ashtonkem

It honestly seems like the MPs involved still suffer the delusion that the U.K. is important enough to strong arm multinational companies into doing their will in order to gain access to the U.K. as a market. Genuinely not sure why they still think that, after their half assed (pun intended) attempt to ban pornography from their internet.

I think you’ve got this completely backwards.

> so it's very unlikely that synthetic Methane will cost more than a few dozen cents per kWh

No, it’ll cost much more than that. You’re ignoring the factored in cost of storing and distributing gas. This is something that’s only affordable because of economies of scale (and government support) because it was the only practical option for heating and hot water for a while. As electricity gets cheaper and people switch over to heat pumps and electric hot water heaters, the cost of that distribution network is going to fall on fewer people, driving up their cost.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that the gas bill for synthetic methane just for cooking was as high as your current gas bill for heating and cooking. Once economies of scale go away, things get costly fast.

> So you can run a stove for an hour a day for one or two bucks or so. I guess that's several times more than you pay for natural gas, but a lot cheaper than going to a restaurant.

Sure. But the competitor to a natural gas stove isn’t eating out, it’s electricity. Especially as gas gets more expensive and induction ranges become the norm.

You need to factor in the fact that in many areas natural gas is literally a waste byproduct of the oil extraction process, which is why it’s cheap enough for us to cook with. It’s not just that we would need to make methane at 70% efficiency, it’s that we’d be transitioning from something that’s artificially cheap to something that must be made special purpose just for cooking right as alternatives are getting cheaper. And then there’s the distribution network. That’s not free to maintain, and in a world where better electric options are available municipalities are going to want to stop paying for it.

This is the same thing I say to petrol heads about gas. Sure, there might be some left for enthusiasts. But enthusiasts alone will not be able to afford the massive economies of scale that make that consumption anything close to affordable.

Two years actually sounds incredibly reasonable for a new nuclear reactor design.

Also, it’s far from unusual for someone to find a given company suspicious and go digging to find out more and produce public reports or comments questioning their validity. That’s not “axe to grind” and more “amateur investigative journalism”.

I also see it a lot outside of crypto. Heck, it’s starting to show up in surveys about “the American dream”, lots of people now think the system is rigged.

> given that folks calculate cost based on recurring payments

That’s very true for mortgages, but in my experience this isn’t how student loans work. Nobody I knew before college had any idea what their loans would cost on a monthly basis once they went into repayment, and I don’t think it was disclosed to me (or I forgot).

Also unlike my mortgage, my loans have trivially changed repayment plans. I changed some of them several times based on my economic circumstances without refinancing, which makes nailing down a single payment kind of hard, even if the interest rate hasn’t changed.

My KN95s put visible lines on my face the day after and make my ears hurt like hell. They're sealed, and I can tell I'm breathing through one. But "difficult", nah.

Any good scam like that is going to contain both in significant numbers.

My suspicion is that this is caused by both the marketing that crypto has done, and the wide ranging perception that the official mechanisms for investment and wealth growth are rigged against most Americans.

The valve masks are designed for industrial use, like sanding or spray painting. Until 2020 those were the ones you’d see the most, since they’ve been readily available in home improvement stores for obvious reasons.

> A properly worn mask necessarily obstructs breathing.

I’m really not sure why people keep claiming this, as if a lot of us haven’t been wearing a variety of masks for years at this point.

1. The recommendation is 6-8 changes of outdoor air per hour. See ASHRAE 62.1. For comparison personal homes are recommended to change over their air 0.35 times per hour.

2. I would like to see that cross referenced against ventilation capacity. Again, restaurants are supposed to be changing their air over with outside air a lot, the idea that a properly ventilated space would have represent an infection risk days later is in the “doubt” category for me. Basically, please provide a source.

Heck, last time I was in Vegas I could barely smell people smoking a few feet away from me, the ventilation was that good. If cigarette smoke is the metaphor we’re going with for viral particles and dividers, that strongly implies that better ventilation yields a lower infection risk.

3. Exactly. This is an argument for masking when you’re not eating. It’s not 0 risk, but it’s lower. How much lower is debatable, and obviously depends on more circumstances than just masking policy alone.

Personally I’d rather just get takeout when local case loads are high, like right now.

sigh I didn’t say that the dividers help. I in fact explicitly agreed with you that they’re useless.

