VintageCool

If you ssh into servers then I think it is worthwhile to learn some vim.

Most people prefer the stuff they're accustomed to, and they probably buy $20 wines much more often than expensive wines.

After the SBF thing about boxes--

> Matt: (27:13) > I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would've described farming. You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good.

> Joe Weisenthal: (27:27) > At no point did any of this require any sort of like economic case, it’s just like other people put money in the box. And so I'm going to too, and then it's more valuable. So they're gonna put more money in, and at no point in the cycle, did it seem to like, describe any sort of like economic purpose?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...

But that's TWTR, not TSLA.

With the increase in EVs, AC, and heat pumps, I'd expect electricity demand to increase in the next decade.

That comment seems pretty damning. Maybe it would help your point to link rebuttal.

The pandemic made oil drilling + refining look like a bad investment, so the industry underinvested in new oil resources. Then Putin cut the oil and gas supplies to the world in an attempt to extort Europe into standing aside and accepting his conquest of Ukraine.

Steady demand (ie gamers) is good for making investments into the future. A massive flood of temporary demand (ie crypto) is dangerous. If they make huge investments to be able to meet crypto demand and it disappears in two years, then the manufacturers are overextended (probably on loans); they might go under when the flood abates or they might drive prices down to levels which cannot sustain future investment. The flood of crypto demand also harms their steady market of gamers: witness how much resentment has been expressed toward crypto and Nvidia in this thread.

Cursive and block letters are not your only options. There is a wide range of legible handwriting between the two.

For example, "Italic" handwriting has (imho) the advantages of cursive without the excessive strictures.

https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/welling...

American cursive is an impractical "idealized" script. Some scholar a hundred years ago decided that handwriting would be faster if the pen never left the page, ever. As a result, American cursive is full of tiny hand-cramping loops and loses legibility.

With one exception, the capital I is unconnected. My teachers made me retake the cursive test every week for a year because I always tried to connect the capital I to the next letter, and it took that long before anyone told me which mistake I was making.

The low hanging fruit is to decarbonize the grid with solar, wind, and a batteries (and nuclear). Meanwhile, switch automobiles from ICE to EVs. And replace natural gas heating for homes with electric heat pumps.

There are other challenges, but that is a big chunk of the job that is doable / already being done with current technology.

Who knows, maybe the bots even have legitimate Spotify listener accounts.

There was scarcely any financial incentive to address the grid scale energy storage problem until like two or three years ago. There are a half dozen startups working on it now.

My vote is to rapidly install renewables while we have the natural gas backstop, and give the storage startups a few years to make it happen. Energy Dome, Hydrostor, and Form Energy all look promising.

And if new nuclear turns out to be less expensive than expected, great.

Coal is dying in the United States for economic reasons, anyway.

My understanding is that the Texas grid issues are largely due to increased population and lack of a capacity market. Texas has been hitting record high demand again and again in the past few years. Aggregate demand went above ERCOT's worst case projections during the recent heat wave.

The Laffer Curve argued that revenue from taxation might represent an inverted U shape with tax rate. If you were above the revenue-optimizing tax rate, then lowering the tax rate could increase revenue.

But that revenue-optimizing tax rate, which is the subject to much debate, is probably somewhere around 65% to 70%, far higher than the tax rates in the United States. We could surely increase taxes on high income individuals without doing much harm to the economy.

For the purposes of studying human archaeology, I don't care about the deep sea. I want LIDAR surveys of shallow coastline waters. Global sea levels 20,000 years ago were 125 meters lower than they were today. Our ancestors could have been living on shorelines that are now deep under water. There could be extensive archaeological sites that are undiscovered because they are buried under 60 meters of ocean water.

Ancient human tools have been found by fishing boats in Doggerland, the portion of the North Sea that used to be a land bridge between Europe and England. I bet there's a whole lot more discoveries to made just a few miles offshore.

Possible title change to clarify: this is $80k / year!

I think you under-estimate how quickly human populations will mentally adjust to "the new normal" and how much suffering we're willing to tolerate, especially if it happens to someone else on the other side of the planet.

