- I call this the "judgement day" scenario. I would be interested if there is some science fiction based on this premise.
If you believe in God of a certain kind, you don't think that being judged for your sins is unacceptable or even good or bad in itself, you consider it inevitable. We have already talked it over for 2000 years, people like the idea.
- You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.
There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.
EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.
Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.
For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
- But if we own real estate, we see the limitation and destruction of housing stock as value creation benefiting own personal assets. From that perspective, reducing this sort of low cost housing makes perfect sense.
Generations of young people have embraced this by joining em, not beating them, but this is becoming more and more difficult. It's unclear what prevents any one municipality from going vertical with young people buying, rezoning and building, I think it's related to the lack of income opportunities in some areas, as well as the built in and entrenched voter base. But as soon as any group gets in, they are pulling up the ladder, that's always going to be the case.
- We should have federal legislation requiring tugboat assist adequate to recover from complete loss of power and steering, through shipping channels that go under bridges supported by mid span support columns. The mechanism should be that if the Coast Guard catches you without a tug, the ship is permanently banned from the port under threat of seizure and repossession by the US federal government, or your vessel just gets immediately seized and held in port under bond.
Insurance providers insuring ships in US waters should also be required to permanently deny insurance coverage to vessels found to be out of compliance, though I doubt the insurance companies would want to play ball.
- Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!
I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s
It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
- The cartwheel fails are pretty brutal, it never learned how to catch itself and break its own fall. Cartwheel is a remarkable demo, I initially thought it was a joke and fake until I saw the blooper reel. Now I half believe it.
- This is one of those cases where we fly by and don't think much about it because we live in a plentiful environment. The more detailed we get, the more we realize that everything has a cost, and wasting water is not free as in beer. Have we also considered the disposal costs of wastewater?
I used to live in a place where water was infinite. Fast forward 20 years, now it's not anymore, the fish bearing watersheds ultimately bear the price, but everyone is still unmetered and there isn't low flow anything. If you piss away precious resources for no good reason and claim it's not wasteful, shame on you.
- It's on the same level as people using incandescent light bulbs. Well we clear 160k Euros after taxes and have public medical care, and electricity is 10c/kWh here, so why does it matter what bulbs we use?
We live in an area surrounded by grass fed cows, so what does it matter if we throw away 3/4 of our steak?
Without regard to how plentiful resources are in our particular area, being needlessly wasteful is in bad taste more than anything. It's a lack of appreciation of the value of what we have.
For water specifically - it is generally speaking the most valuable resource available, we just don't appreciate it because we happen to have a lot of it.
- But it says in your article, "We record a demo and dent Akash’s car while recording, just minutes before the deadline." So I think the only thing to do now is to own up to it and please post the demo including the crash so that we can all have a good laugh, and also appreciate the demo that got you into YC?
- That is too funny. So we crash the car while distracted, filming the demo for AI powered voice email we do during our commute, and "Judges love the demo". Pretty funny when nobody gets hurt, not so funny when we rear end a family of 4 or injure a pedestrian.
It's a controversial story, generates buzz. But as usual, the human cost seems to fall by the wayside along the way. You need brainpower to process email, right? Can people really drive properly while trying to focus on something else? Seems like the answer is instantly no, and they are still in YC. Makes me a little sick.
- Not exactly, more or less to some extent without a 1:1 correspondence, more like a 1:100 or something like that technically, but practically it probably works out to roughly 1:1 to 1:2 correspondence on average?
- Surface level thinking, ecological disaster in the making. Birds and bats and other bugs eat mosquitoes to live. Killing all the mosquitoes is like the Chinese killing all the sparrows. We do not understand, and we do not want to understand, the deep consequences of our actions.
People who think we can reengineer and shape ecology by eliminating key species are here on the dunning Kruger curve.
Better option, if you really want to fight malaria go fight that directly, leave mosquitoes out of it.
- Assuming body is 38 degrees C, and ambient is 20 C, Delta T is 18 C, which "works" to whatever extent.
- 22 meters underground, built in 1950s, Tokyo, 5-7% of GDP - yeah the gigantic underground vaults serve as flood protection, to those who have a good understanding of Japanese history, it's understandable to believe these were rather primarily built as bomb and nuclear shelters.
- In what way is endometriosis related to a) hormonal birth control (estrogen and progestin), b) sexually transmitted disease, c) age, d) pregnancy, e) obesity? The article didn't seem to discuss these much, I don't know much about endometriosis, but I feel like I have heard these come up and was surprised not to see them discussed.
- As I was saying, https://stopthesethings.com/2021/12/18/billions-of-wind-turb...
- No, what are you trying to say?
- I didn't see an FAQ and can only guess and piece it together, here goes:
Precious Plastics designs, sells and operates plastic processing and recycling equipment, including crucibles, presses, extrusion presses, sheet presses, injection molding machines, shredders, graders. You can buy the equipment or download the drawings for free, it's open source.
Precious Plastics operates a partner network of plastic recyclers and processors. Especially in developing countries where industrial scale recycling infrastructure doesn't already exist, this allows plastic recycling to happen in situations where it would otherwise go in a landfill.
Precious Plastics has a small, human centric ideal embedded in its culture and messaging. It's based around the idea of a small machine in a garage operated as a hobby with others in the local community, not a vertically integrated industrial behemoth.
Does that cover it well?
This can be seen as the knock on effects from the downfall of the Persian and Ottoman empires, and to a greater extent the destruction of the Persian civilization as the leader in the Middle East, replaced by the British and later American empires.
Water depletion and failure is but one small symptom of their civilizational decline. These issues wouldn't have been circumvented by better planning, it was to some extent written in the sky that this would come to pass. How can they support the needed infrastructure spending and policy goals, not being a leading global power? For example, not being able to control inflows from neighboring countries, or have the USD or trading partners available to pay to import food.