That being said, the virus isn’t magically going to fill the entire space equally from one infected person. There is a distance factor involved, and the closer you are unmasked the higher your risk. So only unmasking at your table cuts your risk pool down to the tables immediately proximate to you, rather than everyone you walked by, and anyone you shared the bathroom with. It’s not as safe as staying home, but it’s better than being unmasked the entire time.

Oh, and the risk isn’t going to hang around hours after the fact, unless if you’re in a completely unventilated space. Commercial restaurants change their air over a recommended 8 times an hour.

They are. But limiting the number of people you’ve been potentially exposed to to just the people directly next to you is obviously safer than being exposed to every person between your table and the bathroom/exit.

I’ve never really understood why people are confused by the eating thing. The point is obviously harm reduction, not harm elimination. If you’re going to eat out, it’s obviously better to not get exposed to every single person you walked by when you’re not doing an activity that’s impossible with a mask on. This has always been extremely obvious to me, and a natural consequence of trying to keep restaurants open and case loads down.

Now at various points I’ve wondered why restaurants were open, but that’s a different discussion.

It is always fascinating what does and does not raise NIMBY ire. It doesn’t really seem very consistent.

Genuinely curious if you could make more money as a developer purposefully pissing off zoning authorities in California rather than trying to keep them happy. The state has such a long history of purposefully trying to stop development that it doesn’t seem to me like playing nice is a successful strategy.

I’ve gotten my flu shot yearly for my entire living memory. I don’t really understand why a booster vaccine for a pandemic that’s killed an order of magnitude more people than the flu does per year is some serious burden.

I personally worry about the availability of medical services due to attrition among medical staff and ICU load due to the unvaccinated. I also have taken precautions, but I can’t guarantee that I won’t get into a car crash or suffer a random medical incident requiring urgent care.

Also, chances are we’re going to exit this pandemic (whenever that happens) with a severely reduced medical system. We’re burning through medical personnel at an unsustainable rate, and we’re all going to suffer a diminished level of care until replacements can be retrained and hired.

People don’t agree to go to an ICU for funsies.

Generally I find that recommending individual, uncoordinated action as a solution to a system issue to be generally unsuccessful. Something like this either needs a coordinated response like a boycott, or a political solution.

> as far as I understood recently about US is that the speech is protected between the citizen and the government, not between civil entities, as business/corps and citizen

This is mostly true. But there are some special exemptions.

The real gotcha is that the courts have generally taken a dim view towards using the courts themselves to restrict someone’s speech. The Supreme Court basically doesn’t want (or maybe didn’t want given their recent changes) congress to launder free speech violations to civil lawsuits enforced by the courts. That’s kind of a neat trick that you’d generally want to suppress, which if I understand is why there are first amendment issues around defamation lawsuits, despite being purely between individuals.

How does this work with the DMCA? I dunno. But to my (non lawyer) eyes it does seem kinda like it effectively criminalizes speech, and I wonder if it should stand up to judicial scrutiny.

To be fair, congress mostly doesn’t give a shit what happens either.

I’m genuinely curious if this aspect of the law would (or has) stand up to scrutiny, given that congress regularly writes unconstitutional laws, and the Supreme Court really really really hates prior restraint.

Any sufficiently powerful organization begins to see its continued survival as the most important thing. I’m sure that a lot of this was implicitly done as a counter to the “threat” of Americans asking uncomfortable questions about the DoD budget and whether it really is worth spending that much on national defense rather than other things domestically.

> Very few “evil schemes” exist in reality because people aren’t all that clever (and all that evil).

Also, groups of people are really bad at keeping secrets. In my experience most orgs that do bad things find a way to make everyone think that it’s either actually a good thing, or that someone else is responsible for it. If you make people think there’s a dark secret, they’ll tell eventually.

I agree until your second to last sentence. I think the hesitation isn’t because of military concerns, I think the USSR posed a serious military threat if the US ever decided to throw down, but rather economic issues. Unlike the USSR, America does a lot of trading with China, which makes framing them as some boogie man both practically and rhetorically tricky. It doesn’t help that business interests (and consumers) in the US would scream bloody murder if the tap of cheap consumer products was turned off.

I also think that the end of the Cold War, the failure of the forever wars, and our bungled pandemic response has taken a lot of gloss off the old propaganda. The interruption of having the USSR fall has made a lot of Americans look around and saw “wait, why does life kinda suck here though?”, and it’s kind of hard to rebuild that propaganda machine once it’s stopped.

Or Operation Gladio in Italy for that matter.

That’s only possible with an extremely euro centric world view. If you were to focus on say, South America, you would’ve come to the exact opposite conclusion.