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Comment Re:500 means statistically significant health effe (Score 1) 93

You also have to consider that the US has a long way to go before its even remotely competitive with China, if we're talking about total tons of CO2. They produce 2x what we do, and that's not including how much they breathe - which puts it more like 4-5x the total of what the US produces, for both India and China.

Comment Re:500 means statistically significant health effe (Score 1) 93

That's largely dependent on relative oxygen concentration in the air, which is the biggest reason indoor air quality is poor/low in oxygen - not CO2 directly. CO2 is the second order issue.

These are generally people with poor cardiovascular health in the first place.

With higher oxygen levels (as naturally happens with increased CO2) due to increased plant growth, people will/are able to withstand much more CO2 before its problematic.

Comment Context is needed (Score 1) 93

Meanwhile, that's about half of the low end of what plants prefer - 800-1200ppm.

Their alarmism about (the 180ppm) of the last Ice Age, meanwhile, was almost low enough to kill all plantlife on the planet (and with it, most animal species that depend on said plants). We were dangerously close to global annihilation.

For context, 1000ppm is going to be a stuffy office space, and 800ppm a well ventilated indoor space.

A well-fitted surgical mask like so many medical professionals insisted was necessary some short years ago? Those have been measured to result in a CO2 of 2,000-5,000 (with peaks up to 8,000ppm when its actually fit properly) for the air being inhaled. (But don't worry, that's still under the 8,000ppm 8-hour OSHA maximum.)

If plants like CO2, they're going to grow more rapidly and prolifically. That means, in turn, they'll be producing a lot more oxygen. Let's assume a moderate increase in O2 to 25% ambient... which is more than safe, and even preferable. The result would be that humans could withstand significantly higher CO2 ppm.

I'm not sure why we've ever started talking about CO2 as a "greenhouse gas" when it's 0.0425% of our atmosphere, and the facts above (about it causing significant greening of the planet). That much is well established, and it's well accepted that greening an area will decrease, not increase, the temperature of the area. We've seen this play out significantly in the last decade or so in eg. North Africa. This more than offsets the "global warming".

More CO2 is not only not bad - its beneficial and preferable.

The big problem with the CO2 hysteria (such as in the OP) is that it's myopic and agenda driven. "You've got to consume less" - which is true, regardless, but bellies the point that such propaganda is directed at Western countries which produce both less CO2 per capita and in total vs countries like India and China, which have effectively zero efforts in place to reduce its production. It's clearly aimed at the Western countries to hamper them economically. Outside factors, like solar output, are never considered in these breathless press releases about global warming. Notice how "global warming" is conveniently replaced with "climate change" in the media during periods of low solar output? We're now nearing the peak of the ~11 year solar cycle with the solar maximum likely to occur this year. Expect seeing more "global climate change" in the news in the coming years...

Comment Re: Talking about the weather (Score 1) 143

Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.

Comment This meeting would be better as an email (Score 4, Insightful) 16

Basically, AI note takers allow all the folks who aren't really needed at the meeting to just get the email summary. What this means is that A. none of them should have been asked to go to the meeting in the first place, and B. the meeting probably should have been an email.

Meetings tend to be useful for the person calling the meeting. The number of meetings that were genuinely useful for me as an attendee... over the course of my entire career, I can count them on one hand, as long as I use binary. 99% of time spent in meetings is not useful. And even in meetings that are genuinely important and useful, half the time is usually not useful.

More emails, fewer meetings. We had it right during the pandemic. That's why productivity improved so much.

Comment Re:units (Score 1) 31

I've noticed that stupidity with units too. They also give millions of tons of CO2 in the report. For a reference 31 TWh is amount that is used by a whole highly developed country of about 5-6 mln people, e.g. Slovakia (26 TWh, 5.5 mln), Ireland (34 TWh, 5.4 mln) or Denmark (36 TWh, 6 mln).

31 TWh per year? That's only 3.5 gigawatts, or roughly one nuclear power plant, or about 0.01% of California's annual power production, unless I'm misreading some numbers or missing a decimal point somewhere.

Comment Re:Vision Pro Secrets? (Score 1) 31

Plenty. Enough that he risked it, and tried to cover his tracks. I know you're just taking the opportunity to shit on Apple and get a pat on the back for it, but painting it as 100% failure from top to bottom just isn't reasonable. Surface level focusing on prior art has you described deliberately misses the point. By that logic there will never be another significant innovation in cars, since prior art at getting from place to place is in the can.

The only interesting thing about the hardware, IMO, would be details about the internals of the custom silicon used for the image pipeline. And even that probably isn't all that interesting. Beyond that, The hardware is just a glorified iPad and a Quest 3 bolted together, with slightly higher resolution marred by slightly worse optics.

Most of what makes Vision Pro interesting is the software, and that isn't fully baked, making it somewhat less interesting than it otherwise would be.

