grues-dinner

Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or two much larger bores). And a deep, concrete-sheathed cable is a huge pain to maintain compared to cables around 1-3m underground.

Which is not to say they don't use TBMs - they do, but it costs a lot - this is a 200+ million project to put 3km of cables underground: https://www.nationalgrid.com/media-centre/press-releases/tun...

To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried.

Roads also go to places with buildings and have junctions, plumbing, foundations and are generally hard to dig past. But there are places where they do follow motorways: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M6_motorway,_northbo... (also canals).

Rail lines go though towns by design, and as you see from comments even here, the one thing people really hate the thought of is power lines near houses.

Norwich-Tilbury doesn't go near many houses at all, and certainly not 400,000 peoples' houses. Check out the route: https://norwichtotilburymap.nationalgrid.com

The consultation area is 120m wide, not necessarily the trenching. The working width is often far less than that: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/340431/download

In this drawing, you can see the area in the map and it is not 120m wide along the trench: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download. For scale, the grid squares are 1000m.

A 400kV trench construction swathe also includes the soil storage areas - subsoil and topsoil are separated for return afterwards, as well as clearance to the fencing (https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/357086/download).

UK domestic electricity is roughly equal to industrial (94 vs 82 TWh). Commercial is 62. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a286564785...

A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and low demand. So not only do you need to provide enough of a price delta for the industry move to be worth it (sacrificing proximity to other amenities and customers, eating the relocation costs, loss of employee supply, etc) but you also need the industry to be operating 24/7 (or start doing it). Some industries can do that, but not all.

And then one day when the grid upgrades are done, the risk is the incentives are cut and now you're stuck at the wrong end of the country.

I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic.

The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically extinct now.

I am somewhat sympathetic to, in the case of wind, low-frequency noise complaints, but I strongly suspect most of them are just tacked on for good measure.

People oppose everything.

* Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds

* T-frame pylons: boring (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/13/electr...), eyesore (we prefer the lattice ones), most of the above too

* Underground: damaging to the environment, end stations are eyesores/light polluters, more construction traffic, should be HVDC not AC, house values

* Solar farms: waste of good land (golf courses are fine) noise somehow, construction, eyesore (but a 400 acre field of stinky bright yellow rapeseed is OK), house values

* Onshore Wind farms: all the birds all the time, access, eyesore, noise, dangerous, should be offshore, house value, waste of land, I heard on Facebook the CO2 takes 500 years to pay back

* Offshore wind farms: eyesores, radar hazard, all the birds, house values somehow, navigation hazard, seabed disruption

* Build an access road: destroying the countryside, dust if not surfaced, drainage, house values

* Don't build an access road: destroying roads, HGVs on local roads, house values

* Nuclear: literally all the reasons plus scary

Some of them are fair on their own, but it really adds up to a tendentious bunch of wankers at every turn who think the house they bought for 100k in 1991 and is now worth 900k is the corner of the universe.

> As a foreign influence

I'm sure these people would never take foreign cash: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c93k584nvgeo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyk1j92195o

Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-....

And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures. Like this objection from a village near (but not actually on) the underground stretch near Manningtree: https://holtonstmary-pc.gov.uk/assets/Documents-Parish-Counc...

Employment in China is actually pretty thin right now. The labour force reduction is surely coming down the track, but it's not here yet. There may be enough time to pivot to lower-labour options with good management.

With the exact right approach and enough luck, you can conceive that automation can replace the bodies at the rate they are lost demographically and thus avoid the crisis of underemployment or the crisis of insufficient labour. To far one way or the other and it ends in tears.

Time will tell, and it could all go horribly, terribly wrong, but if any country can thread the eye of that needle, it would be this one.

The thing is it's increasingly about the process of stringing things together, rather then the stages themselves. Obviously, not all the stages in your video are in the one video: it's from at least 7 years ago from a company that makes the specific machine class, so I can see why you might be confused about that.

