Interesting calculation. I think the efficiency loss in trying to cool all the way down to ice is probably not worth the benefit of a lower amount of water used.

Water heat capacity is about 4.2 kJ/kg per degree, so if we cool the water, say, ten degrees (C), for 4 kW of cooling for 12 hours we'd need about 4 tons of water (*). Seems like a lot, but water is cheap, and the tank would be a cylinder .64 meters radius at the base by 2 meters high, bigger than a home water heater, but still not too huge to put in your basement.

Ice would be better; the lower temperature would make heat transfer faster. On the other hand, you could circulate the cooled water in the same loop as baseboard hot-water heating, so in some ways it's simpler.

--

*(unless I screwed up the calculation, which is easily possible.)

That's because of all of the inbreeding. A is the CEO at one place where B sits on the board. Next door, B is the CEO and A sits on the board...

Just another example of why everyone needs to start running LLMs locally and not have them refuse to do things at random on a 'cloud' service.

Exactly that. Many seem to have forgotten that hospitals were absolutely slammed early in the pandemic and that medical care in general suffered.

It's because the government threw vast amounts of cheap credit into the economy which turned a short-term crash into a long-term depression where kids can't afford houses and the cost of living is increasing by far more than the fake inflation figures economists churn out.

And it's also why we now have a Potemkin economy where nothing really works and we pretend to get rich by selling houses to each other at ever-increasing prices.

The 1930s depression was also caused by economists who refused to let things crash and wasn't resolved until their plans were scrapped after WWII.

Meh, I suppose. IMO it's not worth optimizing in a car that's able to remember settings associated with a driver. In "dumb" cars, if the regular drivers are different sizes (I'm 8 inches taller than my wife) you need to be able to quickly and easily adjust the mirror positions, because you have to do it a lot. In my Tesla, I mostly find it annoying that the main rear-view mirror doesn't automatically adjust, requiring me to reach up and move it by hand. I think the best fix for that, though, is to replace it with a screen fed from a rear-view camera.

Again, this mostly seems moot with per-driver, automatically-applied settings. I have the air flow adjusted to my liking and never touch it. I never manually adjust fan speed, either, only the thermostat... and that I do by long-pressing the left thumb wheel then scrolling up or down. I have to long-press because I like the media controls to be the "primary" use of that wheel.

I think this claim is overrated, at least for me. I end up having to look quite a bit. Obviously once I've found the control I could look back at the road while I adjust it... but I often don't do that in vehicles with manual controls, like my truck. Again, I prefer to adjust the climate control by changing the thermostat rather than playing with temperature or fan volume by "feel", and I have to see the temperature display which is in the center console. I know what temperatures I prefer, though, so I look move my hand to the control, rotate it until it shows the temp I want, then return my attention to the road.

Similarly with the sound system. I know what volume I prefer and adjust until the display shows that level. On the rare occasion I listen to the radio I don't use the tuning knob, I use the "scan" button, which requires looking while I hit the button, then listening until the right station comes on, then looking while I hit the button again to stop the scan.

Different strokes, I guess. I quite like Tesla's system. I did prefer having a stalk for the turn signals rather than the buttons on the steering wheel. My wife likes the buttons... which is interesting because she prefers to drive manually a lot more than I do, so it may be that I just haven't given them a chance. She says she likes that she can signal without having to take her hand off the wheel. I use FSD pretty much all the time except when I'm driving for fun, which I basically never do in environments where I have to use turn signals.

They do make the news, but often only the regional news. Did you read about the fire in Bermondsey or Avonmouth? Both were on the BBC somewhere.

"Economist" should be one of the easiest jobs to replace with AI. Ir's not as though they ever do much other than says whatever their employer wants them to say.

Why is it that "modernize" always seems to mean "do more to turn humans into bug-men"?

Ah, this again. Are you being paid by oil companies, who want to do anything possible to stop electrical vehicles?

No. The main pollution is not tire particulates, and electric cars are not particularly harder on tires than any American SUV. There turn out to be incentives to making cars larger and heavier. Eliminating these incentives would help, but (spoiler alert) it's not electric cars that are the problem.

No, it's partly right. Air conditioning loads tend to peak in the late afternoon, when solar power is still available (but not at its peak), but have another peak when people get home from work, which continues on into the evening and loads typically only drop below average around midnight, when solar is not abundant. Look up "duck curve"> .

This could, in principle, be easily solved-- air conditioners could easily store coolness. Water has a high heat capacity, and you could cool water during the solar peak, and use it to cool your living area in the afternoon. Water has low watt-hours per kilogram, but for residential or commercial use, that's not a big deal. But most of the US doesn't have time-dependent electricity rates, so there's no reason for consumers to want this.

Absolutely right, if by "renewables" you mean "solar". If we did have time dependent electrical rates, the cheap power is midnight to 6AM, not the solar peak at all.

But this may change as more and more solar gets emplaced.

I have a mug from a conference Startpage sponsored about a decade ago.

It's been in my Firefox at least since then. Did I add it manually?

I am actually surprised this is new!

I guess Mozilla was being paid to not do this? Ages ago we had Altavista, Excite, Yahoo, and even Google as options. I really had no idea how deep the anticompetitive tying had become.

BTW, if you want to search for anything counterculture Yandex Search will have it on the first page while the Western engines will gaslight you into believing you misremembered something.

Even 20 pages deep.

The UK is never going to deploy vast amounts of solar, we donâ(TM)t have the insolation for it.

Indeed, but even so, we do get enough that relatively expensive rooftop solar is generally worth it.

But we sure as shit have the wind (and tidal) and thereâ(TM)s all the rest to do as well: EAFs, induction cookers, heat pumps, EVs, blah. We need to race or be left in the dust, like Americans with their shitty payments systems with cheques etc (and obviously with fossil fuels too).

Yep, we have a lot of wind, especially now with modern offshore building techniques.

I think with the right investment and incentives, we can also focus on batch industrial processes, things like arc furnaces and electric cement kilns which can be spun up and down fast enough to deal with weather variations where necessary. Sure depreciation is a bit of a pain, but having free energy in order to dump excess capacity is quite compelling.

Multiple reasons.

One is they have a very high power density, both specific and volumetric. You need quite a lot of power to vapourise water and lithium is the winner here. Largely speaking, small, especially disposable vapes appear to be limited by the power density of battery chemistries not the energy density.

Pouch cells are also really good for small batteries because they don't have a prismatic metal shell, and they can easily be made to custom shapes.

It is an incredible waste of resources.

I don't want to spend $150 on a quality headset that will become trash in just 2 or 3 years when the battery dies. But what choice do I have?

Buy a pair of fairbuds?