ZeroGravitas

And roughly 2/3rds of that is lost as waste heat, so really only another 25% is actually useful.

Smelters in Australia are leaning on the fossil-friendly politicians to stop getting in the way of renewables because they can't compete with global prices unless they use renewables.

Why not?

What do you think an llm would say if you asked it:

> Did the US and UK support Saddam Hussein when he was using weapons of mass destruction on Iranian civilians?

Your page says:

> Saddam committed crimes of aggression during the Iran–Iraq War

Which links to a page about the war:

> Iraq was aided by [...] the United States, the United Kingdom,

> After years of military and economic losses, decreasing morale, intensifying Iran–U.S. relations, and little international action against Iraqi attacks on Iranian civilians, Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq under United Nations Security Council Resolution 598.

So they basically did.

For natural gas it's 20% of seaborne gas, traded LNG but it's only 2 or 3% of all methane gas which is often used locally and moved via pipelines.

Though obviously has bigger impacts on the places that did rely on LNG because they didn't have (enough) local pipeline gas.

The other day I watched a YouTube video on a work machine with no history and got 2 AI generated video ads for scam products before the video played.

An AI generated man talking about his product building journey to make a pressure washer hose that didn't need power (in the AI video it didn't even have a water supply connected!) that was going to be banned in a week because it was too powerful so buy now.

I've seen AI slop before and scam ads before but the combination of the two gave me some real tingly spider-sense that things are going to get worse and that some unethical people will make a lot of money from it so be in no hurry to stop it.

But the difference between Vietnam and Iran is that Trump had a plan to get out of Vietnam.

It's a standard ISO Standard thing which could perhaps be justified when standards where printed on paper.

The JPEG XL team released a draft to try to work around this but couldn't avoid it for the official standard release.

The Texas grid has a weird parallel with China.

Both are generating more electricity over time.

Both have been generating more electricity with fossil fuels.

Both have solar rollouts that if you compare using absolute numbers with smaller places are impressive but less so as percentages.

Both have carbon intensities that are going down over time.

Celebrated for their progress despite/because "They're not doing it to be woke"

You can basically tell any narrative by selecting your figures carefully.

Last time Intel's SVT-AV1 managed to beat both x265 and x265 at various quality/speed tradeoffs.

I assume there will be an SVT-AV2 too which will semi-automatically gain from the SVT foundation for working with lots of cores but will still need specific work to support and then tune AV2 encoding.

The negative reading of that signal is massive demand destruction like a global recession. So a reduction in oil supply and a reduction in demand equals only a minor rise in prices.

I'm worried that war being "a bonanza for American energy and defence interests" is the thing people learned and a direct cause of this current war starting and it not cleanly ending.

The constant vaccilating between peace deal being done and being non-existent could just be put down to having a sociopathic liar with no guardrails in charge, but it could also be the same sociopath and his family activley profiting from the war via "insider trading" on the 180 degree turns in the reporting.

Some of the early use of VP9 and AV1 was Netflix serving video to people in developing countries. Their metered bandwidth was more of a bottleneck than the CPU playback.

VP8 was developed by a small company and bought and open sourced by Google on a fairly short timescale because the proprietary codec group had tried to start exerting their control.

So it's not accurate to say that had a lot of companies behind it. That usage came later and even then it was mostly in odd corners of the video industry.

> In the 1980s, when IBM accused Sun of violating seven patents, Sun examined the patents and argued that IBM didn't have a case. The reply of IBM's lawyers was "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?" And Sun paid out.[4]

People have been saying this for decades now.

I've never understood why some people seem to cheer this on like a corporation owning some maths was their local sports team.

For a while I assumed some people had put in a lot of effort on H.264 encoders and so the digital sharecroppers were angry and jealous that someone might be advocating for messy freedom.

But some people seem to just enjoy the thought of corporations putting a tax on video distribution.

Luckily those greedy corporations have repeatedly shot themselves on the foot and so their influence is waning.

I use Firefox but YouTube has recently started giving me a pop-up occasionally telling me that they are intentionally slowing down the site because they don't like some of the browser extensions I use.

In general they just increase the numbers on everything when they go up a generation.

e.g. if you check in 4 directions to see if you can reuse a chunk then make it check in 8 or 16.

Faster encoders will have smart heuristics on when to use these new abilities and when to skip them but the reference encoder will try everything in a dumb way to eke out a tiny win to maximize a theoretical advantage and map out the extreme best case.

If it's so valuable why don't you want to buy it from the Russians and the Gulf?

Solar PV and climate are intimately linked in fact and in propaganda, don't be silly, but ignoring that.

It is entirely possible to cover a plateau in demand in an industry without being weirdly shrill about the idea of businesses losing out to competitors, their share prices going down, or being surprised that competition leads to lower profits.

Reminder:

Magazine title: The Economist.

Focus since its founding nearly 2 centuries ago: free trade and free markets.