The thing that no one has cracked yet is that sitting 30 people down at a belt and telling them to follow the manual is easy and flexible and while it's a skill, it's not very technical. Designing the line to do the same thing is hard, fiddly and very, very technical. Whoever does that needs to know the machines available, the sensors, IO, networking, wiring, power, PLCs, HMIs, access paths, be able to design and spec anything custom, etc etc. You also need to feed back to the designers if one aspect is hard to automate (poking through wires is a good example). Even loading workflows: You can't just shout "duo kai" at the machinery as you trolley a palette of magnets to the head of the belt and expect them to get out of the way.

That, combined with the outlay of the machines themselves, limits things you can make with it. The kind of factory in your video seems to a very typical Chinese SME where there are 50-200 people in a simple warehouse with some basic equipment and they contract assemble. These places do not generally run the margins you need to stop production, acquire several million in automation and design services, and start up again.

Fully or just highly automated systems thus get used for high-volume stuff that doesn't change much in a run. Cars, phones, that kind of thing are the classics. Food production also due to the massive volumes.

The floor on where it makes sense to even think of automation is, however, lowering quickly. It's not just Siemens NX that can do it any more, factory management platforms are sprouting from everywhere from Huawei's ERP to Hangzhou student bedrooms, and there are other SMEs starting to do this work at lower costs for smaller outfits.

As long as manual CMs exist and are cheaper, CheapNShit Speakers doesn't need to design its product for automatic assembly, even though it definitely could if it needed to. That creates a kind of "snap to automation" where something that wasn't ever automatable suddenly gets automated, because when the machinery is close enough, the last few sticking points are designed away and suddenly you can do it.

Like I said, the real acid test of when this becomes really useful (or dangerous to the workers, depending on perspective) is when you can quickly reconfigure a production line to make the Black Friday CheapNShit 2000+ speakers rather than the ones you made before. The CMs currently will do that with a WeChat message, a new manual and a palette of parts and have them on a truck tomorrow.

This is likely a place where "AI" will find a home, whatever happens to the chatbots. It's things like allowing a fairly generic robot to pick up a new kind of speaker case and put it on something else without having to have an engineer write a program or even G-code to do it.

Also like AI, this isn't quite like last time when the US lost its manufacturing to China. The US lost low-medium manufacturing to China based on, basically, labour costs. Then it lost the high end on labour and automation that means as long as you have the machine you don't need the expert US workers and network effects because everything you need for that is available within 2 hours in Shenzhen.

China losing the middle-high end to cheaper places implies that automating most of it will remain so hard that it's always more expensive in TCO terms than the cheapest global labour. If labour is only a small part, this is not necessarily true or it may be true only for some products (clothing is a good example of something traditionally hard to automate fully).

On the other hand, automation getting to that state also means the US, or anywhere, can get the manufacturing back if it wants to, by competing not on labour costs, which is unlikely within the next decades, but on the technology and network effects that make it possible to acquire, stand up and run these kinds of line quickly.

Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU. And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in usability.

Factory automation design as a service is already a huge sector but it can get a lot bigger. Of course the capital barrier to entry to standing up a factory for some widget will go up, but the unit price might not. It remains to be seen how far into the low-end, low-volume, high-SKU-count that process will reach. Maybe things like standard-ish robotic cells will allow agility in the factory. If being able to make one-off parts in a highly data-driven factory is Industry 4.0, maybe that's Industry 5.0!

Presumably it will become less possible to spin up production of, say, a whole new design of a speaker in a few days with some new tasks for the workers and some rejigging of basic machines, but it sounds like a sector that will see some interesting progress in the next 50 years.

Previous biotech breakthroughs have made good progress in treating many illnesses, but making healthcare cheaper overall is not one of them, even if it makes a specific therapy cheaper.

It would be unsurprising to me if a biotech gold-rush resulted in healthcare becoming a larger proportion of GDP, even if it produced miraculous results. We'd just have to scrimp and save and take out a reverse mortgage for generic re-transcription therapy or whatever instead of chemo and nursing homes.

