I read the article on using it for rocket fuel, and concluded the author knows a lot less than he thinks he does. Like you said, why would you choose this over methane when it's both less energy dense and much harder to work with? It does have the advantage of not needing an oxidizer, but the energy density still comes out lower even accounting for that.

Then he had this sentence:

That's wrong on every point. It has nothing to do with physical chemistry and nothing to do with thermodynamics. It's actually the quantum chemistry algorithm they used for energy computations.

The Nature paper suggests using it for clean energy storage, but I can't see how that would be useful. For short term storage, batteries are the way to go. For long term storage, you want something very stable that's easy to store safely. I can't think of any storage application where this would be a good choice.

Let's put the numbers in perspective. Deitke could earn $100 million in his first year at Meta. That's about $2 million per week. That's the same amount a person earning $40k/year would earn over a 50 year career.

He gets as much in one week as many people get in their entire lives.

Of course, that means he's still in the minor leagues. The wealthiest people in the world gain tens of billions per year, thousands of times more than most people get in their lives.

It's an amazing illustration of a thoroughly broken system. It's not like that reflects the benefit he provides to society. Clearly Meta thinks it's justified by the benefit he provides to Meta, but it's unclear whether the projects he's working on provide any benefit at all to society.

In the days of physical media, the retail price didn't reflect most people's actual cost. You'd buy a game for $50, play it, then sell it back to GameStop for $20. Actual cost to you: $30. Or if you weren't in a hurry, you'd wait for the first round of people to finish playing it and buy it used for $40. And then sell it back again for $20, for a net cost of only $20.

Digital sales have eliminated the used game market, so the retail price is what you really pay. Game makers need to understand they can't compare digital game prices to physical ones and think they're the same.

In the original short story he began as an old man sized old man, and ended as a baby sized baby. It's a really bizarre story, much more so than the movie.

Here is how physicists would describe it. When we say that a mathematical object is "real" (or more properly, "fundamental"), we mean that it's isomorphic to some aspect of reality. Their behavior is identical. By observing one, you can exactly predict the behavior of the other. Does that mean the mathematical object "is" the real object, or just that it's a perfect description? That's a philosophical question that's probably impossible to answer. Most physicists aren't concerned with it. An isomorphism is good enough for all possible purposes that can ever be studied scientifically.

For example, Newtonian mechanics is not fundamental. It isn't isomorphic to any aspect of reality. It still does a very good job of describing lots of real phenomena. But if an object is moving fast enough, Newtonian mechanics gives a measurably wrong result. It's not isomorphic, and therefore isn't fundamental.

Is the wavefunction fundamental? We don't know, but the reasons for that are scientific, not philosophical. We just don't have enough evidence. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics assume it's fundamental and others assume it isn't. We don't know which interpretation is correct, because we don't have enough evidence to tell. Maybe we never will, or maybe some day experiments will conclusively show that one interpretation is correct.

"Observer" simply means "environment". This is one of the areas where we genuinely have made progress in understanding quantum mechanics. It's now well understood that wavefunction collapse is caused by decoherence, which is to say, the system becoming entangled with its environment. It doesn't matter whether the environment includes a human, a cat, a computer, whatever. Any macroscopic object works equally well.

What is entanglement? That's still a thorny question. We have lots of ideas for what the answer might be, but no solid evidence for which one is right. So still a lot we don't know, but also some things we do. Anyone who claims today that quantum mechanics has a special role for conscious observers is mistaken.

It's on a much larger scale than that. They assume the region of low density extends out to 300 Mpc, or just under 1 billion light years. That's 100 times larger than the local group.

No, it isn't. You aren't replying to what I said.

I would totally support a ban on activities that alter climate or weather on a global scale. Like, for example, increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere. Shall we start enforcing it?

We're already changing the climate. If we're not going to ban all geoengineering, it doesn't make sense to ban only the carefully thought out interventions that have a chance of helping, while continuing to allow the ones we know are catastrophically harmful.

https://www.energy-storage.new...

This article from 2022 reports their 2.5 MW, 4 MWh demonstration system being fully operational.

All of those were localized events affecting the north Atlantic. Not a lot of tropical coral reefs there, and it's half way around the world from the Great Barrier Reef.

Current global temperatures are 1 C higher than in any of those periods and climbing fast.

That is exactly hyper-capitalist ideology. When a group of people join together to form a company, all their moral obligations to other people disappear. Their only goal should be profit for themselves and their investors. If they prioritize anything else, they're doing a bad job and should be punished.

Why? Because you say so.

Recognize that this is ideology. There's nothing objective about it. It's not justified by anything. It conflicts with common standards of ethics and morality. Yet you flatly assert it as true. That's what ideology means.

Don't you mean diminish their profits, not diminish my profits? There's so much prejudice displayed in that one word.

If someone is a bad employee and doesn't do their job, that's a failure by them and they should be fired. If someone is a good employee and does their job well, but you can't find anything useful for them to do, that's a failure by you. You should cut your own salary before punishing them for your failure.

Let's do the math. Suppose a laid off MS employee has $100,000 in an index fund that tracks the S&P 500. MS is currently the second largest stock in it, accounting for 6.66%, or $6660. If the layoffs cause the MS stock price to go up by 5%, that will earn them $333. That's really going to cover their expenses for a long time.

On the other hand, Satya Nadella owned 864,327.244 MS shares in the most recent disclosure, worth $123,331,718 at the current price of $142.691 per share. A 5% increase in stock price will make him over $6 million dollars. Of course, he feels really bad about the harm he's causing to the laid off employees, but that's a sacrifice he's willing to make.

I'm sure the laid off employees are so grateful to him for laying them off. They don't care about losing their jobs, only that it led to a small increase in value of the tiny fraction of their 401k that's tied to Microsoft's stock price. That's the way you take care of your employees.

Here's what he's really saying: the company has no loyalty to its employees. He's going to do what's best for the company, or rather, what's best for the investors. (They're probably the same thing in his mind.) They don't need to have layoffs. They have plenty of money. But keeping those employees would mean less profit going to investors, and investors matter more than employees.

This is what he's paid to believe. His compensation is linked to profits and to the stock price, not to protecting employees. The rules were written by investors, not by employees, and he's following the rules. If the rules were different, say if he couldn't get a bonus for any quarter when the company had layoffs, he'd think and act very differently.

This is the modern, hyper-capitalist world we live in.