Carbon-negative concrete

You would think, unfortunately banks have done a great sleight of hand in the US limiting their liability related to safe deposit boxes /and/ safe deposit boxes available to rent are nearly impossible to find. Nearly every bank branch in any major metro will have a waiting list that is years out to get a box.

What's so valuable? Well, basically the same stuff most people keep in a random desk/dresser drawer, but ought to have in a safe: Paperwork mostly, guns, jewelry. It's not like I'm storing anything worth tons and tons of money, but the insurance break on getting everything fully covered when you have that sort of safe is significant, and it's one-time up front expense to ensure you can properly store things like paperwork, guns, and jewelry which is easily worth tens of thousands of dollars anyway.

The only difference between me and every other random joe that buys a gun safe at bass pro/cabela's, is that I know what an /actual/ safe is, and I went about acquiring one rather than the cheap RSC you can bypass with a pry bar and a hammer or a sawzall.

> By having such high valuables at home, aren't you putting your family at risk?

Many people have things at home equally valuable, they just don't bother actually doing anything to protect them. I don't think doing the work to protect them adds any additional risk.

> Also, why talk about these things on the internet? Isn't that painting a target on your back too?

Sure, I suppose so. That's true of so many things. I think it's important to be transparent with information though and then mitigate or hedge any risks that come with it. For instance, in my case, I'm nearly always home, I'm always armed, and my valuables are well protected. If someone were to find out and decide they wanted to rob me, the most likely outcome is they'd be leaving in a body bag, so they're unlikely to think that is a wise idea.

All in, I spent around $90k in 12 years on the house, and the outcome was maybe $25k returned at sale. When you look at anything like that you should really consider how long you think you're going to stay there. I had intended to live in that house quite a lot longer, but life situations changed and I had to move out of state, so off to sale it went. Nonetheless, I don't regret any of the improvements I made because I got to live with those improvements and have a house that matched my needs/wants/desires. If I buy a house again (I'm currently renting), I'll probably have it custom built. There's simply no reason in my mind to put up with lowest-common-denominator mediocrity and normalcy in the highest cost thing you will likely ever purchase in your life, and the folks who do that to return a few higher percentage points of ROI at sale are treating themselves like they're a renter in a rental property, rather than treating themselves like a homeowner. A house isn't an investment, it's a place to live that you can do pretty much anything you want with it.

While I'm on that topic, there's a few things everyone should know about safes.

An RSC, or Residential Security Container, has a very minimum standard, and the "gun safes" even though they are heavy and bulky at bass pro are usually RSCs. They are legally required to be marked, and if they are marked RSC, they are no more secure against burglary than your typical sheet-steel locking cabinet at the hardware store. Sometimes they're actually worse. The big thick door and the big thick walls on those "gun safes"? Well, generally it's two thin sheets of steel with drywall sandwiched between them. Why drywall? Well, it helps with fire protection and is the primary way in which the safe gets fire rated.

So let's talk about that drywall for a second. When you have a fire rated safe that uses drywall and it doesn't hermetically seal it, that drywall can actually cause corrosion of firearms or other metal objects and degradation of papers stored within the safe. Modern drywall is exceptionally corrosive, but usually this isn't a problem in homes because it's painted over on the inside to seal it and it off-gases to the outside where homes aren't perfectly sealed. In a safe though, you have a seam-welded outer shell, drywall, then carpet glued over it (which is also corrosive as well), or in better safes a seam-welded outer shell, drywall, then a tack welded inner shell with no carpeting.

Why does drywall cause corrosion and degradation of paper? Two compounds in drywall are responsible: Formaldehyde and Sulfur. Carpet also contains huge amounts of Formaldehyde typically, as does the carpet adhesive. Formaldehyde off-gasses and is itself deeply corrosive. Sulfur compounds in the drywall combine with moisture in the air to produce a chemical reaction when encountering naturally occurring pyrite in the powdered rock base of the drywall to produce iron hydroxide and sulfuric acid when coming into contact with exposed iron and high carbon steel (e.g. what guns are made of). The iron hydroxide off-gasses and the sulfuric acid is left behind and causes corrosion and pitting.

Don't be a big dummy, buy a real safe, not the crap they sell for thousands of dollars at big box stores with less than $100 in materials costs. If you are okay with the security level of an RSC you can get by with a plain locking steel cabinet.

But you will find dozens of examples in a google search of people who somehow think they've solved the world's water woes by collecting condensate off a disassembled A/C or dehumidifier, and ignorant uncritical news reporters buying it hook line and sinker. Collected funding, even had a whole embarrassing incident at Cal involving the freshman engineering class a few years ago.

There is definitely a need for clean water out of air, but it's got some subtle limitations: you don't need it when it's already raining, and the further you get from that condition, the less well dehumidifiers work in terms of gallons produced per kwh consumed. Below 50% RH, you're getting bupkis for condensate. Most of that energy is spent cooling off air but not quite cold enough to get it to leave its moisture behind.

Here's an easy thought experiment next time you run across one of these "inventions". If a cubic foot of air at 40% humidity contains .24 mL (sorry for mixed units) of water, give them the benefit of the doubt and say their setup is 100% efficient for pulling every last molecule of water out of air. and it runs on a 28cfm computer case fan. How many gallons per hour would that be? 0.1. The reason these suck is not that they don't work in dry conditions (though they don't), but that they don't move enough air to be useful.

But I could see it depositing in biochar as Calcium Oxide. A physical mixture, not a chemical reaction, is what I meant.

This honestly feels like I slipped into a separate timeline when I wasn't watching, last I heard of the topic Nikola was a pump and dump scam, everyone seemed sceptical about battery mass lowering payload to useless levels and range being crap, these things requiring beyond megawatt chargers to get reasonable charging times, you name it. That's somehow all gotten solved in the past few years?! I mean I'm all for it, just seems almost impossible to believe.

And we'll ignore carbon to manufacture the truck and create and maintain the roads, warehouses, and other transport infrastructure.

You can't just say "look, I am carbon neutral because I consider that the carbon that was extracted to make my electricity counts for somebody else", that's just naive. Either you live in a carbon neutral world, or you don't.

Fact is, we are not even remotely close to living in a carbon neutral world, and renewable energy does not remotely promise to replace fossil fuels. Hence the more energy you use, the bigger your carbon footprint. We need to use less energy, that's all. There is no green energy.