ZeroGravitas

This undersells the weirdness of Musk.

He is after all at this moment talking on Twitter about how he regularly tells people who say they are Jewish that they aren't Jewish and if they don't have DNA tests to prove it he doesn't believe them.

Back to USAID: Musk, a prominent US defence contractor also gave as one of his reasons to cut USAID that it was a front organisation for the American Intellegence community.

So just before a big war he threw a curveball at long running intelligence operations. In his own, public, on-the-record comments. The same man who provides Grok AI to the Pentagon for use on classified info.

He also, when challenged about the deaths, claimed that he hadn't cut any funding for that stuff and that it was all still done by a different department so there was "zero deaths".

Which is a lie, but if you believe his lie, then a) he didn't save any money b) unless you count the stuff that was really the American Intellegence operations.

On the other hand if you don't believe his lie then all the dweebs online defending all the deaths as worth it to cut the deficit are defending a man who doesn't even bother to make that same argument.

This feels like very low quality propaganda.

Like at one point it spends a whole paragraph on how landfills are better than just spreading trash around randomly.

Is there someone out there seriously arguing that developing nations should just recycle and entirely skip modern landfills?

Are they implicitly arguing that the US has a developing nation level of civic infrastructure?

Not sure if it's a translation issue but there's some weird language which makes me suspicious. I thought this was going to come out strongly for e-fuels which is something the Germans have pushed at various levels.

In the end though the actual paper concludes that, yes, EVs are the main solution here and then suggests making them out of low carbon steel and recycling them to get a little extra benefit.

Probably still far too kind to hydrogen and e-fuels, but they don't seem to push it too hard.

Possibly a rearguard action if they realize BEVs have won and just trying to slow it slightly with nitpicks? Or is that too paranoid.

I got my account blocked for using antigravity with pi, has that policy changed?

Though in any sane world, the distraction from the distraction from the distraction... Would each be career ending in itself.

But it's not a sane world. It's a world where the US doesn't even pretend to stick to the spirit or letter of deals that it makes. And so dealing with the US is pointless whether you are their oldest and closest ally or a nation currently at war with them.

You can't even rely on their own national self interest, you'd need to know exactly which billionaire has the ear of the president for the entire span of your agreement.

> Tim Cook was the author or editor of nineteen books, including The Good Allies: How Canada and the United States Fought Together to Defeat Fascism During the Second World War.

I notice several problems with this book title in hindsight.

A recent similar example was Mad Men rerelease in 4k where the VFX weren't redone properly after a rescan of the film and you can see the man operating the machine with the pipe that spews sick out of a characters mouth.

All the cost were hidden off the balance sheet 40 years ago. They can't build them cost effectively (or on schedule) now that there's more scrutiny on where the money comes from.

Donald Trump does a lot of stupid evil stuff to further fossil fuels but getting all the tech nerds excited about even more expensive nuclear power is actually evil genius.

Good info, though I feel the graph that shows the daytime solar utterly flattened is underselling batteries.

Part of the magic is that they can absorb or return exactly as much as is required much much faster than any other tech.

Is there a shallow peak during the hours around noon? Or a shallow nadir? Or a few random spikes in demand? Does that change day to day or season to season? Batteries can handle all of that with ease.

Same for delivery after the sun sets. Part of the reason they get rolled out so quickly is that the jagged expensive peak can be matched exactly.

They also do the same on a micro scale to keep the grid locked in sync. Again faster than any rival tech.

The diagram even shows one blip at exactly the point in the day when batteries fast response is most valuable. Bit of a misfire from the usually excellent Ember team.

I've never found a coherent explanation of what this problem is, as an outsider looking in.

It roughly matches the shape of the American datacenter issue where an uptick in demand that is small compared with the level of extra demand required for EVs and heat pumps and industrial electrification to decarbonise the economy has apparently caused massive problems.

And also the Australian experience where the grid companies would rather curtail solar than sell it cheaply (often because the same companies profit from evening gas prices).

You are then forced to conclude that there was simply no coherent plan for electrification. Decades of planning time utterly squandered.

Probably spent arguing about whether climate change was real.

European self-sufficieny in oil products peaked in the 1990s around 65%

Never high enough for self sufficiency without major changes that the people close to the money spigot delayed for decades to line their own pockets.

Another resource curse.

> It has gone from being a major producer of oil and gas to being heavily dependent on imports.

You seem to be suggesting this happened for reasons other than extracting and selling all the oil and gas that was there, while also stalling on any domestic moves to burn less fuel, leading to the obvious imbalance.

Even the oil industry when they show graphs of what they describe as "unrealistic" options which involve massive cuts in taxation are only tiny speed bumps on the way to exhausting the reserves.

Meanwhile a single round of wind turbine auctions will save far more gas than that. And be a "green transition".

Part of the reason for the ventilation requirements is due to burning fossil fuels in the home for heat and cooking.

You can ventilate a little less when you're generating less pollution in the home.

Some ventilation is still a good idea though.

Just following your doctor's advice on diet (less red meat) might have 10-20% of the impact of switching to an EV for an average American.

The are diminishing returns to going full vegan from a greenhouse gas standpoint, beef and cheese are the big ones.

In general individual choices don't matter but helping kick of a cultural trend does. It's the same wierd logic as voting, no individual vote counts but voting matters.

Techies should really be leading the way on installing solar, heat pumps, induction hobs and EVs and in fact often are.

I think the current air pollution deaths of fossil fuels (several millions per year) are roughly an order of magnitude higher than even expected climate change deaths.

