I use left as change things quickly, break things, tear down Chesterton 's Fence, taking big chances, and right as gradually careful change, thinking about why things exist before destroying them, and be averse to risk. Trump is left of FDR in that view.
Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative
Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.
I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.
And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.
When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used
Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.
At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating
Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.
I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.
I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.
Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.
Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.
It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.
Having actually RTFA for once... I was looking at where Mark was noting his first email address.
I remember those days -- pre internet, so you had to give the route (...!ucbvax!ucscb).
We also had write (and for see as you type, "rite") on our PDP-11/70, and for the life of me, I couldn't understand why I'd use email instead of write. It took a while before I realized the value of asynchronous communication.
But yes, those were the days.
For those who are too young and missed it, or those who remember it and want to see it in all its glory: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...
Finally! Someone I can tell to get off my lawn with those hot grits!
I waited for quite a while. I figured it wasn't necessary. Otherwise I probably would have had a 4 digit ID as well.
I am shocked, SHOCKED! That AI didn't preserve institutional knowledge.
Am I taking crazy pills here? They were suing Apple. The entire lawsuit was against Apple, not Google.
They sued both over the same issue.
Apple won, Google lost, in spite of the fact that Google had the more open ecosystem and the better case.
Not everyone needs a nav app and this is a budget alternative we are looking at.
Just because we can't magically address all causes of CO2 and pollution in general doesn't we should blindly ignore the issue.
Indeed. We should also, however, recognize that emissions reductions can never get us to net-negative CO2 and that is where we need to get. We should be investing heavily in research into carbon capture and sequestration, because it is the ultimate long-term solution to greenhouse gas emissions, the thing that will allow us to actually reverse global warming.
In the meantime, as you say, we should start by looking at the CO2 emissions sources that allow us to most quickly and cheaply reduce our emissions. The easiest area is electricity production... made even easier by the fact that wind and solar are the cheapest technologies we have for producing electricity, in many cases even when the cost of battery storage is included. And of course as we convert electricity production to non-emitting sources, we should electrify as much as we can the other areas where we burn fossil fuels.
But we also need to be investing in carbon recapture, because some things are going to be hard to convert and, as I pointed out, only recapture can get us to net-negative. We should also be researching geoengineering techniques, such as methods of reducing insolation. Geoengineering isn't a solution (e.g. reducing insolation does nothing to fix ocean acidification), but it may be a necessary short-term measure, and we should be prepared, having already done what we can to understand it in case we need it, and before we need it.
Carbon reduction is good, but it's insufficient and I worry that we're not putting enough into other approaches. A large part of the reason is that people are afraid that attention on anything other than carbon reduction will harm the emissions reduction efforts. That's not a ridiculous concern, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scale and scope of the problem.
Prototype designs always work. -- Don Vonada