What would quantum technology actually deliver?

Other than collapsing the internet when every pre-quantum algorithm is broken (nice jobs for the engineers who need to scramble to fix everything, I guess) and even more uncrackable comms for the military. Drug and chemistry discovery could improve a lot?

And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.

Better healthcare technology in particular would be nice, but rather like food, the problem is that we already can provide it at a high standard to most people and choose not to.

"OK, Timmy. Here's what to do: Tell them there is a mysterious supernatural being watching their every move from a very tall building in New York, helped by legions of minions. If they behave nicely to you, they will be rewarded with a higher credit score."

> tell them that lowly paid actor is _really_ Santa and he _really_ wants to hear what they want

To be fair, that is also pretty wild to me.

People will do basically anything to fix junctions except install roundabouts.

I wonder how many millions of days humans sit in cars and look at empty crossroads and a red light.

And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "pass", generate another one until it does. Then grade according to "efficiency" metrics and feed it back in.

As long as you do that, the penalty for a a slop-based fuckup is just a less efficient toolpath.

"Miscommunication" is when you see mineral water on the bill when you thought it was tap water. Being that ignorant of the positions during a trade war that you started and doing it in public on Twitter is more like holding Uno cards face-out during your own game of poker.

> Amid the market's downturn on Friday, our view was that the 100% tariff announcement by Trump was a bargaining chip.

> After China's statement last night, we believe the odds of Trump's 100% tariff on China going into effect are extremely low.

"Does nothing, wins" is getting a bit out of hand: they're going back in time and winning 26 hours before they even start.

Lost was a very valuable public service: it inoculated elder millennials against getting too invested into TV shows.

I feel like Airbnb started more on the provider side as "fuck you landlord/local government I'll sublet if I want and you won't catch me" more than a fuck you to hotels specifically. Any "fuck you hotels" on the customer side was mostly on the price side - Airbnb was indeed cheaper when it was a bed, a towel and a plate in someone's flat rather than a specially-bought and renovated property where you never see the host except to pick up a key. Maybe the "meet real new people" thing had some legs at first for some gregarious types, but it clearly wasn't that important since it's mostly gone now. It bootstrapped into a whole property market thing when it turned out to be outrageously profitable in tourist areas and created a whole new supply of holiday let properties at the expense of local residential supply.

Hotels/Booking.com are more of a fuck you to travel agents and/or opaque or fragmented hotel pricing, since they don't provide an alternative to the hotel itself.

The problem is the GVCS is already bumping against the OSHW curse even for the smallest items: replicating one unit costs real money in materials and processing and if you fuck up, a new version costs real money too. But in the last 15 years, the niche is shrinking - you can get a decent new doohickey from China whereas previously you would have to hope for an ex-first-world or ex-Soviet cast-off.

A 500 million glassworks or foundry is just that times a million (literally). And technology has never stopped - no one would spend a hundreds of millions to build a new plant on a 20-year old design.

Sell your industry to private equity, this is what happens. Someone who values it will take it up. Many such cases.

There are some attempts at things like this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs

They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldings and stampings, then eventually lock down spares (or just don't bother).

The open source option basically only be worse (but maybe more repairable) and/or more expensive than the alternatives, except when there is no alternative in the market. And China is providing so much mid-grade affordable and fairly functional stuff there often is an alternative even in the most isolated places. In 1980, getting a decent lathe in some town in, say, Angola might have been basically impossible. Now, it's still not cheap, but it's not completely impractical. If you can get bearings and induction-hardened shafts you'd need to DIY, you can get the whole thing, and maybe even cheaper.

It's a bit depressing, because of course I want to see the world flooded with high-quality, modular, very standardised, re-usable, repairable, hackable items, but that approach has a limited market in reality.

