You forgot that this is about gas turbines. They're going to BURN the hydrogen. Divide that 68% number by two, and that's still probably wildly optimistic. More realistic numbers are probably more like 20%.

Not really, no.

If you're rolling it around on wheels, maybe. For a fixed installation, weight has exactly zero relevance. You're putting it on top of a concrete slab on top of dirt. Who cares how much it weighs?

Volumetric density might matter sometimes. Typical density for hydrogen peaks at about 40 kg per cubic meter (assuming Google search isn't lying to me). With a fuel cell, this will maybe give you 1320 kWh. But then you need additional space for the fuel cell itself, plus compressors to compress the hydrogen on the way in.

Batteries give you half the energy density, but that's all you have to have. Electricity in, electricity out.

Which one is more dense depends entirely on A. how quickly you need to store the incoming hydrogen (size/number of compressors) and B. how quickly you need to be able to turn the hydrogen in your tanks into electricity. Because the batteries will be instant. The power is just there. Whereas with fuel cells you need more/bigger fuel cells depending on how high your kW output needs to be. So storing huge amounts of power is more dense with hydrogen if you only need to dribble it out, but massively less dense if you need to dump all of the stored energy in an hour or two.

And realistically, for grid-tied energy storage, that second case is more common than the first. You aren't going to store energy for a year unless you're in Alaska had have all-day twilight for several months. No, you're going to store the energy during the day and use the vast majority of it between the middle of the afternoon to the early evening. It's probably a three or four hour window in which you will be dumping all the energy that you stored, give or take.

But to make matters worse for hydrogen, they're talking about burning it, not using it in a fuel cell. The efficiency there is maybe half the efficiency of a fuel cell. So when used in that way, batteries are more efficient in terms of volumetric density than hydrogen even BEFORE you factor in all the space for the turbines to burn it and turn it into electricity! This is absolutely *insanely* space-inefficient.

Add to that the problem of hydrogen embrittlement, where you have to keep replacing those storage tanks every few years, not to mention the pipes, turbines, etc., and it quickly becomes obvious that this project is a giant money pit in which Southern California will burn dollars and turn them into a negligible amount of temporary power storage.

There's no way in this world that burning hydrogen from electrolysis at somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% round-trip efficiency makes sense. This is quite possibly the single most clueless idea ever to come out of California's government in the history of California's government. The only people this makes sense for are the ones who are bilking the taxpayers by building out this infrastructure. Because it will never be useful. It will always be more efficient to use the incoming energy to charge batteries, or to do something else. Even when you're talking about things like nuclear power and using waste heat to crack water into hydrogen, you'd still be more efficient with any number of other thermoelectric energy capture systems going straight to electricity and storing it in a battery.

Hydrogen is not the answer. Hydrogen is the question. No is the answer. Always. For literally any purpose you could possibly come up with other than fusion.

Fuel cell efficiency sucks, too. Sure, maybe it's half again more efficient or even twice as efficient, but a battery would be more like 5x as efficient.

Are you saying all copyright laws are stupid? Because thats what the Internet Archive unilaterally decided in these cases.

Its not just the usual issue about length of copyright term, because the IA were sharing (and initially they had no way to enforce the sharing, so really it was just distributing) scans of books that were both old and brand new.

So if you are saying all copyright laws are stupid, what else do you think shouldn't be a law? All property law full stop? Lets eliminate ownership entirely?

That's going to be expensive as hell.

I thought that was the entire point of consumer IoT goods? Rent-seeking by manufacturers?

(Serious question, not just snark.)

Your first mistake was buying a sh*tty front-loading washing machine in the first place. I dealt with those in the laundromat in our dorms at grad school. Never again.

Front loaders mean that you can't add clothes when you realize "Oh, s**t, I forgot the towels upstairs." And now you're running entire extra wash loads because your washing machine is designed to lock the door and prevent you from opening it.

Add to that the increased risk of flooding, increased mold problems, etc., and you couldn't *pay* me to take a front-loading washing machine unless you let me cannibalize the motor and then haul the rest of it to the junkyard afterwards. It's a fundamentally bad design.

If you can't hear your dryer buzzer, get a louder buzzer, or add a remote buzzer. That's the nice thing about non-digital hardware. You can just replace parts. It just applies a voltage across some kind of buzzer. Measure the voltage with the buzzer removed or look in the wiring diagram. Add a relay with an appropriate switching voltage in parallel across the buzzer. Use your old telephone line that you're not using because nobody has land lines anymore, and wire up a pair from the dryer to a location upstairs. Use low voltage DC through the switched side of the relay, and add a piezo buzzer and a 12V power supply upstairs. Add some connectors to make it look neat, and you're done.

