I remember the fanciful suggestion, months back, where AI was going to scan millions of CCTV images just looking for crime in the real world.

But, very obviously, that's hard, and scanning the cyber world of bank and corporate transactions, and numbered corporations and real-estate flips, is much, much easier: it's just scanning a flow of bits for patterns found to be related to frauds and other white-collar crimes, in the past. Could AI scanning of all bank loans and Credit Default Swaps, and leveraging, have spotted the Global Financial Crash before it happened?

Oddly enough, the Masters of the AI Universe have never suggested watching their own economic class for crime, to my knowledge.

If a Canadian engineering firm designs something to be built in America, nothing crosses the border but information. Specifications one way, blueprints flow the other. The work is taxed in the country of sale, where the customers are. It's always been that way, on both sides.

This is just a computer doing some work in America (and we all know the actual computer may be in Sweden), work that is sold as a service by Americans, to Canadians. It's no different than the specs and blueprints. A query is sent to America, services are performed, results are sent back to the customer in Canada.

And it's a friggin' THREE PERCENT TAX. God, quit whining. You got away with no-tax for years, and never should have.

The best intel I got was from David Roberts "Volts" podcast, where he had on a genuine "China Expert" who has reported full-time on their business news for a long time. That guy pointed out that you can't get anything done in most provinces without appeasing the 'boss' of that province, generally the actual political head.

And a lot of those guys own coal mines, so you can't get your solar project approved without also putting in a coal plant. A lot of the power plants are solar with coal "backup", and a lot of those are barely turned on - just a few months of winter, say.

So, yes, they "build a coal plant every week" but at low capacity factors, so the coal usage can actually go down.

The metallurgical use is expected to decline sharply in the 2030s, even if no better process is found, simply because their building boom is over and a lot of it was for rebar.

I used Excel heavily, with longish macros, do be able to program at all (in Engineering, not IT, not allowed any development tools), and was able to write a lot of what (were not then called) "apps" - specialty programs that did one thing. Custom reports and updates, mostly; A button would refresh a pivot table directly from Oracle database; another would put changes back in to Oracle, after data filtration.

Calc is pretty lame at many things that Excel really had nailed down well, 20 years back. Casually tossing of Macros that do database hits or invert pivot tables is just easier in Excel.

Thing is: IT Dept. HATED ALL THAT.

IT totally hated user programs of any kind, even when they were far more stable and reliable than their solutions. Even small ones that did one thing.

My solutions were always up for being replaced by some more-difficult usage of their Big Solutions, like PeopleSoft or the Formark Document Management system. Only the fact that they were so slow to deliver - by the time they'd started the project in earnest, the business needs would have changed; I'd adapt my Excel macro solution in a few days, and they'd be back to square one on a year-long process - kept my solutions going for years.

So, the bad news is that you won't be able to do some of the cool power-user solutions with Calc that you could with Excel; the good news is that your IT department will be happy about that.

If Britain pulling out of EU trade was Brexit, this is AMexit - America leaving the whole world.

All through my career, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, I saw amazing numbers of white-collar jobs just created. My office seemed to need new facilitators and re-organization specialists, and levels of supervisors, and especially people doing "communications". We aquired a whole communications department that we had to work through instead of just informing the public ourselves, handling incoming calls ourselves.

I was never clear on the need for all of them, they didn't seem that productive, day-by-day, and often seemed to be doing jobs that came to nothing later on - reports on shelves.

This may be just a correction.

I've re-checked a few times now, and it's 3500 cf per MWh of heat, which means 7000 cf per MWh of *electricity* from a combined-cycle gas turbine that's 50% efficient.

But, of course, the 200T mass of the wind turbine is silly. It forgets the heavy concrete foundation, but I'm good with that as I bet the foundations last a century, like most concrete foundations, and you can wear out 5+ turbines planted in it. (I think that's why nobody mentions the concrete.)
Most of the mass is steel, and that's 95% recyclable by an existing waste stream we can assume. I think the generator parts are the same.

It's just the blades, and those seem to run about a ton per four metres, as they get big. I think the wind turbines of the future are going to be more like 10 MW, which is a 75m blade, so I'll go with 75/4 = 19T per blade, or 57 T/turbine (10MW)

But wait! I screwed up something else. Wind turbines on land are only at a 30% capacity factor, so over time, a 10MW turbine would be more like a 3MW generator, on average.

