I'm sorry, but he's very much the opposite of a concrete thinker (unless you mean the way that, back when he did actually sometimes build things, he used excessive amounts of concrete in building things to keep his mob buddies happy). I am actually pretty sure that he has a serious cognitive problem with 3 dimensional reasoning. There are all kinds of evidence points like his ideas about building a wall at the Southern border (with a moat with alligators and snakes in it, no less), or about raking massive forests, or about expanding something like Iron Dome to cover a massive country like the US. His comprehension of physical reality seems to be at the level of Saturday morning cartoons (examples: Pinky and the Brain building a replica Earth and everyone evacuating to it via a single ladder, or painting a continent with a giant paint roller, or Noah's Ark, you know, absolute nonsense that's good for a laugh, but defies any realistic understanding of physical reality).

I think that the problem is that it quite literally is insane. Anyone suggesting that wind turbines cause cancer through the sound they make, just as a random example, obviously need either serious remedial education, therapy, or medication with anti-psychotics. Whichever it is, it is quite literally completely insane that anyone who states and/or believes anything like that should be anywhere near policy making roles.

My understanding of what you might call the "assembly language" of a quantum computer, is that you could not practically perform the real time functional operations of an actual operating system. Like handling I/O in real time, for example. I don't see a display driver or mouse and keyboard input operating directly on a quantum computer. Not as they are conceived and exist right now, anyway.

It will? Cool.

Generally speaking, traditionally made charcoal isn't really a problem from a greenhouse gas perspective because it's carbon neutral. All of the energy that goes into its initial pyrolysis and released when it is burned comes from the atmosphere in the first place and the energy comes from the sun. That doesn't mean there can't be other forms of pollution. Indeed smoke from charcoal burning in Africa by the Romans apparently used to reach Rome itself sometimes and caused significant deforestation. Hopefully modern charcoal burning operations are sustainable and also deal with the exhaust better.

Of course, a lot of charcoal briquettes these days apparently have actual coal in them as well as charcoal. So that would obviously contribute to global warming. Of course quite aside from that argument, I don't really like the idea of coal tar in my food. Apparently the general advice to avoid that is to let the briquettes burn for a long time before putting the food on. Of course, the whole excuse (I mean, we all know the real reason is penny pinching) for using actual coal in the first place is to make the briquettes burn longer, so that's basically self-defeating.

So, basically, however much flavor the imaginary screams of "bitch-Gaia" add to your delicious steaks, I have to rain on your parade. Either you're not really doing all that much damage, or you're ruining the steak by barbecuing over bituminous coal and might as well just be pouring lighting fluid right on the meat.

And? That's part of a natural cycle that happens over tens of thousands of years. The thing is, there is ample evidence that the last major conversion into desert was rapidly advanced by human activity. Climate scientists are also well aware of such deserts. So, really, I'm not sure what your point is supposed to be.

Or, how about using 0.05% of budget of the industries they identify of causing the problem for that purpose instead? It would produce a heck of a lot more solar farms than your idea. Seriously, this whole thing seems a heck of a lot like DARVO. Take the ones raising the alarm about a problem and declare them the ones somehow responsible for it.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where there was simply no question that, whoever gets elected, they would do the right thing as far as the environment goes.

Or they could do their actual job and their findings could convince the public, the government, and potentially private industry that it is worth investing far, far more than that into building GigaWatts of solar every year.

And everyone could be baking their own bread, driving their own garbage to the dump instead of leaving it out for the collector, or doing their own surgery. Heck, some people do. Generally though specialization actually works. True, it's a question of balance and things sometimes get over-specialized, but I don't think this is one of those circumstances. They are a research institute that does climate research. However big they may seem to you, their budget is actually minuscule compared to the problem. They are supposed to do research that can help guide policy, which deals with resource management on a scale many orders of magnitude above their budget.

You seem to be pushing some form of individual responsibility argument where the burden of dealing with the issue falls on small actors. An example would be water conservation. Overuse of water is an issue, so we want people to conserve water in the home. I am personally all for that. There's no reason (despite the claims of some that you need to flush the toilet ten times, fifteen times, as opposed to once) that you shouldn't have an efficient toilet because a properly designed one just needs one flush with only a fraction of the water of an old fashioned toilet. There's no reason that other appliances shouldn't be water efficient either. However, residential water usage is about 8% of all water usage. While it's good not to be wasteful, focusing too much on fussing about residential usage when a tiny increase in industrial or agricultural water efficiency surpasses what is even possible in residential savings is a poor use of time and effort. Just getting 20% more farms to use drip irrigation would probably exceed any gains that could be made in residential water usage.

So, it seems to me that's what you're doing here, but to an even greater degree. Putting 10% or even 100% of their budget towards building solar panels would not make a dent, but the data from their studies could.

