By the sound of it, he’s arguing that in a 100% renewable electric grid, to keep outages from rare production lulls—like multi-day periods that are both overcast (cutting solar) and calm (cutting wind)—to less than once per decade, you’d need about 3 days’ worth of energy storage. That’s plausible. Even a 30-day stretch producing only 90% of demand could be buffered with that reserve.

Australia’s annual electricity use is around 200 TWh, so 2 TWh is roughly 1%—closer to 3.7 days of average demand. That’s in the right ballpark, especially with rounding and overhead. Back-of-napkin accuracy is fine here; maybe the extra cost is wiring, inverters, and grid integration.

What’s not reasonable are the cost comparisons.

Australia’s public healthcare budget is about $180 billion AUD/year. A lithium-ion buildout at ~$100 USD/kWh would cost around $400 billion AUD for 2 TWh. Spread over 15 years, that’s ~$26 billion AUD/year—just 14% of healthcare spending, not more.

If they go with sodium-ion, which is emerging at ~$30 USD/kWh, the total cost drops to ~$100 billion AUD, or ~$6.7 billion/year—less than 4% of healthcare spending.

And that’s assuming a pessimistic 15-year battery lifespan. In reality, the sheer size of the system means shallow daily cycling, which dramatically extends life. Batteries degrade slower when they’re not pushed hard. A system sized for rare deep discharge could last 20–30 years, especially with smart charge management.

Plus, investing $100B+ into grid storage would naturally accelerate R&D, manufacturing scale, and chemistry improvements. LFP cells currently outperform sodium-ion on cycle life, but sodium has room to grow-and in grid use, even 40% remaining capacity can still be useful. You don’t need to scrap a battery at 80%. Just add more cells or shift its role.

Notions of "noon" is a relic of a preindustrial lifestyle.

Make all the clocks world wide set to UTC.

>Despite doubling their expected livespan

This is incredible but it's mostly down to germ theory, antibiotics, and to a much smaller extent vaccines; things that really help infants make it to childhood is a lot of the lifespan increase. Science hasn't been able to enlarge the max human lifespan, and there's still plenty of diseases that the treatment is lacking for, so I could see being disappointed in that. And lets be real, the fact that science was responsible for many of these gains in the past means nothing about how funding is spent in the future, nor does it speak to fields relatively far removed from what's being debated- "Semmelweis being correct when everyone else wasn't" is pretty far from string theory.

>they'll never have to worry about starving to death

Also strangely mostly down to a relatively few discoveries. And I'd pair this with the ability to access a lot more energy, as making a very large difference between modern life and most of human existence.

But one of the main points brought up by the article is string theory, and string theory had an era where it was almost exclusively considered the most respected academic darling, but many string theories got discarded when the colliders reached good enough energies that a lot of scientists expected to see something. Of course, none of this was ever going to block off string theory as a group, it just eliminated a set of them. Check this >10 year old article:
https://profmattstrassler.com/...
And you'll see that, theoretically, string theory is still perfectly healthy. But the article really smooths over what did get eliminated, which was lowkey what a lot of people were hyped about- a solution to the hierarchy problem ("natural supersymmetry" in that article), and string theory isn't helping with that, and high energy collisions have eliminated the types of string theories that would (not entirely, but like, to a degree).
While you'll find no shortage of physicists defending this, and pointing out *technically string theory never promised this*- including this wall street journal one which tries to politicize it by implying that the critics are conspiracy theorists- the simple fact is that the reason string theory got so much interest and funding wasn't because of the barely-falsifiable high-flying stuff, but because it implied that we were gonna get something better and more explanatory than the standard model, something that, once we had seen a few real pieces of, could have experimental results plugged in that would then yield even more insights into reality. That isn't happening, but that's why string theory captured so much for so long.

Isn't it fair to criticize a system that appears to have gotten kinda lost in the wrong caves, for about two generations of scientists? Even if just the magnitude of resources allocated, men and money.

I've been thinking about this some. It's NYC, so entry from outside would imply a ground floor, less than ideal. Maybe climbing up a fire escape would work.

Making it look like a utility closet would probably work well. Still have access from inside, not restricted to where you can get at it from outside the building. All depends on the access rating of the place, of course. For example, a painted wooden panel screwed onto the wall concealing the entrance. Sure, can't access it on a whim, but could sit for years.

Keeping an eye on public records to find spaces that are under dispute with said dispute unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, then just change the locks.

There are ultimately lots of options.

PointCast... memory unlocked. There's a name I haven't heard in like 30 years.

I agree with you that everything old is new again, often something that wasn't as successful as it could have been and companies are trying to make the idea work. VR has been in that category for almost 4 decades, and it still is.

I'm actually thinking that it would be "make VOIP calls look local and avoid mass shutdowns for spamming people with scam calls."

They then rent the service out globally to said scammers from China, India, even Pakistan and North Korea.

It doesn't need to be a whole abandoned building - just a specific abandoned spot within it. If anything, a building still otherwise in use would be superior, more noise to hide the power draw in.
I've watched some some specials on NYC buildings. "Useable" floorspace getting walled away or even just forgotten behind a locked door happens regularly. Inheritances, will disputes, remodeling snafus, and more.

As for the use of the servers themselves - I'm guessing they were used to make scam calls and such using local phone numbers.

> At some point your UI has reached peak usability and the you can only go downhill.

That point happened in 2009.

Also another case of Microsoft touting a "new" feature that other OS's have had for decades.

So? Your point?

Considering that a geneticist can look at a DNA sample and determine the race of the person it came from, I'd call that a rather glaring deficiency in modern genetics. This has all the credibility of a physicist telling us gravity is a social construct.

Sciences that consistently "disprove" the crashingly obvious should be regarded with the utmost suspicion.

There's also the subject-verb disagreement bubble.

We are a GLOBAL economy that is based on information. Call it Post Industrial. Information moves at the speed of light.

Pretending we Americans live in a giant castle surrounded by a huge Moat (aka Oceans) isn't going to protect us from what is happening elsewhere. Offshoring is going to kill our economy.

We have a dying generation who still sees the economy as post WWII, because that is the world we grew up in (Last of the boomers here).

We had better get used to it. Build things better, faster, cheaper.

In practice we add randomness because it makes for better utility overall. Look up model temperature

The school administrators, unlike the people who actually make the schools work, such as it is, tend to be paid pretty well.