Yeah, this is what I always worry about when I see studies like this. I know they always try to control for confounders, but it's really hard to do right. If you mess up, you get another "Regular wine drinking improves your health!" craze (wine consumption is correlated with wealth and better access to healthcare, and also, people with serious health problems often have to give up drinking)
720,000 people left the labor force
This is the blandest, most watered-down way to say "lost their job" yet. Quite nauseating.
That's absolutely not what it means.
"Left the labor force" doesn't mean "they lost their job" it means "they aren't looking for a job". Examples of cases where people "leave the labor force" include (but aren't limited to):
* Retired.
* Had a child and decided to become a stay-at-home parent.
* Decided to spend their time caring for an elderly relative.
* Decided to go back to school.
* Gave up on working after being unable to find a job.
* Had a financial windfall and decided to stop working.
And so on. The "gave up after being unable to find a job" is not particularly likely in a job market where only 4.2% of people who want a job don't have one, though I suppose some may choose not to work rather than work in a less-desirable job than they had before.
Also, it's July 2. June employment numbers are basically worthless at this point. Give them a quarter or so to get more data and correct the numbers. The initial numbers are based on only on employer reporting data, which skews it in various ways. The government uses several other data sources including surveys, but it takes time for that data to come in, which is why these numbers are generally corrected 2-3 months after they come out.
What's the incentive to pay the random then, if the attacker had encrypted the data without backing it up and wouldn't be able to decrypt it?
... it's just another pack of lies like everything else Musk hypes up.
Counterargument: Who would have predicted a few years ago that one private company would dominate global launch, launching more by every metric than the rest of the world combined, and -- all by itself -- triple the number of satellites in orbit in 7 years.
Sure, 200Xing the satellite count is a lot harder than tripling the satellite count, about 66 times harder. But if Starship is successful (by no means a given, also far from impossible), SpaceX will reduce per-kg launch costs by 100X, maybe more.
I'm skeptical... but I would also not just write it off as a "pack of lies". The things SpaceX is actively working on should make the launch part of it feasible. Will it be cost-effective? That's a harder question, and heat dissipation is the core thing that may make it infeasible.
Also, the final paragraph of the summary seems to be confused:
So, why are the hyperscalers hyping orbital data centers? Answer: because it's lucrative. "The Elon Musk part of it is honestly genius because he's got xAI building the data centers, SpaceX sending them to space, and Tesla building solar panels," Genkina says. "It's almost like he's paying himself."
Yes, SpaceX will be incredibly lucrative if it owns the whole vertical stack, building, launching and powering -- but only if it works. If it doesn't work, and if orbital compute isn't cheaper than planet-bound compute, then SpaceX will have no buyers.
The other possibility is that it's just a pump and dump, but that's not how Musk has ever worked in the past. Yes, he makes crazy promises, and delivers only half of them, and delivers years after the promised date, but those half-realized, years-late results are still often world-changing.
We all know you ain't bankrolling it yourself, and the people you seem to think will pay for all this wont.
Doesn't really matter because it has to be done, unless we want to pay the much, much higher costs of just living with the hotter planet. We're all going to pay, one way or the other. It's just a question of whether we want it to be expensive or really, really expensive.
I'm not sure you'd need to pay much. Already I've seen power prices go negative in TX on ERCOT's site. I expect that is somewhat accounting only. I thought some power is priced ahead and committed at a given price and then there is the "open market" which covers surprises. So if wind/solar has a better than expected day, there are days they get nothing for it. So I'd expect those days they'd take a ten bucks a MWH and be ahead.
Right, and it will have extremely good days because of seasonal variation. If we size our systems to provide most of the winter load, there will be a lot of excess power in the summer, and while batteries will continue to get cheaper, I don't think they'll get cheap enough to timeshift from summer to winter. Long-distance power transmission also doesn't do much to address that problem, unless it's really long distance.
I think before when battery tech was much more expensive this would have been a possibility. With battery prices what they are now and falling, I expect the more likely scenario is that batteries get bought to store the excess. And given AI insatiable appetite for juice, I expect every watt that can get built will get consumed. I think I saw consumption today on the ERCOT grid is projected to be around 85GW peak. And it is not even hot yet. I remember just a few years ago 85GW would have been record consumption territory. Now it is meh. The good news is I think a little over 50 of that will be wind/solar today. Not positive, but I think fossil production may actually be down a bit this year relative to 5 years ago. Renewables in TX and batteries shoving up to 8GW into/out of the grid regularly. Who'd a thunk.
Maybe, but if there's a useful place to put excess production it can definitely be more cost-effective to do that... and carbon recapture is definitely something worth doing, and could probably be done intermittently. We just need a way to pay people to do it, pay them enough that it's worthwhile. Note that it doesn't have to be worthwhile now, we can new tech that makes it more efficient, but the pay on offer has to be high enough that people think there might be some path to profitability.
"Thank you Vera much."
Nobody's pursuing such initiatives. Doing so would be even more expensive than net zero emissions policies.
We definitely need to start pursuing it, at least researching it. We'll never solve the climate change problem with emissions reduction alone, recapture and sequestration will be essential.
There are some strategies which are pretty cheap, such as planting forests. But the numbers don't add up on that; we'll need more. I think carbon recapture systems may pair fairly naturally with renewable energy generation, though. Renewable variability means that in many cases it makes sense to overprovision. For example, in order to get sufficient power generation from a solar plant on cloudy days, you may install 2X-3X as many panels as you'd need for a sunny day... but that means that on sunny days you have lots of excess production that might be hard to use (I experience that with my rooftop solar; last month I generated just over 1 MWh that I couldn't use and the grid wouldn't pay me for). Using that excess to power carbon recapture would be a good idea.
For that to work, though, we need to arrange some financial reason for people to build and operate carbon recapture systems. That's a big missing piece which only government can solve. The obvious solution (to the entire climate change problem, actually!) is refundable carbon taxes plus carbon tariffs.
All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists know it. -- Richard P. Feynman