Any consumer trinket that is made from recycled plastic is more or less pointless. At most, you get one more cycle out of that little bit of plastic. Better than nothing, sure, I guess, as long as your thing actually needed to be plastic. Worth all the back-pats and preening website copy? No.

There are practical ways to use less plastic (or any material really):

* Don't sell disposable shit

* Don't sell fragile shit that breaks quickly in the first place

* This often means more things out of metal, or at least thicker plastic. It may mean you need to use a screw to close the case rather than welding it shut or using plastic tabs that snap

* Use materials and designs can can be repaired using standard parts and materials

* Provide spares for less than the cost of replacing the whole damn thing

* And on and on

If your aim is to sequestrate existing plastic to keep it out of the environment, burn it, landfill it or maybe make it into bulk building materials and hide safely it in a non-wearing building (i.e. not a road surface) for 100 years. Putting it back out into the world in a less recyclable form (a common example: cheap and shit fleece jackets proudly made from 50 bottles or whatever - now that's microplastic fibres and definitely will not be recycled ever again) just defers it a couple of years. Especially if the thing you made from plastic didn't even need to be plastic.

In any country? Yes. For example, Luxembourg (1200km² of farmland, 677,000 people).

In most countries: not really. And not to the extent that meat farming does, which is land-use broadly considered to be acceptable. One cow needs from under 1 to to 8 acres depending on how good the land is, and grazed land is roughly double cropland in the US. One cow produces roughly 10 people's beef intake in the US. Not to mention much of the cropland is already used for biofuel: diverting 60 million acres of arable land for energy is already a thing the US does. That 60 million acres of solar could produce 5 times current US electrical consumption.

One acre of solar makes roughly 30 US households (not people) of energy. Say 5-10 if you also need to cover current fossil fuel heating and transport. And obviously the energy mix won't be 100% solar.

So, on the face of it, it doesn't seem that solar power is an especially inefficient or wasteful use of land in most cases compared to other uses generally considered reasonable. And it also doesn't (further) damage land like intensive farming does. Whereas clearing natural land for solar could be more damaging.

Solar on roofs is not great in terms of coverage and is inefficient in terms of operational costs. Yes, the land was already used, so it's better then nothing and you can probably more or less recoup the house, so it's economical for the people who live there and the more the better. But you will still need to power denser housing and increasingly-electrified industry and transport.

Urban sprawl in the US is big, but still the US is only 3% urban. Even the UK, which is much denser is 8%. Farmland is far and away the biggest land user in most places.

It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has people there, the costs and losses of getting energy from Mexico to Iowa may outweigh much of the advantages for quite some time.

Assuming solar isn't displaced by something else, one day we'll presumably see highly insolated areas exporting power over huge interconnects, but for now, fitting a panel basically anywhere is still better than not fitting it at all.

The figures are, if anything, an underestimate.

An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right.

One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newest F-150s do an atrocious 18 mpg in real usage, so you need nearly 1500 gallons to go 25,000 miles. So this figure is presumably ignoring the non-ethanol content of the fuel, which is most of it.

> Picture of ploughed fields

We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved.

Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way.

Compared to what was there before (often forest), a gigantic monocrop industrial field is about as ecologically friendly as a car park. And the car park won't dump fertiliser into the water courses either.

Theoretically, with enough cheap renewable energy, synthetic hydrocarbons could fuel the war machine.

It would need possibly big, vulnerable plants to refine, but so does jet fuel and diesel now.

Adding that much electrical capacity is a civilisational task, but an electrical "JP-8 at home" plant in theory is a good security asset, especially for countries with poor oil supply.

That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended.

A handpicked team of professional astronauts on an interstellar mission being a bunch of complete incompetents over and over again for plot convenience is the real headscratcher that eventually makes it feel like the plot is an afterthought and makes you disengage from the film as a story rather then just pretty pictures.

It's a pattern you see a lot especially in sci-fi and action, and it's annoying because it's not like you couldn't have the glossy visuals or set-pieces if you also had coherent plots.