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Comment Re:Wish Australia had it, even the equatorial part (Score 1) 224

We have DST, but only some states. But the sun coming up at 4:45am in summer sucks up near the tropics and makes no sense.

Well, this particular discussion is about a (not yet enacted) law concerning DST in the United States, and none of the states are in the topics except Hawaii, which does not use DST.

Comment Re:Can't Channge The Universe (Score 1) 224

You can't change the universe, nor the solar system. There's very specific reasons why the Sun reaches its zenith(daily peak) at mid day(12:00).

The sun does not reach its zenith at 12:00.

If you defined noon as the time of the sun reaching its zenith, days would no longer be the same length. Days in northern hemisphere winter would be slightly longer than 24 hours, and days in northern hemisphere summer would be shorter, due to the difference between sidereal time and solar time.

Comment Re:More dead Americans (Score 3, Insightful) 224

Driving to work in darkness, schoolchildren crossing streets, in winter.

When the daylight hours are short in winter, you have to pick some time in which it's darkness. If it's light during the morning commute, it will be dark during the evening commute.

This depends on how far north you are, of course.

Comment most of the US slightly west of their solar time (Score 1) 224

Most US population centers are in places east of the point in their time zones where the sun is overhead (or due south) at noon,

Unless I'm misreading the map, on the East coast, the EST time zone is pretty much centered on where it should be, with New York very slightly east and Washington DC very slightly west of center. The main problem with EST is that it extends west to the city limits of Chicago, while it should change to CST around Toledo.

If anything, most of the population in the US is slightly to the western edge of the time zones, not the east.

Submission + - Gravitricity energy storage goes bankrupt, but two others keep on trying (autonocion.com)

Geoffrey.landis writes: Gravitricity, a Scottins corporation that proposed using gravitational potential energy to store electrical energy, went bankrupt at the end of 2025. The basic idea is so simple, even a freshman physics student could describe it: use an electric motor to raise a weight up against gravity, and then when you need energy, lower the weight back down, and use the energy to run a generator. The difficulty, however, is in scale. Their proof of concept unit, a 40-ton block of steel falling the height of a 30-story building, stores an amount of energy equal to about eight hours of an average American home’s electricity. Their solution was to go big: there are literally millions of abandoned mine shafts around the world, many of them kilometer and more deep. They proposed a full GraviStore system would hang up to 24 separate weights of 500 metric tons each from cabled winches inside a single shaft. Twelve thousand metric tons of suspended steel, going up and down forever. But turning their concept into a reality ended up spending money faster than it could be invested, and, so quietly it took investors three months to even notice, the company went bankrupt.
But the basic concept may not be dead. Several other companies are still working at turning the concept into reality. And hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines are scattered across the United States, most of them a liability, a few of them with a kilometer of free vertical drop and a hoist house and a grid connection already sitting on site.

Comment Who are they? Secretaries (Score 4, Insightful) 74

Here's the article's actual answer to the question (not in the summary): "The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks," said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper's authors...

Secretarial jobs were already cataclysmically wiped out by the word processing/computer revolution. It's hard to remember anymore how ubiquitous secretaries were to businesses.

However, turns out that this previous revolution didn't reduce the workforce, because the number of IT support personnel required increased directly as the number of secretaries decreased.

Comment Re:give a thank you (Score 5, Informative) 83

to joe biden and lina khan. trump admin must not have gotten a proper bribe to kill this.

Actually Trump is personally behind the right to repair. From Google:

In this case, OP was correct. The FTC action against John Deere was filed during the Biden administration when Lina Khan was FTC chair.
  https://apnews.com/article/dee...

Comment Radiators [Re: Bet against Elon if you like] (Score 1) 195

So you don't see generating massive amounts of heat, with nowhere to dump it besides passive radiation into a vacuum as a problem. Go on, what's the solution for that?

Radiators.

Since the heat out at most equals the solar power in, and the two-sided flat-plate equilibrium temperature of a panel receiving solar energy is 331K (58 C), if the solar panels are also the radiators, heat rejection is manageable.

(Completely accurate only far from the Earth. In Low Earth Orbit, you also have to account for albedo and infrared radiation from the Earth.)

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