Also, low-water-use plants tend to also be slow-growing. That's why they use so little water.

Hesperaloe produces 1.5 kg per cubic meter of water. This is comparable to the water use efficiency of forests used for paper, which is between 1.5 and 4 or so. So this actually requires as much water as trees, if not more. The only advantage, if you can call it that, is being able to plant it in places were trees won't grow.

But the problem is that this also means you'll be cultivating plants grown far apart, none of which produce very much mass per plant without taking so much that you kill the plant (whose roots are likely the only thing keeping the topsoil from eroding). That means you need an order of magnitude more land per unit of crop mass, and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. (Trees get tens of feet tall. Hesperaloe is a pile of long leaves that gets maybe a foot tall.) So the energy consumption involved in harvesting it is likely to also be one to two orders of magnitude greater because you might have to harvest an entire acre worth of red false yucca to get as much biomass as you'd get from cutting down one fully grown coniferous tree in a few minutes.

So you've gotten a little bit more crop land that nobody asked for, and/or saved a bunch of trees that were planted specifically to turn into paper, and in exchange, you've introduced a massively energy-intensive harvesting process followed by some other probably massively energy-intensive conversion process. This doesn't seem like a net improvement to me.

Either that or you harvest it including the root system, and yeah, you've gotten a lot of raw material, but now your topsoil erodes, and you can't plant anything there for a thousand years.

The process itself might be useful in some other context, of course, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

That's so little that it is completely lost in the statistical noise.

First, a natural gas turbine *also* requires hundreds to thousands of gallons of oil for lubrication every year. All turbines do. So with the exception of solar, no matter how you produce your power, you're going to use about that much oil.

An average onshore wind turbine produces 6 million kWh per year. (Offshore turbines produce more.) Petroleum-based generators use about 0.08 gallons per kWh. So if you used oil to actually produce the power, that generator would use 480,000 gallons of oil. By comparison, even if the fossil-fuel-based turbines somehow magically used a tenth as much oil, that would just mean the oil-based generator uses 479,730 extra gallons instead of 480,000.

In other words, the *tiny* amount of oil changes the greenness of wind farms relative to fossil fuels by about 0.06%, well within any reasonable margin of error.

It's noise.

A nuclear power plant uses 200,000 to 500,000 tons of concrete and produces a gigawatt of electricity. A utility-scale wind turbine might use 1,500 tons to produce 5 MW. So it's about the same amount of concrete per megawatt, to within a single-digit factor, depending on the duty cycle of the wind turbine.

And the foundation can usually be reused for the next turbine, so that concrete also lasts many, many decades, typically. They don't remove the entire structure when they replace the turbine.

Also, you didn't factor in all the extra concrete for building long-term offsite storage facilities for the nuclear fuel, or the concrete for the sarcophagus if things go sufficiently wrong. :-)

If blades are failing after a decade, then either A. something was wrong with them to begin with or B. the company that owns them stopped servicing them after a decade because of expiring tax credits. And that second one actually is plausible, but that's not a failure of the technology; it's a failure of U.S. energy policy. Why spend money repairing it when they can wait for it to completely fail and then replace it and then get the tax credit again?

I would argue that nuclear power stinks on ice. The cost per kWh is considerably higher than wind, and it requires continuous staffing and oversight to prevent things from going horribly wrong, whereas wind farms are almost entirely passive other than minor routine maintenance until something breaks and has to be replaced. Nuclear also requires transporting dangerous materials by truck or rail to storage sites, requires building storage that can safely contain the spent material for millennia, etc.

Also, every 40 to 80 years, the nuclear plant's equipment has to be replaced, and all of the removed material is contaminated, which means long-term storage of the reactor, pipes, concrete containment vessel, etc. You can't even recycle the raw materials like you can with wind, because nobody wants radioactive metal or concrete. And even if your blades are made of a material that can't be recycled easily, you can still landfill it instead of basically burying the entire plant in a no man's land for tens of thousands of years. If you think the waste from wind farms is bad, it pales in comparison with the cost and storage requirements for shutting down a nuclear plant.

If we get fusion working at an industrial scale, then we'll talk, but fission just isn't worth the hassle when there are other, much cleaner solutions.

Closed-loop water cooling? Heat pump cooling? Immersion cooling? A lot of things, really.

Companies use water for cooling when it is cheap and plentiful. When it isn't cheap or plentiful, there are plenty of alternatives that don't involve any ongoing water use.

Now if you ask how the construction company is going to build concrete floors without water... that's a different question. :-)

Err... people with wealth.

*sigh*

The law is not absurd. About a third of poor people are on metered cell phones for their home Internet connections. OTA TV is free. So consolidation of the OTA spectrum massively reduces access to a diverse panoply of voices for the poorest Americans.

The law wasn't written to protect the top 5% of Americans' ability to get news from a large number of sources. People with wealthy always had that ability.

And micro-motion of the eyes has all sorts of interesting superresolution side effects as well, helping compensate for optical defects.

