This reminds me of a possibly apocryphal story about a compsci security class. First day of class, the professor walks in, tells the whole class, "Congratulations, you've just failed this class." He then shows them him entering 0s into the database software. "This course is 16 weeks long. Whether you pass or fail is up to you."

I agree totally. The economics of this device are just fucked, which anyone who ever looked into carbon capture could have told you.

A more interesting use for this technology is to hook it up to a high carbon source. Something like a metal refinery or a cement plant that generates large, concentrated amounts of CO2. It then results in a fuel you can use either in surface transport or in regeneratively running the industrial source itself, significantly shrinking its carbon footprint. Ironically, if you were to hook an industrial scale version of this up to a coal-fired powerplant, you could significantly reduce the carbon footprint of extant power generation while building out green alternatives.

The only price is of the device, which is listed as $15k-$20k. At that price, given gas prices, that's a payback timeline of almost 40 years.

An average box fan will move around one thousand cubic feet of air a minute. Converting that to metric, that's about thirty-seven cubic meters of air a minute. A cubic meter is one thousand liters; thus an average box fan moves 37,000L/min of air, roughly. You can very easily move enough air to run a simple hydroxide CO2 capture device. It wouldn't be terribly efficient and it would also be a power hog. Given the size of the machine in the pictures in the article, the numbers they give are reasonable. Even the price seems on par with a back-of-the-envelope estimate. This device doesn't make economic sense but it does make mechanical and chemical sense.

This thing generates one gallon of gasoline per day. As this reads like a press release, I assume that would be under ideal circumstances. For the sake of argument, let's just roll with that. Assuming a price per gallon from a gas station of $2.50 USD, at a price of $20,000 this device has a payback timeline just short of 22 years. I somehow doubt this machine will run for that length of time without encountering the need for maintenance and repair. This would extend the payback timeline to closer to 30 years. The average lifespan of a car is about 20 years. Meaning before you reach break-even on this machine, you'll probably be replacing your car. If you replace your gasoline car with an electric car, the payback on a solar array is just 5 years.

Havana syndrome doesn't exist. It's a psychosomatic mass hysteria. Havana syndrome hasn't been "conclusively proven" false, only because it's virtually impossible to prove a negative. Several scientific bodies looked into it and found it to likely be psychosomatic. Intelligence agencies and the State department looked into it several and determined that it couldn't possibly just be in their heads and so issued multiple wildly differing theories with little to no evidence in their favor.

This is a very good idea. It isn't a short term solution to anything but it would be a long term net benefit to the economy. It would also go a way towards the de-financialization of the economy and controlling consumer debt loads. Which is why none of Trump's handlers, party members, or financiers will allow it to go through.

It's so weird to me that Trump the person has a habit of throwing out good ideas I assume he's heard somewhere, immediately walking them back, then doing the opposite. You'd think the media would have figured out this pattern. Instead, they Charlie Brown for it everytime he pulls a Lucy.

Adams was a moron who tried to treat his cancer with dewormer and apple cider vinegar. Much like Steve Jobs, if he had been half as intelligent as he thought he was, he would have listened to subject matter experts and treated his cancer with chemotherapy, radiation, and/or surgery as his oncologist recommended. Instead, he died as a testament to the fact that money rots your brain and your soul.

You can't recycle most plastic. You definitely can't recycle a bunch of random different types of plastic that are fully contaminated and mixed together. Plastic recycling is a myth of the petrochemical industry to maintain a profitable stream for what would otherwise be a waste product of oil refining.

(Unlike plastic recycling, glass and metal recycling makes economic sense on it's own and thus didn't need add campaigns to back it. People did it simply because they could make money doing it.)

Do you think analog means the same thing as the Imperial system of measurements and digital means metric? Because I can assure you that you don't use the actual metric time-keeping system that had 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, and 100 seconds in a minute. Analog means a clock with hand. Digital means a clock with numbers. Maybe if you had a better educational system in your country you'd know that.

China is not a dictatorship. That's not to say it isn't authoritarian. A dictatorship is a specific thing and China isn't that thing. Taiwan was a dictatorship until this century, and might just slide back into it given recent political unfoldings on the island. China is a single party authoritarian communist state. They have non-hereditary peaceful transfers of power through elections. Admittedly only party members can vote in those elections, but the elections are still meaningful, and no nation allows all citizens to vote.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a functional government. Oh, well.

I meant that the equipment to produce mirrors of that level of fineness has existed for half a century at least. As far as it's concerned, the mirrors on Hubble and KH-11s aren't out of the ordinary for that generation of optics. It might be a high degree of precision, but it's one that's been met for a long time. You, in fact, can purchase a dielectric mirror of that level of precision off the shelf. They're not usually as large as the Hubble primary but they are on the Earth-monitoring cubesats used commercially, as well as higher end amateur astronomical equipment. Of course, those will all probably use aluminum dopant and not the probably exotic materials used by ASML. (Which, a little bit of research I've done says it's probably molybdenum and iridium in precisely controlled alternating layers.)

That's not that special. For example, the main mirror on Hubble, which is also the same primary on the KH-11 spy satellites, is an order of magnitude smoother than this and is designed to work in optical and near-IR wavelengths. While Hubble's primary is doped with aluminum and James Webb is doped with gold, ASML's mirrors would need a different dopant.

China is pointedly not spending a third of their manufacturing on AI. They're also not spending a third of 1940s America's manufacturing output on it. They're not spending even an inflation-adjusted amount of money on AI as was spent on the Manhattan Project. China is not pursuing hyper-scaling as a technique to improve their generators, unlike the US. They've already shown much more progress with a much faster and cheaper process. These new chips, if they ever develop them, will improve those models, but they won't be hyper-scaling them like US companies are.

Hilariously, what will probably happen is they'll start selling chips to compete with Nvidia. There's lots of demand for these chips and not nearly enough supply. There's already a five year backlog of orders for already outlayed data centers. Which is doubly hilarious because these chips run super hot and only have a lifespan of around three years.

It's even more funny once you take the circular financing of "AI" companies into account. Nvidia invests in companies like OpenAI that then spend that money paying data center companies to build more data centers. Those data center companies then buy chips from Nvidia. Nvidia then uses that income to make more loans to AI companies, etc. This is obviously a Ponzi scheme-style financing structure. An introduction of Chinese chips would actually disrupt this scheme just enough to pop the bubble as it's not actually generating wealth; it's just passing the same $10 around between each other and calling it economic activity. If the Chinese firms can pull even a small amount of market share, they'll rapidly deplete the alpha from the industry.