The problem here is that you have not actually provided any evidence of your assertion that their research has not led to any improvements. Institutes like this are, in fact, the ones who figure out which are the most serious problems to tackle and which are the easiest problems to tackle that can do the largest amount of good. If we ignore the actual differences in available technology over those 34 years (and variations in their budget), you're saying that they could have roughly built about 68 MW of solar capacity over their existence. Even if we outright ignore capacity factors, that would be around 10.43 TeraWatt-hours (I hate Watt-hours, but it's what everyone uses). If we use the approximate 1 ton of CO2 produced per MWh from using coal for electricity, that would prevent about 10,431,000 tons of CO2. That would be about 380,000 tons of methane. Or about 2,607 tons of HFC-404A refrigerant, etc. Policies preventing methane dumping into the atmosphere and phasing out problematic refrigerants as well as many others eliminate vastly more greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere than the usage of their budget that you are proposing. Those policies are created based on the recommendations of research like the kind produced by this institute.

Yeah. I mean, it's pretty vague what the hell a "quantum computer operating system" even is. From what I can see, calling it an operating system is a misnomer. It may have some operating system like features like a scheduler, but it seems more like an API with some operating system adjacent features.

In his second term, we know that he hasn't. The revocable trust arrangement in no way meets the standard of handing over "complete and total control". As for the trust during the first term that you were actually referring to, even if we are to naively believe that Weisselberg wasn't throwing himself on his sword for the others, he was one of the named trustees and committed both tax fraud and perjury. When he left the company between terms, he got a $2 million dollar severance package with one of the conditions being that he not cooperate with any investigations by law enforcement against the company or Donald Trump (which sounds a lot like obstruction of justice to me, but apparently it's only a "gray area")

Then let's consider a few things. Right when he was actually announcing the "blind trust" Trump publicly said that he would fire his sons, the trustees, if they were doing a bad job. Part of the point of a blind trust is that you can't fire the trustees because they are doing a bad job because it is supposed to be "blind". He also marketed his properties and steered government business towards his properties in office. Also, we know from public statements from himself and his sons that he was receiving quarterly updates about the business, which violates the terms of a blind trust.

In this term, they're just not even really bothering trying to keep up an illusion. In part I think because they know that so many of their supporters will just point to claims from the first term without bothering to even check if he's actually made them for the second term (like the way he stopped giving up his salary during his first term, but Trump supporters kept insisting he was). We've got the crypto stuff, the fact that he's filed in court as a person with significant control over his businesses (so, not just some public statements that can be "interpreted", but actual legal filings indicating the trust is meaningless), there's his direct control over some of his businesses like Truth Social. Then of course there's the fact that when Trump goes on international trips, one of his sons typically goes as well. Not on the same plane (well, not always, sometimes they do travel with him on Air Force One), and they don't directly sit in on the same meetings. It's more like Trump has a meeting with someone and then, by amazing coincidence, that person has a business meeting with one of Trump's sons right after. I could also go into the emoluments clause violations, but Slashdot has a length limit on posts.

The current war against Iran is at least 2nd order relevant to the discussion since military entanglements over oil would evaporate if everyone could: A. Produce ample electrical power using largely local resources and B. actually use that power for all primary power usages, ditching fossil fuels. So that part wasn't exactly off topic, more tangential to it. The military discussion specifically over whether it takes a navy to block the Strait of Hormuz was pretty irrelevant though, I will admit. That was mostly me being pedantic in my response. Interesting that someone found the need to mod it troll though, since I thought it was largely a fairly dry recitation of the facts.

As for:

To be clear, I'm not suggesting salvaging it. Or at least not for standard power generation. There are still niches in remote locations where geographic location and/or logistics make other forms of power impractical (deep space, for example), but for most other scenarios, renewables and storage appear to be winning. Any advances there may be in SMRs don't change the fact that economies of scale should mean they will come in second economically to conventional nuclear plants. The conventional nuclear plants themselves are too costly, too slow/inflexible, and too geographically constrained (you don't technically have to build a nuclear reactor on waterfront property, but it's more expensive to cool them with dry cooling towers).

Of course, once any of these reactors are actually built, and we're already forced to swallow the cost of them, it may be economical to keep operating them because the sunk costs are already sunk. It wouldn't be so bad if these projects were just billionaires throwing away their own money, but they always get subsidized with our money in the end through a variety of means (like being forced to pay for their power at a set rate, even though much cheaper power is available).

Not sure about Coke bottles, but I know that back in the day when we would leave out our milk bottle empties for the milkman, the bottles would be washed and re-used. So for those sorts of bottles, the deposit was the traditional kind, intended to guarantee the return of the container for re-use.

Doesn't really make sense though. I mean, I know a lot of criminals are idiots, but the lead, antimony, etc. in the battery are generally economically recyclable. Meaning that there's an actual profit motive in recycling them. It's not the typical e-waste. The plastic is generally an easily recyclable thermoplastic as well, that just has to be shredded, cleaned, then remade into new battery casings. The sulfuric acid, if not recyclable, can be neutralized and any heavy metals dissolved in it can be removed.

Basically, there's no sane reason to ship them as e-waste anywhere. Even in these countries, it should not really make sense that they would just be thrown out instead of recycled. If they are not being recycled, that just means logistical issues with the lifecycle. If the article is true, that represents an economic opportunity for people to collect them (and I find it hard to believe there aren't already scrap dealers who could be handling used batteries as well).

Yep. That's a pretty good elaboration of what I was saying. Plenty of things that should have electrified, like home heating, are very stubbornly slow to do so. Having the electrical capacity is only one part of the equation.