What these groups need to do to protect vulnerable people is to make sure we build new powerplants soon. It's so sleazy of them to act like they're trying to protect customers from paying high prices for energy when for decades they basically caused energy prices to get so high by having a problem with basically every possible way of generating energy.

Whatever, dude.

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.

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.

Once you import numpy, Python has arrays.

That would never fly. You just know that some dufus at the gym would bring a 10kg steel dumbbell into the MRI room and ruin things for everyone.

They tried, but quarreling parent groups couldn't agree on whether to teach the kids that they were coding with 3 registers or 259 registers.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

But I was told that the sole reason insurance rates are high is because of BIDEN!!!!1!

I bought a nice pair of gloves this year with ChatGPT, but when they arrived I found that they each had six fingers.

The chlorophyll in plants is finely tuned to absorb specific wavelengths of light. It already has a hard time with green light compared to blue light, and it's simply not going to work at all with radiation that has wavelengths that are orders of magnitude shorter. Chlorophyll acts like a little antenna that gets excited by certain light frequencies, but ionizing radiation would just blow the chlorophyll molecules apart and destroy them.

Taking advantage ionizing radiation is going to require a completely different mechanism than plant photosynthesis, just like you can't use glass lenses or parabolic mirrors to focus X rays or gamma rays. Plants probably have no more chance of having such a mechanism than fungi do.

Right now, we're noticing that Chinese companies are offering us exploitative deals, and we don't like it, and think that tariffs will fix it. But with tariffs in place, we will find that now it's American companies that are offering us the exploitative deals, but they can charge more now, because they're insulated from outside competition. What I'm saying is that intranational capitalism is just as sleazy and brutal as international capitalism - only less efficient, because it's less competitive.

I agree with you about NATO states paying for mercenaries to defend Ukraine. There are many experienced fighters in Africa and the Middle East, and it's likely that their services could be bought at a reasonable price. Without more soldiers in the field, Ukraine's front is doomed to collapse.

I love AI and I would and could pay for it if I had to, but why would I pick OpenAI to pay? Their product is not really better than their competitors' products, and sometimes it's clearly worse. They have the advantage of being the first mover in their field, and that gives them inertia with low-information customers - the new AOL.com. But apart from that, they have huge debts and not much else to distinguish them. Their best employees had left, and their former partners have become wary of the way they operate. Projections of their future profitability must be based on the expectation that their AI will figure out some better business plan than what the OpenAI humans have come up with!

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."