Totally agree. Today's "AI" companies would like their investors to believe there's a path though.

Clearly we're misunderstanding each other. I was saying that investing in the bubbled asset was folly. I think the AI industry will continue to exist after the bubble pops but at a size no larger than the database industry today. So not zero value, but a small fraction of what it is currently.

I do think that the amount of money being invested in AI training for the improvements being produced is an absurd waste. They're spending larger and larger sums of money to produce rapidly vanishing improvements that customers have so far never shown an interest in paying enough to turn a profit with.

Yes. It will deliver the complete and unabridged Harvey Epstein files.

Alternate lede.

So in other words, because chewy.com exists today it would've been smart to invest into pets.com at the height of its value?

This is going to be such a disastrous investment it's going to make Solyndra look like an insignificant whoopsie in comparison. While Chinese product dumping efforts can be hard to foresee, the obviousness and severity of the AI bubble has been on public display for anyone who cares to look for months now. And there's the potential to sink far more money into it. The winner of the AI race is going to be whoever wastes the least money on this folly, and the US looks set for a massive and easily avoidable loss now.

And let's not forget the end goal of this. If someone were to win this race in the fictional imagined scenario where AI didn't hit the core of Diminishing Returns Planet around ChatGPT 4 and there was some kind of path from LLM tech to AGI, the end result would be a technology that augments/replaces labor (same thing, don't be fooled by your boss) in a world dominated by an economic system where most people are workers who need to be able to find buyers for their labor. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms? The point of using it in his book was to tell the reader that a renewable uses X amount of land and that nuclear only uses some fraction of X land, therefore nuclear is better while ignoring that the land can be used for multiple purposes at the same time. He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things, so he's not a reliable source. Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to have used his book as a resource in the first place when you have actual, up to date references.

What land area? Are you simply ignoring that the wind farm does not actually consume the land between the limited footprints of the actual towers? It can still be farmed on, lived on, have factories built on it, have a solar farm built on it, etc., etc., etc.

Ok....? If I build four nuclear 1 GWe plants and call it a nuclear farm and build them in a square configuration with one at each corner and the linear distance of the sides of the square is about 200 km, then the Watts per square meter is You need to leave space between turbines...

Uh, yeah, of course you do. The point is that the wind turbines don't consume that space. The thing is, I'm not sure anyone in this discussion is talking about the same thing. For example, earlier in the conversation, you note that you think the w/m^2 in that article are high and you then cite MacKay. The problem is, MacKay is talking about land area, whereas the article you were criticizing there was clear that it was talking about the area of the VERTICAL PLANE (not yelling, just for emphasis). You're comparing apples and oranges and citing an old and clearly biased source. MacKay may have been a good with computer science, but the details of his career indicate that he was intellectually dishonest when it comes to energy in order to push his own agenda. The book and other details make it appear, from my opinion, that his intention was always to give lip service to renewables, but only to develop a following that he could then steer to the conclusion that only nuclear energy could work. Citing his book hurts anyone's argument for me. Why even cite him when you could have gone with primary sources?

Well, there was quite a lot of hot air in there really, both figuratively and literally since he was clearly a closet nuclear shill.

Well, technically, it has changed at the Earth's surface due to reduction in certain types of pollution. For all intents and purposes I suppose we can say it has not though.

Well, the change you state there is a 25% increase, so that's nothing to sneeze at. The panels have also certainly become cheaper.

Anyway, in the end, I stand by what I said, you selected, quite unnecessarily, a biased source that many have held up to a rigorous analysis and found lacking.

Why would we want private industry to build it? They're already fucking us over six ways from Sunday, do we really need another way to get shafted?

The high speed rail in most of Europe is owned and run by the country's central government and is generally extremely good. The high speed rail in China is the best on the planet, owned and run by the central government. In Japan and a couple of other countries it's managed by private companies which report to, and take direction from, the central governments.

Or perhaps this is just one of those things we're uniquely incapable of doing, like providing healthcare or keeping control of our military spending.

Yes, I've seen what happens when government owns and runs the rails, we've ridden the trains in Spain, Italy and Portugal, and they're outstanding.

Which figures? Land usage figures? Because that is mostly what he focuses on and he exaggerates the land usage of wind turbines to a fantastical degree, pinning it at 2 Watts per square meter. Obviously this is off by orders of magnitude and is a manipulated figure obtained by using the entire land area of a wind farm rather than just the land area that a turbine takes up, ignoring the fact that wind farms don't consume the land they sit on except at the very base of the tower. For a back of the envelope calculation, consider a 6 MW nameplate turbine that, with a standard capacity factor, produces 2 MW. Even if you consider the base to be as wide as the blades (which is not even realistic since you can pretty much use the land right to the actual bottom of the steel tower one way or another), that would be about 18,626 square meters for a 154 meter wide set of blades. That would be around 107 Watts per square meter even then, which is a good deal more than an order of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers. If you use a realistic idea of the land area taken up, which would be inside the diameter of the blades, the number would be at least two orders of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers.

