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Comment Break Out the Champagne at under $100/MWh (Score 1) 26

$100/MWh isn't remotely competitive any more, mostly, but because of the "base-load" need, you might get that much. If it can't produce power cheaper than that, though, it won't fly.

Nuclear dreams are now in a race with batteries, basically - if batteries get down to $20/kWh as the CAPEX, keeping around enough batteries for a dunkelflaute every few years, starts to compete with $100/MWh of baseload.

And then there's geothermal, just a big question mark right now, but the chancers doing pilot plants are definitely aiming for less than $100/MWh - and for power that may not just be base-load, but have some storage capability so it can flex up more power at night, hold it back during the day. If they make that happen, nuclear has to beat them or die.

Comment Re:claims (Score 2) 44

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: Trump will solve this problem (Score 1) 86

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Fuck that.

I want the govt more OUT of my life, I dont want to give them more pathways into my life....

Comment Re:3D printing wasn't the problem (Score 1) 98

I'll find out in mid January, lol - it's en route on the Ever Acme, with a transfer at Rotterdam. ;) But given our high local prices, it's the same cost to me of like 60kg of local filament, so so long as the odds of it being good are better than 1 in 8, I come out ahead, and I like those odds ;)

That said, I have no reason to think that it won't be. Yasin isn't a well known brand, but a lot of other brands (for example Hatchbox) often use white-label Yasin as their own. And everything I've seen about their op looks quite professional.

Comment Re: Why was the older version better? (Score 5, Insightful) 60

They don't really know what caused the glitch.

The cosmic ray hypothesis is just a conjecture.

So, they're rolling back to the previous version until they can figure it out.

If they're doing memory scrubbing, they might want to bump up the frequency.

If they aren't using semiconductors made with depleted boron, they should be.

Comment Re:claims (Score 4, Insightful) 44

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) 121

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.

Comment Another retirement goal I can toss (Score 1) 78

When I retired (10y) I was a whiz with Perl, had learned enough Python to know I could switch over easily, and was being told by Paul Graham that if people were too dumb to see that LISP was the ultimate language that had made his fortune, that Ruby had the same deep structure allowing the ultimate trick of self-modifying code and true compactness and elegance and all that stuff the Great Programming Languages all had to have for the most-elite work.

Of course, I didn't have to work any more, and I hate writing toy programs, and didn't have a problem that really required it, so at 10y, the O'Reilly Ruby book is dusty, and when I have something too hard for a bash script, it's still perl. Which still works.

But I was feeling guilty about it, and now I can put the Ruby book away with satisfaction that the moment passed. (Giving up on FORTH was the hard one; loved that language.)

Comment Re:politics and/or incompetence (Score 1) 54

I was having a conversation with a friend, a real small government type. His premise was that all government jobs were corrupt, and always will be. So privatize everything. I noted that it is people who are corrupt, so when we get rid of corrupt guvmint, where are the corrupt people going to work?

Private enterprise is at least as corrupt as government workers. Belay that - more corrupt. It is surprising how many decent, honest people work in government. Yeah, at the top at present it's really sketchy - but look where they came from.

Yea. your friend's line of reasoning is pretty common but it is a bit of a head scratcher to me. There's less transparency in private business, so there's corruption and unethical dealings that most of us never find out about. The point of having services under government control is that it's the people's money and the organization should ideally be answerable to the people.

This is not remotely a good situation.

The anti-union shift has been a bad strategy for the Dems. Unions can get their members showing up to the polls or even for political action far better than Act BLUE can by just sending upper middle class donors a panicked email begging for donations.

  Some people don't like unions because it's an extra layer of politics. It seems inefficient to have dues and voting and people getting paid just to be reps. But taking a step back: if you want to walk into a room with your boss to negotiate something, like a job or raise or working conditions. You, as the worker, are standing alone and your boss has an entire organization (and legal team) behind him/her. Without unions every person is negotiating under a serious imbalance against some of the richest and most politically connected organizations in the world.

Comment Re: Huh? (Score 1) 201

Not sure. Just when you think you've found it the line slants up again. But humans have limits and Donald Trump is old. His hey day seems to have been in the 80s and 90s. Now he's slowed down and is taking more naps, plus a bunch of his old friends have died or gone to live in group housing. I suppose you could argue that he's taking dirty old man to new heights in his mind.

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