I don't know exactly where you're getting the content, so I can't be completely certain, but when you pull network feeds off satellite, there's often a period of time allocated for local commercial insertion by affiliates. I'm not sure what they put in during that period these days, but that might be what you're seeing. If the downstream affiliate isn't injecting ads correctly (or at all), then you'd have whatever placeholder content filled the gap, which might be national ads for other shows on the network (preemptible spots) or might be nothing at all.

Same. I can't imagine paying $50 a month for any service. I'm currently an extra member on my mom's Netflix account because Netflix decided they didn't want my $11.99 and I wasn't willing to pay them $17.99 a month or endure ads. And that's where 90% of my viewing comes from.

So maybe buck or two a month is about all I'd be willing to spend for the very limited amount of viewing that something like YouTube TV would provide, assuming I could even deal with the commercials from live TV enough to watch it at all, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't, which makes the whole question moot.

Live TV is dead. And streaming live TV won't save it.

It's worse than that. ESPN has massive revenue, but also massive costs. Contrast with Disney, where the cost of production is dirt cheap by comparison, and what you conclude is that Disney/ABC is basically taking advantage of knowing that a lot of folks want sports to force mandated bundling so that all those people who don't watch ESPN end up helping pay for the ones who do, both by paying for the ESPN part and the Disney part, which ends up subsidizing the ESPN part.

The worst thing that can happen to a streaming service is getting sports. We need to keep streaming sports on their own a la carte services. As soon as you start bundling it in, the cost of the service skyrockets while the quality of the content plummets, because sports is such a huge fiscal black hole.

The courts have been pretty mixed about Guantanamo. They agreed with me in Boumediene v. Bush. But then, the farther the court swung to the right, the more bats**t the rulings became, and the more they buried their heads in the sand to avoid following the law.

Anyway, I think the correct argument to make would be that if they are not guaranteed due process, then they must not be criminals subject to prosecution, and must instead be P.O.W.s, which means they are subject to release at the end of the hostilities pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, and the government owes them a lot of money for unlawful detention since 2021.

Surely you're joking. Nixon had his election staffers break into the competing party headquarters.

Under Biden, the FBI, as part of an active criminal investigation into an attempted coup, looked at the phone records of sitting members of the government to see who they called and who called them and when.

No, Nixon did not get impeached for "much less".

Yes and no. The legality depends on what they do with the data. If someone takes pictures of you for a scrapbook, sure, it's fine.

If someone uses them in artwork, that's probably fine.

If someone uses them for primarily commercial purposes, that's a violation of your right to privacy, and illegal.

And there are a *lot* of things that private citizens can do, but government can't. Why? Because the government has disproportionate amounts of power over you, and so our laws and our constitution deliberately shackle the government to limit the harm it can do.

First, that's not true. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says anything about "citizens" or "lawfully present persons". The Constitution limits what the government can do. People have constitutional rights whether then are citizens or legal or undocumented immigrants.

For that matter, people have constitutional rights whether they are in the United States or Cambodia. This is not to say that the Cambodian government has to respect those rights, but rather that with only a few explicit exceptions, the U.S. government still has to respect the constitution even when not operating on U.S. soil. It cannot, for example, require U.S. citizens in other countries to quarter troops.

Which is really, really stupid. It just makes them some other country's problem, and no other country should be willing to put up with it.

Very few countries do that, actually. A lot of countries do detain them, but not for months or years. The real problem is that the U.S. legal system is horrifically slow.

Haven't you noticed? That's their pattern. They accuse the Democrats of wanting to do something bad because it's what they would do if they were in power. And when they get power, they do it. Want to know the most heinous things the Republicans want to do? Just look at what they accuse Democrats of doing, and you have your answer.

The number of times this has happened even in the last year or two should have been enough to make the pattern obvious to a casual observer. :-)

Doesn't the onion problem exist for any theory tho?

I mean, at the end of the day, something has to underpin the thing that underpins the thing that underpins the thing that our universe runs on? Whether it be a simulator, or another form of energy or whatever, there are rules which are goverened and set by something, which indicates that that level of reality also sits atop something else...

This really is one of those mysteries which will never be resolved, and we can only go so far with theorising.

Chrome based browsers already made it a lot harder to use sites with self signed certs as well - I had a VSphere server on my local network that had a self provided self signed cert, and actualy accessing the server got progressively more and more difficult (and there was no way to change the cert). At one point I had to type in "this is dangerous" to get the browser to actually give me an option to proceed.