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Comment CO2 as an indicator of air quality. (Score 1) 13

Indeed. My thought was that CO2 levels could roughly correspond to the number of people in the specific room, offset by actual ventilation levels.

IE more CO2 = more risk because it means more people with inadequate ventilation.

Conference crud is really simple. Hacker or not. You bring in hundreds/thousands of people from around the country and world, exposing most of them to even more potential disease carriers on airplanes, trains, busses, and more, then disrupt people's sleep and disgestive tracts with unfamiliar locations, schedules and food and you have the perfect melting pot to get people sick.

What can be done to help prevent it? Mask wearing might help some, along with sanitary other stuff - improve the ventilation in such buildings, including good filters, UV lights and such helping to sterilize the air. At the same time, improve air quality otherwise, because harsh cleaning chemicals can also make people sick.

Comment This seems ridiculous on the face of it (Score 1) 82

TFS appears to be attempting to conflate the phone-buying habits of individual consumers with business hardware replacement cycles and productivity. It appears to be complete garbage.

I am left to assume this was shadow written by someone in the marketing department from some large tech company - e.g. Dell, Samsung, Apple, Google, Microsoft.

As an aside - it seems pretty wasteful (and pointless) to replace your smartphone even after 29 months, let alone every 22 months.

Comment Re:No. [Trains can't win?] (Score 1) 218

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.

Comment Re:Not climate change. (Score 1) 128

why did they go to some professor in Mexico who had nothing to do with the study to explain the findings?

Because they wanted someone with expertise and credibility to explain the issue plainly so that they could be quoted.

The reporters go to some seemingly random professor to comment on the findings of someone else's study.

This is quite a common thing for new outlets to do and it's confusing why you find it strange.

Why not talk to the people who produced the findings about what the findings mean?

It's generally hard to get a response from people who write papers like this in a timely manner because everyone is asking them a zillion questions all at once.

Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 34

Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!

So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:

---
The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the physics.

A hydrothermal reservoir taps naturally circulating volcanic brine. Its fluid chemistry is whatever the rock has been stewing in for centuries: arsenic, boron, mercury, dissolved metals, HS, etc. The industry learned long ago that natural brines often destroy turbines, foul condensers, and require scrubbing that wipes out the thermodynamic efficiency. Those problems are real, and your experience confirms them.

Superhot-rock geothermal is a different class of project. It does not rely on natural brines, natural permeability, or natural aquifers. SHR / modern EGS systems:

Bring their own working fluid (usually treated water in a closed or semi-closed loop),

Create engineered fracture networks rather than using natural ones,

Operate in a supercritical regime (>374C, high pressure) where heat transport is dominated by convective sweep rather than slow conduction, and

Are sited where mantle heat flux is extremely high (e.g., Newberry), not just where water has accumulated in shallow formations.

The key point is that the problems you encountered at Campi Flegrei — toxic brine chemistry, turbine contamination, and power losses from scrubbing — are specific to hydrothermal geology, not to engineered SHR systems. SHR avoids most of that simply because it doesn’t use the volcanic soup; it uses injected water circulating through a designed heat-exchange zone.

Your numbers actually underline the potential: you were getting ~50 MW per well from a shallow (~350–400C) hydrothermal system with awful chemistry. Modern SHR aims for rock in the 400–500C+ range, with supercritical water carrying far more enthalpy per kilogram and without the brine-chemistry penalty.

Whether SHR proves economical at scale is still an open engineering question. But the Campi Flegrei outcome doesn’t generalize to SHR any more than the problems of early natural-steam geothermal plants generalized to modern binary-cycle systems.

Does this distinction make sense from your point of view?

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