do feel for those waking up and realizing they've been used by a rebranded fascist cult that tried to recruit them for another Kristallnacht.
I'm glad we're seeing the signs that this is starting to end.
Get these folks each a copy of Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World". They don't need handed-down instructions from another authority. They need that famous baloney detection kit. They need walk-through of what the process of discovering truth looks like.
You need only figure out how to fine-tune algae farming. For a bonus, you get food and fuel as byproducts.
I think that people underestimate the already-existing advantages of electric cars. This claim to cost-parity with combustion engines sounds great, but even prior to that:
* The drive-train of electric cars features far fewer moving parts, and are proving quite durable. There are Teslas with mileage nearing 500,000, still going strong. In terms of cost of ownership, electric cars are already quite affordable just in terms of life-cycle and maintenance, particularly if you go for liquid-cooled batteries, like Tesla and Chevrolet have.
* If range anxiety is your chief concern, extended-range EVs have enough battery to drive around all-electric in the city, but a backup gas engine that runs with high efficiency. The Volt is a great example of this, and an excellent transition car for those who might not have access to charging infrastructure. I own one. I only had to fill the gas tank three times in the first year - trickle-charging from a regular electrical outlet overnight met most of my needs. The vehicle is getting around 117 MPGe and 142 MPG, which measure gas + equivalent BTUs for electrical generation or pure gas mileage. The Volt is highly underestimated - you can easily go electric most of the time with it, without any worry about roadtrips anywhere. They're affordable used, too.
* The improvement to air quality has huge externalities. If we counted healthcare costs due to air pollution, electric cars and renewable energy generation would already easily pay for themselves on that count alone. No, the technologies aren't perfect, but they are flexible to future upgrades, and the technology is improving incredibly rapidly. This article is a case in point.
Really, the up-front costs for a *new* vehicle is the only hard pill to swallow, if one doesn't count the likely longevity of the vehicle.
Most of the arguments on the internet against EVs just don't match up to my actual experience of them. Ah, Slashdot, once the place that would be first to call out industries in hiding from changes whose time has come.
If you must sequester carbon, I can think of no quicker, more scalable way than cyanobacteria bioreactors. They can work with minimal water loss and nutrient runoff, and once they have fixed carbon and nitrogen in their biomass, you can use them in soil amendments, which in turn would ease a lot of our dependency on petroleum-based fertilizer.
A healthy spirulina culture under the right conditions can double its mass in days. Trees are great, but for the application this article is talking about, algae beat both trees and industrial / chemical solutions.
Which "architectural secrets" are you talking about? Surely can't be the CISC-based 68K Amiga line?
Case in point. Those who thought a computer was just a CPU and RAM never got the Amiga. The Amiga had a chipset for hardware acceleration of all sorts of functions, such that it took ghoulishly stagnant management holding the engineering team back for years before PCs caught up.
The Apple M1 architecture is the most coherent to the Amiga hardware philosophy of anything to appear recently. I would love to see a RISC-V counterpart!
Any sightings of a new, suited crimefighter or a sleek Jackmobile around town?
Rated power: GE 13MW, Vestas 10MW. So GE is 30% bigger. Or a bit more if you use the 9.5MW figure.
kW per foot in diameter: GE 18.006, Vestas 17.658. So GE is nearly 2% better.
W per foot^2: GE 99.754, Vestas 131.29. According to this metric, Vestas is over 31% better..
Why do you mention the 30% increase in output like a footnote, and then fixate on output per foot in diameter as if that were the most important measure? This turbine is meant for anything *but* space-constrained conditions - we're talking about offshore wind power. Output per foot of diameter is really not the biggest constraint here. Overall output, total costs of deployment and maintenance, reliability under the harsh conditions of offshore generation - those are key. Why gloss over or omit them?
"Ports are scanned, retard."
You idiot, they are detonated a couple of hundred yards away from the port, H-Bombs just like water to produce a better fallout.
And what's that supposed to do for a country which is economically dependent on exports that go all over the world in shipping containers?
Some people are so keen to imagine comic-book villains that they miss basic self-interest in other humans.
Homework is one of the places where warning signs of abusive homes appear. It's cruelty on top of cruelty to write off a student who couldn't focus on math because last night, their door was getting kicked in by a raging pseudo-adult male, and their mother was rehearsing them in how to pass off bruises as "an accident".
Cue all the ones who assume that saying that this is a problem is saying that kids from good homes shouldn't get quality education. Quite the reverse; why aren't we making sure not to make things yet worse for battered children?
Do you know what your hypothetical non-hypocritical hero looks like?
(sees a hit-and-run car crash)
HNH: "I'll never ride any wheels again and hope you do too! Carry on! What a hero I am!"
(walks in on a knife-point mugging)
HNH: "I'll never keep cutlery in my kitchen again! Carry on! What a hero I am!"
(walks in on a sexual assault)
HNH: "I'll just castrate myself and leave! Carry on! What a hero I am!"
Who's the real hypocrite here?
That's how obviously stupid and immoral this consumer-shaming trope is. It's obviously on the side of big polluters to tell people themselves to the woods, to wait until industry cuts or burn them down too, rather than do something to get society to leave obsolete industries behind.
This isn't chiefly about consumer choice. A mere 100 corporations alone are responsible for 71% of human CO2 emissions, along with all the other destruction and pollution that goes on with that. https://www.theguardian.com/su...
Just what is a climate justice group? Is it a group that lives in the forest, uses no fossil fuels and eats only organic vegetables? If they practice any other lifestyle, they are hypocrites.
That has about as much logical sense as saying that people who want to stop widespread rape have only the option to sterilize themselves. It's also about as wrong and vile. However, I'm pretty sure you didn't come here to be convincing, or think anything through, but for the record, your stale, oft-repeated trope sucks.
Don't panic.