That's an absurd comparison, because the Internet is not a limited spectrum. Your analogy is like arguing that there should be no regulation of airline mergers, because you can always walk or drive. They're not equivalent, they don't have equivalent costs or benefits, and from a legal perspective, they're not even the same market, or at least not meaningfully so.

Not at all. TV is still a finite spectrum. There will never be any more over-the-air TV channels than there are now, realistically speaking. Not everyone has high-speed Internet. 7% can't get it at all, at least by the FCC's definition.

Another 16% use their cell phones for Internet, which means their data is likely metered. This number balloons all the way up to 34% when you look at low-income Americans.

Those folks don't have access to "infinite channels".

You're right that over-the-air TV is dying because of competition, but it's also the only remaining lifeline for the poorest Americans. And that's exactly why the Republicans want more control. They've made manipulating poor people with below-average education into an art form, and being able to get more stations in more markets owned by large right-wing conglomerates means more people who can be easily manipulated.

That's why, believe it or not, right now, in the dying days of TV, those rules are more important than ever.

There's no evidence that consolidation will reduce cost of operation enough to be meaningful, but there is evidence that consolidation results in fewer voices reaching the poorest and often least-educated Americans. And this is unquestionably a bad thing.

Not necessarily. Pretty sure the older HW3 sensors from Tesla had considerably less instantaneous dynamic range than the human eye — probably not enough to be a problem most of the time, but still...

But more than that, cameras are notably worse than eyes, because they're in the wrong spot. A pair of eyes three feet back from the window sees the scene and focuses through whatever is hitting the glass, so unless it's a deluge, the contents of the glass are largely out of focus. With small sensors mounted close to the glass, you don't have the depth of field helping you in the same way. With cameras outside the car, it's even worse, and they get blinded constantly.

What cameras do have is quantity. Your eyes can look in only one direction at a time. Cameras can look in every direction. They can see that something is coming at you from the side or behind. They can see around corners better, if placed correctly. They can judge distance and speed of oncoming vehicles with mathematical precision that human brains can't consistently match.

They also don't get tired. They don't get drunk. They don't get distracted. They don't start burning when sweat gets in them. And so on.

These things can make camera-based cars considerably safer than human drivers, at least in theory, particularly once you consider that the average contains drunk drivers, tired drivers, distracted drivers, etc. And most driving accidents are not caused by loss of visibility, statistically speaking.

They're things you find in a place called a liiiiiii-brary.

In the worst case, they'll add interior walls (and maybe add some windows to the exterior walls), and resell it as office space, residential space, factory space, retail distribution space, or even a community library. After all, floors built to support racks of equipment should handle the weight and distribution of stacks of books without breaking a sweat.

So the construction might be overkill for what they eventually get used for, but it's not like a newly built, solid building isn't going to find a use. Maybe a quarter of the effort is wasted? Just guessing.

The main impact of prop 19 is making it possible for the elderly to not be forced to move to another state if they decide to downgrade to a smaller home. It likely has minimal impact on people's ability to move closer to their jobs, because it is limited to people 55 and older, so less than a quarter of California's workforce qualifies for transferring the cost basis to a new property.

More to the point, the people most likely to change jobs are younger workers, and none of them qualify.

As for Modoc to Beverly Hills, the difference in market value is added to your assessment. So if you bought a $50,000 home in the middle of nowhere that has appreciated to $300,000, and you trade up to a $3 million home, your new tax basis value is $2.75 million ($3 million minus $300k plus $50k). So it really doesn't make much difference in that case, practically speaking.

And that's when the corporate systems are configured to warn if you try to share something with or from the wrong account, and you shame the user into doing it right. Besides, this is usually only a problem for brand new users. Once you have a bunch of files uploaded to both accounts, you're not going to suddenly see the files from your personal account, and think, "Oh, this is where my work stuff goes".

It's only confusing if you have access to the same files from both accounts. And then, yeah, you'll get confused about which account is editing the file, but it's not as if it really matters in that situation.

And now, by suing a bunch of former employees, they're giving employees who might be thinking about jumping ship a reason to pause. Whether Apple wins or loses the lawsuit, Apple wins.

They know what they are doing. The UK government has never believed in privacy rights. They know they're doing a disservice to everyone. They don't care.

And the only rational answer is to cut them off. No more iCloud storage for anyone residing in the UK. And for anyone else, immediate denial of access from the minute you set foot in that country to the minute you leave. This is the only reasonable option.

And ultimately, this is the reason why Cloud storage shouldn't even exist. The minute you depend on someone else for storage, you can't completely 100% guarantee that your data is not in someone else's hands. If you store it on hardware you own, not built by the company that sold the backup software, then people will be able to verify that data is getting pushed to only a single destination, and if they started cheating and sending it to two different services, folks would likely notice. It's not perfect, but it makes back doors a lot harder to pull off without detection.

We need Time Machine for iOS, backing up over encrypted SMB to servers on our home network that we control. Fix that gap, and none of this matters anymore.