The people who keep puffing the "wind and solar are cheaper than fossil-fuel generation" are quick to throw out the LCOE costs using the installed capacity of wind and solar facilities, and ignore the fact that these facilities, over time, produce less than half their rated capacity, and require extensive infrastructure construction to get the power from where it's most efficient to site the production to where it can be used. Then there are the equally-ignored considerations of the production curve not matching the demand curve, either requiring that wind and solar production be turned off due to excess production or falling short of demand, requiring backup power sources to cover the shortfall, with the most common 'solution' -- battery storage -- being both expensive and of limited capacity... and not included in the costs accounted when claiming the cost advantage of wind and solar.

Does the LCOE for solar account for the cost of the backup power that is required for periods when the solar facility is not producing power (i.e., night), or otherwise producing power well below the facility's rated output (i.e., overcast or when the sun is low in the sky)? Does the LCOE also account for the cost of maintaining generators with sufficient inertia to cope with sudden shifts in the amount of solar power being delivered to the grid to avoid situations such as the recent power outage affecting the entirety of Spain because one solar facility had a sudden drop in power output, with a lack of inertia in generation to hold the grid stable causing other production facilities to trip offline? Companies that install solar and wind facilities are quick to tout their rated capacity, as if the facilities produce at that capacity 24/7, but the actual production is typically less than half of the rated capacity, and the production curve does not match the demand curve, so that while a solar facility can produce significantly more power than the demand in the middle of the day, that production often dips well below demand in the early evening (the 'duck curve') -- excess power generated in the middle of the day is wasted unless large and expensive storage systems are used to capture that power and return it when production falls, with these storage systems insufficient to store enough power for an extended shortfall in production. Waving the flag for the LCOE of solar generation when the builder/operator of the solar facility assumes no responsibility for delivering reliable power misrepresents the actual cost of solar generation.

And either way, they're going to get back only a fraction of the energy they put in to compress the CO2 in the first place. And I have to wonder what the capacity of this compressed-gas storage is going to be; the blurb talks about 8-24 hours of power supply, but if it can only cover 10% of the grid requirement, but a loss of wind drops out 20% of the supply and stays becalmed for three days, it's not going to help much.

Well, except for one significant technological advance, which was banned by the Union Cycliste Internationale in 1934, because it made the current champions look like chumps. Charles Mochet had invented the Velocar, a pedal-powered 4-wheeled vehicle that got used as a pace vehicle in bicycle races. It was difficult to maintain speed in turns, so Mochet experimented with variations on the design, eventually splitting it in half to create the first recumbent bicycle. To get exposure for his invention, he convinced a second-rank cyclist, Francis Faure, who endured the jeers of the other racers at the first event he was to ride the recumbent in. After he left them far behind, unable to even get close enough to draft him, the jeers stopped. After walking away with victories in many races, Mochet and Faure set their sights on the record for "The Hour", essentially a competition to cover the most distance in an hour of cycling. On July 7, 1933, Faure smashed the 20-year-old record by almost a kilometer, covering 45.055 km in the hour. At the 58th Congress of the UCI in 1934, there was enough outrage at Faure -- a middling cyclist who had previously only shown his ability in short races and sprints -- to have crushed the top athletes in cycling competition (as well as strong lobbying from the manufacturers and professional riders) for the UCI to issue new regulations defining what a "bicycle" was for purposes of being allowed in competition; one of these, requiring that the front of the saddle could be no more than 12 cm behind the bottom bracket (where the crank and pedals are mounted) instantly rendered all recumbent bicycles ineligible for competition in UCI-sanctioned events.

The US Cycling Federation has continued the de facto ban on recumbents in competition (despite commissioners' claims that they're not truly banned), with attempts to enter recumbents being disqualified for a variety of reasons, including exposed gearing, overall length, etc., all in the name of "safety", but which has the effect of banning recumbents from competition in USCF-sanctioned events.

According to the Australian Institute of Marine Science's report on the state of the Great Barrier Reef for 2023/2024, it's in quite good health, with coverage increasing in all three of the northern, central, and southern areas. This appears to be just another solution in search of a problem, a program created to justify sucking down more funding so that they can be seen to be fighting "climate change", whether or not the programs they're pursuing have any effect.

And the same thing I used to say to the doctors (who should know better, given the annual refresher requirement) where I used to work when they made (sometimes repeatedly) the same mistake, it's the "Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act" -- 'HIPAA', with one 'P' and two 'A's.

Run the audio through speech recognition, filter it for keywords, discard the audio, store the keywords, and aggregate them to produce a model of your interests, then sell the model. You can say definitively that you're not storing the audio, and the fact that you've stripped the audio for identifiable -- and marketable -- tags they can sell to companies wanting to deliver more focused advertisements to you has nothing to do with that.

The unspoken addendum to this announcement is that it's an admission that, between the additional load of AI data centers and the charging of all the EVs that Governor Newsom wants everyone to drive, matched against the inherent intermittency of wind and solar power production (despite the pravda that the blackout affecting the entire Iberian peninsula on April 28 was not the fault of a sudden cutout of renewable production tripping protective cutouts), it will require an AI-driven monitoring and control system to be able to respond fast enough to manage sudden swings in generated power, because humans can't react fast enough to prevent a sudden production drop at one facility from taking half the state down with it.

To steal a line from ReasonTV's 'Unintended Consequences' videos, "Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?"

Or are in a different city and don't want to take a chance on a random restaurant. McDonald's doesn't stand on quality; they stand on consistency -- with precious few exceptions, what you're getting served at one McDonald's is being served at thousands of others, starting from the same corp-delivered food bases. There are some exceptions -- the lobster rolls I saw advertised when I was in Boston, for example -- but you're going to be getting the same Big Mac no matter where you order it.

No, no; it's "Where do we want to allow you to go today?"

China's start to the construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-powered capacity and resuming construction on 3.3GW of suspended projects in 2024, all fueled by investment from the coal-mining sector, would suggest otherwise. Analysts may expect that China's expansion of its clean-energy capacity will slowly squeeze out coal's share of its electricity generation, but their rapid coal-power expansion is posing a "challenge" (it's amazing how "challenge" sounds so much better than "major stumbling block") to their high-level climate commitments, including commitments on reducing coal use.

And Robot Jox .

It's a particularly niche webcomic, but the 'your job has been replaced by software' thing appeared in the 'Sabrina On-Line' webcomic twenty-five years ago, albeit with a somewhat different focus. The same 'pointy-haired boss' syndrome, though.

SAG is suing because the game didn't hire a live SAG member to do interactive voiceover work in a MOBA, where the live voiceover artist has to respond in real time on a 24/7/365 basis to an unknown number of dialog streams... while the voice actors were on strike. When SAG can produce a voice actor who can, at any time day or night, with no rest at any time, produce intelligent voice response to whatever a player might say, and do this in, say, ten simultaneous dialogs, I'll concede the SAG has some truly amazing voice actors. And if SAG suggests that a group of voice actors be hired for this work, add the requirement that they all must be phonically indistinguishable from each other -- essentially, requiring their speech to be run through an AI voice transformer into JEJ's voice, and since you'd be paying for the voice transformation already anyway, require them to demonstrate how an indeterminately-large team of voice actors is more efficient than making the whole dialog process AI-driven from start to finish.