So the final numbers are 7000 cf/hour/MW X 3 MW X 0.0052 lbs/cf / 2.2 lbs/kg = 50 kg/hour (average of many hours).

So it would take 57000kg/50kg/hr = 1140 calendar hours. Or 48 days.

Summing up: in 48 days, a 3MW gas plant running 7x24, would produce about the same energy as a 10MW wind turbine running 48 days.

The 3MW gas plant would have burned 57 tonnes of methane to do that.
The 10MW wind turbine would have a coming debt of 57 tonnes of icky composite-material blades to get rid of somehow. 19.7 years later.

Still, it would be possible, surely, to simply put the wind turbine in a furnace that vaporized it at thousands of degrees C and just put the whole thing into the air as gas.

Because that's what the competition does, every day, with their fuel. So that's really a fair comparison.

It took some time to find the numbers and do conversions. At 7000 cf/MWh, a gas plant burns through 165 kg of methane for each MWh, so 827 kg/hour to displace a 5 MW wind turbine. About 20 tonnes of natural gas per day.

Every ten days, the natural gas plant burns the weight of that wind turbine and tosses the waste into the atmosphere.

I've been over the numbers twice, and I'm still shocked. Can this be right?

Sorry, didn't make clear - when all money goes to the top, there's less to invest. My expertise is in the water/sewer utilities, where Thatcher's privatization was supposed to lead to infrastructure renewal from private investment. Every promise was broken, every requirement was dodged or lobbied out of existence, and the higher utility rates were simply pocketed, and the water infrastructure remains poor.

I'm just assuming that same pattern shows up in factories, housing, everywhere. Britain has been looted.

You read James Burke about Britain from the 1600s onward, and the progress is inspiring. New crops and farm practices in the 1600s more than doubled food production, new chemistry and physics and new mechanized cloth-making all through the 1700s, with the steam engine taking off with Watt's in 1783, and the whole 1800s just one amazing improvement after another in trains, boats, farm machinery, factories.

And people starved on the streets of London in the early 20th. It doesn't matter how much more money you make if it all goes to the top.

That wasn't SF, it was just a description of the economy before about 1975, when there were few women in the workforce. There was one woman in my 1980 grad class in Engineering. Four of my last five bosses, from 2006-2016, were women engineers or CPAs. Medicine and Law have been 50% female for two decades, but there were almost none in 1970.

The post is saying that the current situation is the historical abnormality, and thus the top suspect for the demographic change.

If women entering the workforce had merely allowed families to choose greater income and wealth over children, we'd probably still be above replacement.

But, nooo, our economic system had to relentlessly seek efficiency and profit until two jobs were *necessary* for a precarity-free, comfortable life with retirement safety in the offing. So that set up a direct conflict between you "having a life" and having kids. Enough chose the former that we are now below replacement and faking growth via immigration.

When the whole world follows - India is now below replacement - and begins to shrink, the way China already is - the immigration will slow down and we'll have to face the fact that our system is "anti-life", as surely as hunter-gatherers realizing that drought or change in herd size is making them dwindle. As they had to move away from old grounds, we'll have to move away from old systems.

I don't say "late stage capitalism" because I think we've had capitalism since those hunter-gatherers were trading furs for flint. But we're 20 years away from seeing the end of the quasi-feudalism that forced people to choose between survival and reproduction.

Iraq War: US and UK.
Global Financial Crisis from turning Wall St and City of London into casinos: US and UK.
Brexit: UK
Trump: US

Over, and over again, the last attempts to preserve feudalism and concentrated control of all money and power: it's the last two empires.

I won't live to see them over, but I do get to watch them shrink, slowly but surely.

...they're all pretty fictional in the modern world. The "invisible hand" didn't even keep dirt and sawdust out of store-bought bread.

Everybody seems to understand that you can't trust illegal drugs to be safe, to contain what is advertised, even though that market is totally governed by the "invisible hand". All it lacks is regulation.

If you're against regulation, you're in favour of every product being as reliable as street drugs.

...seems like 3-4 years now, while we continue to laugh at the attempts to go for 30 minutes unsupervised.

I don't denigrate ML, I've filled in some probability tables with massive data summarizations myself, and it helped automate my own job. But I've been replaced by two people, nonetheless. Better tools often get you into more complexity and you have to navigate that to prevent the great tool from making greater mistakes.

Backhoes really helped speed construction, but not unsupervised.