Our (Iceland) leading source of PM pollution,æ is, weirdly, a dam (KÃrahnjÃkavirkjun). The water is full of rock flour and fine subglacial volcanic ash, which normally would have just gone out to sea. Instead, a lot slowly settles out in the reservoir, and then when the water level drops, dries out and blows away.

Beyond the above, let's add, first re: government requests:
  * Re, government takedown requests, right-wing-authoritarian Turkey was responsible for half of them, followed by Germany and India. The EFF is alarmed at Musk's near-total acquiescence to takedown requests. But Musk made a giant fuss of fighting against takedown requests for people advocating for the overthrow of Brazil's (left) government (only to ultimately comply).
  * For compliance requests more broadly, from January to June, Twitter approved of 71% under Musk, vs. 18% under Dorsey.
  * An example from India: in January 2023 it blocked links to a BBC documentary critical of Modi ("The Modi Question") at India's request. When asked about it, Musk feigned ignorance ("First I've heard. It's not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight"), but on a BBC interview before that tweet stated "the rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can't go beyond the laws of a country"

In general, he's been *way* less resistant to takedown requests.

Also, let's remember when he first censored links to major Mastodon servers, then censored links to Bluesky. And re: politics, he doesn't just censor the left. For example, in December, a ton of major conservative accounts had their verification and ability to monetize their accounts stripped due to a disagreement with Musk over H1Bs. And Musk admits to shadowbanning. The algo is also in general so blatantly tuned to promote Musk and his politics. At one point they ramped up the boosting of Musk too high and everyone was being constantly flooded with Musk tweets.

Also, it's not at all only been ElonJet that he's banned oppositional journalists over.

And off Twitter, he keeps getting more and more authoritarian. Responding to the listing of a top DOGE staffer "You have committed a crime", responded to Mark Kelly explaining why he supports Ukraine "This is treason", etc. This coming from a person who has massive control over the government. Meanwhile, he shares info that doxxes randos by sharing rightwing "Hate This Person" viral tweets several times every week.

The reason why blank media disappeared is because demand evaporated. 800 Megabytes? 5 Gigabytes? Really? No one wants storage that small any more.

You can "save" a lot of money by eliminating the "waste" of paying your mortgage.

BOS (Background-Oriented Schlieren) wasn't invented until AFAIK 2015, and it's taken time to mature.

These are not the first BOS photos, but it is a new technique that postdates the Concord.

A real programmer can write Fortran code in any language.

The source of the joke is that all programming languages have their own unique idioms and features. Some concepts are implemented in many languages, and transfer easily. Others aren't.

Coal power plants around here (southwest ohio) are being decommissioned because they're too expensive to run. Natural gas, wind, and solar are taking their place.

There's an obvious economic driver for shifting demand from when a resources is expensive to when the resource is inexpensive. If a building's owners have a contract with the utility provider for time-of-day billing, and electricity is cheap at night and expensive during the day, then there's incentive for shifting the electric load from day (A/C) to night (power the freezers, and thaw the ice during the day to avoid daytime electric charges).
If the local utility gets enough electricity from solar, and the duck curve means electricity is cheapest in the afternoon, and more expensive at night, then the building owner should just go ahead and run the A/C during the day, and maybe the freezers, too. The capital costs to build the ice electricity time-shifter may or may not still be low enough to fit within the savings the system offers.

I'm still a big fan of gravitational confinement fusion reactors. They're exquisitely simple. You need a safe distance, though.

The old pattern of electricity being cheaper at night, because everyone uses Air Conditioning in the afternoon and demand is at its peak, is going to change. Solar provides power during the day, and not at night. As the fraction of electricity from solar goes up, the increase in afternoon supply will match that daily usage pattern.

The economic justification for batteries is that you fill them when electricity is cheap, and deplete them when it is dear. Utilities will have incentives to match the price customers pay with the supply-and-demand balance.

Yea but could you imagine even doing this 20 years ago imagine the cost being close to just over a million?

Yes?

What they're doing is VASTLY easier than orbital spaceflight, so it SHOULD be vastly cheaper.

This has nothing to do with the ACTUAL challenges of orbital spaceflight. When your energy and thermal requirements are so low, you can basically make a water tower fly. You have zero actual mass budget concerns. You can be as inefficient, overbuilt, overly redundant, and cheaply made as you want, and still hit the goal. It does absolutely zip to actually advance orbital rocketry technology.

Asking ChatGPT (assuming 4o) took maybe the energy of 15-30 seconds of video gaming. Such "destroying the world" :

A US "crypto reserve" is really the final stage of the zero-sum game. Every person who comes later bails out those who came earlier, a "greater fool". The US government is the ultimate "greater fool" possible.

**space

All they're doing is going high up in the atmosphere and then falling. It's not even remotely close to orbit. They're going to about 1/4th the altitude and 1/8th the peak velocity of orbit, so it's just a joy ride for a couple minute fall. I don't get why we're making news stories about people taking joy rides.

We can't catch any luck these days.