At the same time, MacKay uses over-generous numbers to make the land footprint of a nuclear plant smaller than it really is when you consider external factors like the uranium mining land use, offsite processing facilities, watershed area, time issues, etc. MacKay is clearly using land area as the most important criteria in the first place in an attempt to favor nuclear and also clearly fudging his numbers to make it look as good as possible.

He also estimates that every person in the UK uses about 195 kWh per day. Then he stacks that up against his estimate of how much could possibly be generated in Britain and, oh no, the stack for renewable power generation comes up short. Now, this is primary power, not just electrical usage, to be clear. Even then though, that is too high. Going by current primary power figures for Britain of 164.4 tonnes of oil equivalent and a population of 69.718 million, it comes out for me to around 75 kWh per day per person. Now, maybe that's him being dishonest, or maybe it's just the fact that, as I mentioned, he is working with outdated information. Or, possibly the stats I can find on primary power usage in the UK are off, but I checked two sources and they seem to check out within about 10 kWh of each other.

As for technological changes, solar cells have become more efficient and much cheaper. While there is not a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of turbines, wind turbines have improved in various ways. One of the changes is for them to trend larger so that they capture more wind in one spot. Basically there have been various changes that enlarge the stack of power that can be generated.

To re-iterate, the data in MacKay's book, aside from other problems, is simply outdated.

You were implying a repeating pattern, but not actually identifying any repeating pattern.

Average US household drives 14,200 miles per year. That's 37.88 miles per day. The average EV gets around 3.5 miles to the kWh. That's about 11 kWh per day (ugh, technically three time units that should be cancelling each other there, that's why I hate kWh as a measure). The average us household uses 30 kWh of electricity per day. So, the increase to power EVs would be about 36.7%. Sure, it's an increase, but it's not some fantastical number. Also, it's weird how you're acting as if power generation is some sort of zero-sum game. It's simple economics, if there is a demand, supply is increased to meet it. Also, that additional demand for EVs can also be met just from reducing wasted power from households. It is notable that power usage in many developed countries is more like 20 kWh per day per household. So just some basic increases in energy efficiency in the US would provide enough surplus to meet the EV demand.

For starters, people who want to electrify everything in order to be more environmentally sound tend to want to use renewables for power. Aside from that, if a combined cycle gas plant is 60% efficient and that power runs a 400% efficient heat pump, then that's a 2.4X reduction in the amount of natural gas that would otherwise be needed to heat the home.

That is clearly not what you said. You clearly talked about clear cutting forests for GE crops and data centers. In any case, you don't need to clear cut forests for solar farms, there are plenty of unforested areas to put them in, and climates that are good for forests are not always the best for solar farms anyway. Regarding your math with numbers pulled out of nowhere like 10GW, 500W per square meter of panel (pretty extraordinary since that would need to be a record breaking 50% efficient panel) and 20 billion panels... ??? 20 billion 500W panels would generate 10 TeraWatts. I mean, if you want to make a mathematical argument, use actual numbers and actual math.

Which, while bad, has nothing to do with EVs and fossil fuels.

Why does everything have to be profitable? If that were the case then your local potable water plant wouldn't exist, or the sewer plant, or roads, or ...

Sure. So do fairy dust and unicorn farts. Just as soon as we have the fairy dust harvesting operations and unicorn fart extractors up and running - oh, and solve the pesky problem of capturing magical creatures - and actually establish even a basic baseline of the real cost, they will clearly outcompete renewables. That seems to be your argument in a nutshell.

So, you're not even hand waving away all the technical problems with fusion reactors (beyond the ones I myself ignored such as actually getting a stable, repeatable breakeven reaction to work in the first place), but simply completely ignoring that I even mentioned them? Name-dropping the concept of economy of scale does not explain how fundamental issues will be solved. If you're going to be honest about this at all, then you need to actually address how those problems will be solved. Just mentioning Helion and CFS and claiming that their existence proves that they have solved these problems is nuts. Seriously, Helion was supposed to have net energy 8/9 years ago and a working 50 MWe plant 6 years ago. Where are they now? CFS does not appear to be outright lying about their timeline in the same way as Helion obviously is, but they are clearly still overly optimistic. Their plan for shielding the gear used to generate the magnetic shielding is a "molten salt blanket". It seems like a pure fantasy to believe that electronics won't be burned out beyond repair every few months or less. It is hard to believe there could possibly be an operational cost per unit of heat that would be lower than a fission reactor and, once again, the rest of the plant will still need to be a giant steam engine.

Basically, you're just fantasizing about possible future technology. All well and good, but there are certain technologies we have now and for possible future technologies, there are varying degrees of probability of their success. Holding out for what is currently just science fiction will not help us now. Calling me -- the one advocating for basing energy policy on systems that actually exist in the here and now -- nuts seems deeply ironic here.

Wouldn't be the first time I needed to change a default config to work around NSA / Five Eyes fuckery, won't be the last:

https://blog.stribik.technolog...

Well, to be fair, one of the reasons they maybe don't explain things so well is that their plan is basically to "blot out the sun". Basically, they plain to stain the sky so that less sun will get through. While, yes, this would reduce temperatures on Earth, it would also dim the sun, which means that, among other issues, agricultural land will become less productive. They obviously don't want to go into the consequences of that or who will pay for the damages to every farmer on Earth.