A decent source, quoted in the article is Jenny Chase:

Her team is forecasting a plateau and no short term uptick from the war in Iran:

https://bsky.app/profile/solarchase.bsky.social/post/3mmypc2...

That's bad news for everyone, especially those sub-saharan markets in the graph that are not getting cheap electricity and so will remain poor.

Compared with share prices of Chinese panel manufacturers, that's worth writing articles about.

Yet another in the "Free market capitalism is weird and scary to us" series from the (increasingly poorly named) Economist.

Is it only China that freaks them out in this way? Is it to do with their long term sandbagging of anything related to climate change? It was only two years ago when they had a special "Solar power is actually a big deal" issue. And roughly the same time frame that they invited prominent anti-renewables advocate Bjorn Lomborg to write a column and praised his book.

The fact that they close with the suggestion that the introduction of even better and cheaper solar panels will in any way help the businesses they have discussed with giant factories that are already selling below their marginal cost is just silly. The continual improvement in a commodity product with big up front investment needed is the main reason being a solar manufacturer is a terrible business to be in.

Though most of the people who say that kind of thing about Europe seem to have no problem with the people doing this kind of thing that is under discussion.

So was it a clear eyed critique of government policy or was it just idiotic support of fascism?

There's a dude in this thread openly supporting cronyism in government and there's been a general undercurrent of open contempt for democracy, so we can't really assume good faith and sanity from people.

Manhatten Institute only begrudgingly accepted climate change was even happening a decade ago so they'll presumably agree with renewables being cheap after a decade or so of denial and delay.

You don't want your sophisticated propaganda to be too out of step with reality. That wouldn't be effective for your fossil fuel sponsors.

Which of these phone companies were startups in the last fifteen years?

The Chinese ones? And that's the argument for less state intervention? The success of Communism? Who also make all the Apple and Google phones not, in their own words due to low cost, but because they can't find that level of Hi-Tech manufacturing skill located in any non-communist state-planned economy.

> Apple and Google power the mobile phones used from Dublin to Dubrovnik.

Remember when regulations bought Nokia and killed it while trying to leverage their monopoly into yet another area of business their tech wasn't good enough to win on its own merits? Stupid regulations.

There's a weird trope in this area that exporting is good and importing is bad. Except of course they exactly balance each other. Someone has to import your exports.

It's a Trump-level analysis of the benefits of trade.

Sweden has lots of nuclear and wind both of which can be turned off, but in general it's much better for everyone to sell your excess if you have a willing trade partner and an interconnect. The rest of their grid is mostly hydro which has some amount of storage built in but also sometimes is equally "use it or lose it".

MIT has a site called Carboncounter that lets you do this for lots of models at the same time.

http://www.carboncounter.com

You can customize the costs for various thing and it has state level presests. You can also set PHEV utilisation factor etc.

I'm not sure how up to date it is, I see 2025 model cars listed but you can tweak gas cost, tax credits etc. if they have changed.

The very cheapest cars seem to still be ICE, not hybrid or EV but different state incentives/fuel costs varies it dramatically.

And you have to consider some other things like is the Nissan Versa ICE a comparable car to the Nissan Leaf EV? The former seems cheaper to run in the USA.

I refer you to my first comment:

Are you regulating the companies that did all this propaganda to make them either do it or shut up?

Or are you getting angry at the abstract concept of recycling?

You keep talking about plastic recycling, but the EU rules made Starbucks stop using plastic for these cups! In America they use a hard to recycle plastic and lie about it to their customers.

Make the corporations pay for it with Extended Producer Responsibility laws and they'll use less plastic. They'll make what they do use easier to recycle. Because it will cost them money if they don't.

If the companies ship stuff abroad and that's bad then ban it. Like the EU has done.

https://environment.ec.europa.eu/topics/waste-and-recycling/...

> The new Regulation on waste shipments entered into force on 20 May 2024. It aims to:

> Ensure that the EU does not export its waste challenges to third countries and contributes to environmentally sound management of waste.

> Strengthen enforcement to prevent illegal shipments of waste occurring within the EU, as well as from the EU to third countries.

> Increase traceability of waste shipments within the EU and facilitate recycling and reuse.

The world needs to phase out carbon emissions generally and unreliable suppliers of goods.

We should start with phasing out the mostly costly and harmful emissions first.

Artificial lines drawn between electriciy and other areas are unhelpful.

Once you get below about 500 g per kWh of CO2, which the EU is generally well under, then electrification should be used to offset gas and oil usage in other sectors.

It is fine if you use 1 unit of gas for electricity if you save 9 units elsewhere (roughly accurate figures for home heating with heat pumps in the EU)

And people getting obsessive about nuclear without acknowledging the use of gas peakers and interconnects to balance those grids is just annoying.

Support nuclear by pointing out we can shift cars, trucks, busses, heating and industry to use electricity. A car run on electricity even from the most expensive plants in Europe is cheaper than running on imported fuel.

In the early days of this the AI companies were asking for massive new energy supplies but also refusing to sign contracts to pay for it over the decades of its life.

They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.