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Comment Re:Almost thought you were serious (Score 1) 19

I made specific points and your reply did not.

As for my worldview, you interpret posts the same way you interpret the news, exaggerating everything and extrapolating it to absurdity to make yourself upset or say something unreasonable. If you have inferred I was ever an extremist, you were wrong.

Comment Re:claims (Score 1) 38

Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

Comment Re:spin (Score 1) 19

No, Amazon specifically said their layoffs are not due to AI.

Amazon spokesperson said the job cuts werenâ(TM)t a result of using AI, and pointed toward a message in October from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, who said they were part of the companyâ(TM)s effort at âoereducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure weâ(TM)re investing in our biggest bets.â

But reporter would like to have a story about AI job loss, so they forge ahead and build the narrative:

Still, the push for agentic AI is arriving as Amazon is reshaping its own labor model, raising uncomfortable questions about whether the tools the company is selling will displace employees, both within its ranks and among the customers itâ(TM)s selling the new software to.

That part isn't news, it's commentary.

Comment Re:Remember, the problem AI solves is wages (Score 2) 19

Solving the problem of paying wages is just another way of saying increasing efficiency, which has been the goal of almost every technology and management practice forever.

And people concerned with equality should be delighted if there are meager inheritances, or even if they were simply outlawed. Inheritances are very illiberal. Inheritance is the foundation of a class-based society. Inheritances are also fly in the face of conservative principles, since they in no way reflect merit nor market forces.

Comment Re:claims (Score 4, Insightful) 38

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

Comment Re:Old News? (Score 2, Informative) 113

Just put it in context: Today Russia struck the Pechenihy Reservoir dam in Kharkiv.
Russia launched the war because they thought it would be a quick and easy win, a step towards reestablishing a Russian empire and sphere of influence, because Putin thinks in 19th century terms. Russia is continuing the war, not because it's good for Russia. I'd argue that winning and then having to rebuild and pacify Ukraine would be a catastrophe. Russia is continuing the war because *losing* the war would be catastrophic for the *regime*. It's not that they want to win a smoldering ruin, it's that winning a smoldering ruin is more favorable to them and losing an intact country.

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