It's not that Vision Pro is a 100% failure from top to bottom. It just doesn't do anything groundbreaking compared with hardware that costs almost an order of magnitude less, and it is a total marketing flop as a result.

Apple failed to understand the market. They didn't want it to be seen as a device primarily for gaming, so there aren't enough games available. They wanted a closed ecosystem, so they made it support only iOS apps (and only a subset of those), rather than Mac apps as a true spatial computer would. They naïvely assumed that wireless connectivity is good enough, resulting in a device that can't be developed for by users without a paid developer program membership (which means that those of us with corporate tech jobs can't tinker with them for fun) and ensuring that screen sharing with your Mac is flaky as h***. And so on.

And so they built a massively overly powerful device without any clear use case, when what most people would rather have is a larger-display version of Google Glass for consumers — real-time translation, real-time hints about who people are, real-time information about things they see, and being able to watch a movie while they are out for a walk without holding up a device the whole time.

They completely missed the mark, and as a Vision Pro user, I genuinely can't imagine why anybody in their right minds would want to steal their tech, much less the company that makes SnapChat.

Comment Re:Erm... (Score 1) 156

t takes between 150 kWh and 800 kWh to separate and liquify a ton of oxygen, so if you're paying $0.10 per kWh, LOX costs $15-80 per ton

It occurs to me that this is a good use of massive solar plants. It wouldn't cost much to idle your oxygen-separation equipment when the sun isn't shining, so you wouldn't need much in the way of battery storage. Grid scale solar without battery backup in a sunny area (like south Texas) can cost as little as $0.03/kWh, which would give you a separation cost of $4.5 to $24 per ton of LOX. Obviously, if you were producing LOX at a scale needed to fuel a fleet of Starships, you'd work to get that towards the bottom of the scale -- so the LOX loadout for a ship could cost on the order of 3500 * 4.5 = $15,750. To launch 150 tons to orbit. Of course you still need methane.

Could you make "green" methane (i.e. without using fossil fuels) with a big solar farm, and what would that cost? You'd do it with the Sabatier reaction to combine CO2 and H2 to get CH4. To make a ton of CH4 you need 2.75 tons of CO2 and 0.5 tons of H2 (stochiometry, dawg). To get a ton of CO2 with direct air capture takes about 2000 kWh of electricity, so 5500 kWh for the CO2. At $0.03/kWh that's $165 for the CO2. However, producing the half-ton of H2 with electrolysis would take 25,000 kWh, so $750. This puts the raw materials cost of green CH4 at around $915. The Sabatier reaction would add a little more, call it $930 in all.

So... Starship could be entirely solar-powered at a cost of around 3500 * 4.5 + 1000 * 930 = ~$946k, assuming $.03/kWh, ignoring equipment and storage overhead. It turns out that the cost is utterly dominated by the cost of methane production; LOX is all but free. But the cost of solar will likely continue to go down so... fuel costs could indeed get really, really low, even with a zero-carbon strategy. Perhaps as low as $2/kg to LEO.

Comment Re:Consoles are easy (Score 1) 43

On the system requirements angle, PC gamers generally don't care anymore, however, MS can certify a few standard tiers, say, 'xbox 2026', 'xbox 2026 premium', 'xbox 2026 ultra' and the software and hardware ecosystem follows those.

Microsoft tried to do something like that before with the Windows Experience Index in WinSAT. It didn't last long: the GUI was displayed only from Windows Vista through the first release of Windows 8.

Microsoft can curate a store of games regardless of the nature of the hardware. The app stores choosing to let developers run wild has nothing to do with in-house hardware.

If next to nobody signs up for Microsoft's curated store, this curation will be ineffective. The only thing that encouraged third-party developers to publish through Microsoft's store is that Xbox consoles are cryptographically locked down not to run games from anywhere else.

An xBox Series X equivalent GPU is like $250.

Plus the cost of buying the rest of the computer around it. This can prove more expensive if you want a case that looks more attractive in the living room than a big noisy tower.

Most games that release for xBox release on Steam for PC as well.

I'm curious why it took over 14 years after Red Dead Redemption was released for Xbox 360 for it to get a PC port. Rare Replay and several other respected Xbox One games still haven't been ported.

That's why pairing a game controller with a PC is so popular, and steam big picture mode.

In 2012, the consensus was that most users were unwilling to either build a second PC, cart a gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the computer desk, or run cables through the walls, to use Big Picture mode in Steam. (Source: adolf's comment) When did this change?

Comment Re:Desktop computers are not that common anymore (Score 1) 115

It's not PC alone, it's all the streaming services, they are convenient and offers no real incentives to collecting

The incentives to collecting are 1. ability to watch if you rely on wireless Internet (satellite or cellular) with a harsh monthly data cap, 2. ability to watch a particular movie or TV episode again after you have switched to a different streaming service for the month, and 3. ability to watch a particular work again even after its publisher has destroyed it for an "impairment" tax deduction or the service it's on has ended (particularly for game consoles).

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