The article states that the Great Lakes were created by glaciers scouring the land, and while that is true, I think it more accurate to say that the Great Lakes were caused by a failed continental rift. The Midcontinent Rift System formed a billion years ago and almost tore the North American craton apart, but after 15-20 million years it stopped and faded. The rift filled with sediment that was easy for the glaciers to scour away.

The article links to another Atlas Obscura article about how the Red Sea is debatably a sea or an ocean, because it fills part of the East African Rift System. If we're going to refer to that distinction, then please also mention that the glaciers could scour out a lakebed because ancient geology created it!

CS was very popular in the US twenty years ago.

California already has some big long-distance transmission lines.

Path 65 (aka Pacific DC Intertie) is a 3.1 GW line connecting the hydroelectric dams of Washington and Oregon to Los Angeles.

Path 27 (Intermountain DC) is a 2.4 GW line connecting LA to a big-ass coal plant in Utah that is being shifted to wind+solar+natgas+hydrogen.

Path 66 is a set of AC lines that combine for 4.8 GW from Oregon to Southern California.

It seems to be much more common to re-use old coal plant locations as grid-scale energy storage sites.

300° C. Nuclear reactors are pretty cold, for thermal generation. As I understand it, this is because the cooling system has to remain liquid, and you can only pressurize+heat water so much before it turns to steam (or becomes prohibitively expensive to contain).

We definitely can. The apartment I lived in from 2018-2019 was ghostly quiet. For the first five months, I could easily have been convinced that we were the only people that lived on our floor.

and they might be again in a few years

Well, he doesn't know. Most of Vinge's works were about getting close to the Singularity without crossing over, because he expected that technology and society would change massively and unpredictably at that time.

The point of introducing the fantasy element of the Zones of Thought was to allow Vinge to write a FTL space opera without having to deal with post-Singularity speculation.

When species transcended, they left the Beyond and went into the Transcend.

s/got/for/

I had believed that "nuclear construction is expensive, nuclear operation is cheap" got decades, and I spent a few months of pandemic downtime trying to figure out why that isn't true.

I didn't find all that much to go on. Aside from a French Court of Audit report in 2012, this information seems to be mostly non-public? Anyway, it looks like the answer is staffing and maintenance. It seems to be common for nuclear power plants to employ 500 to 1000 people. Fessenheim in France employed 700 people at the time of its closure, plus an additional 600 to 2000 during maintenance (per Wikipedia).

Meanwhile, nuclear seems to be very technically complicated with a bunch of weird Advanced Physics-y shit that can go wrong. Like, water pipes exploding because the nuclear radiation caused water molecules to split up by radiolysis and a design flaw allowed the hydrogen to collect somewhere. Or borated water eating through steel.

And now that I type this, it occurs to me that you can't just turn off the plant for safe maintenance work -- inside the dome is always going to be irradiated and probably require hazmat suits.

And, as you alluded to, nuclear plants use the steam based thermodynamic cycle but run cold because they have to maintain water in a liquid state while absorbing heat from the reactor. The power achievable from the Carnot cycle depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference: nuclear plants run at 300° C, coal plants about 570° C, and CCGT at 1000° C up to 1500° C.

https://cbe.anu.edu.au/researchpapers/CEPR/DP687.pdf

Hydro is great. Most of our hydro resources have already been tapped.

Nuclear has produced a lot of electricity and avoided a lot of emissions. We should keep our existing nuclear fleets. But new nuclear is prohibitively expensive. (Our 1960s-70s nuclear fleet was super expensive too, the system was just set up in such a way that people building power plants didn't mind it being expensive.)

Meanwhile solar got real cheap real fast in the past decade, and wind has had a pretty good run of getting bigger and taller and cheaper too.

I think that wind and solar and batteries are the obvious path forward from where we are today, being the fastest and most economical route to decarbonize. Had the Build Back Better plan passed, I think the US would have been on-track to be about 65% wind+solar by 2035. https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-futures-study

That said, decarbonizing with wind and solar alone becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to hit 100%. But 75%? Totally doable. 95%? Might be feasible.