Many of the big estimates of death rates in say 2100 combine the air pollution of continuing to use coal and combustion engines with heat and climate effects.

The good news is that we have cheaper, better, cleaner options for the vast majority of that fuel burn today and they continue to get better, cheaper and cleaner. There's a clear shift in the market, it just takes time to work it's way through.

But if your kid has asthma today then that is probably doing more damage to them than climate change.

Of course, to state the obvious, both problems have the same solution. Stop burning fossil fuels.

Datacentres can in theory reduce bills.

They're a large, mostly well-behaved grid load which lets you spread fixed costs over more units of electricity.

The problems start when they are being built by well connected entities that can leverage their power to simply demand that other people pay more to give them a discount.

Very similar to the shopping around factories do. Usually a factory brings jobs and other good stuff, but you don't get the factory unless you do X, Y and Z in competition with all the other possible locations. That can lead to a winners curse where you're effectively subsidizing the factory and losing out overall if you "win" the auction.

In some ways the destruction of our political, journalistic (as they hint at in this piece) and scientific cultures and institutions is even worse. And again done knowingly, by the same people.

This particular author isn't an environmentalist as much as a low tech enthusiast.

Hence, solar and wind power generating electricity, which are clean and green technologies but are not "low tech" do not fit his particular niche interest.

Though the article was from 2018. I think he may have evolved slightly as solar PV begins to feel more like a bit of lumber or a steel girder or anything else you can pick up at a hardware store and so passes his somewhat fuzzy and arbitrary definition of low tech.

It's commonly accepted that the Leaf Gen 1 was weird because it was an EV, but in reality it's weird because it was a new generation of Japanese design. There are non-EV models Nissan released in Japan around the same time with the same design language that you could combine together to get something that looked like a gen 1 leaf, like the front of the first gen Nissan Note.

I've long said the problem with the term racism is that real, proper, professional racists like this guy don't think they're treating other races (or women) differently based purely on race (or gender).

They fundamentally believe those people are inferior and so it's totally logical to treat them as inferior. To them it would only be racist if a black or female academic was capable of being as good as a white man. Since he strongly believes they can't, then it's not racist/sexist to treat them as inferior.

Read his own words, it's the manifesto of a madman who thinks the elites in the 1950s were too woke:

https://ncofnas.com/p/a-guide-for-the-hereditarian-revolutio...

Quote:

> White children are brainwashed to despise themselves because of their skin color. Anecdotally, white children are sometimes driven to transgenderism in an attempt to escape the shameful status of oppressor.

> The humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI. Meaningful art of any kind has become almost impossible. In short, wokism is ruining everything that matters except (for the time being) GDP.

Is it stupid and useless at following simple instructions without going off the reservation and doing stuff you don't want it to do?

No, it's "cheating" which makes it scary and smart even when it's not doing something useful that you actually want it to.

Like when Teslas try to swerve off the road. It's not failing at driving in a straight line, it's just trying to cheat by taking a shortcut through the bushes. That's how smart the Autopilot AI is.

Quite often these stories come down to a "first come, first served" system where you just need to add your name to the list.

Doesn't matter if you don't have money, don't have land, don't have customers, don't have experience in the field.

Getting your name on the list is seen as valuable and transferrable like squatting a domain name.

But sometimes people like the big number, even if it's obviously BS. Makes for a good headline (works both positively and negatively depending on framing) and as leverage for other political motives. It's happened repeatedly for renewbles projects seeking grid connections.

Generally as soon as any common sense limits are applied the vast majority evaporates.

My skepticism of Texas authorities and their quotes in the article makes me think they are taking advantage of this to say "see how many datacentres we protected you from" when actually most never really existed in any true sense. Their buddy's data center will still get built.

Almost every paragraph of this puff piece made me dislike the author and the business they are covering.

And that's despite me being aware of the business previously and thinking it's a good technical idea.

Why would you compare someone to Rockerfeller? Does the author not know Rockerfeller's business history? Does he assume readers don't? Does he know and approve of it? All options are bad here.

And almost as cringe as describing carbon and hydrogen being formed into fuel as the atoms "having sex"!? Just no.

Cherry picking a single day to try to demonstrate a widely accepted trend is lazy journalism.

Cherry-picking to try to portray the opposite of the generally accepted truth is much more problematic.

It seems forgotten now but for about a year before all this people were confused about why the oil price was higher than it should be as they expected a glut.

This theory would suggest that China was filling giant reserves at a certain price point.

There should be enough data to confirm or deny that by now.

Those electric 2, 3 and 4 wheelers and electric busses even if powered by coal fired electricity, will do less damage to city dwelling kids lungs than traditional engines would.

And if the trend of China cleaning up their electricity supply continues (they just slipped under 50% coal) then even existing EVs will get cleaner every year with less pollution created at distant powerplants.

Yes, and...

In some areas of London the ULEZ has been so successful that the measured NOx is now coming mostly from gas boilers used for heating, probably mostly old large commerical units.

So shifting from gas boilers to heat pumps and from gas ovens and stoves to electric/indusction is also beneficial.

> But rarely have they been so ... bad at their jobs? Who really thinks a keyword list is the right way to filter grant applications?

Depends what you (and they) think their job is.

RAGE was one acronymn thrown about and name-checked by the vice-president "Retire all Government Employees".

Russel Vaught said:

> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down... We want to put them in trauma."

California has the lowest wholesale cost in the US and were predicted to fall by 30% this summer against an 8% drop for the whole country.

Lots of other stuff affects end-user prices though.