laurencerowe

Wero sounds similar to the US Zelle system but the big reason for that to exist in the first place is that bank account numbers are not safe to share in the US since they can be used to pull payments so there was never an option for easily transferring money to friends and family other than writing a cheque.

In the UK and Europe I could just share my bank account number or IBAN and make payments through online banking since the late 1990s (though in the UK they only became instant in 2008.) So Wero sounds like a nice convenience but much less of a game changer.

It will be interesting to see if it manages to expand to goods and services since the EU strictly regulates the fees Visa and Mastercard can charge there so there is less incentive to switch than in some other countries.

I think that’s probably important in some places. I don’t know how important it is generally though.

> Running a single heatpump waterheater is the equivalent of not driving your car, annually, according to TVA (in carbon footprint).

This seems a lot but for utilities which still have coal plants it seems accurate if the reduced demand allows them to close the coal plant down.

A typical car emits 4.6 tonnes CO2 per year. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

Heat pump saves around 3,760 kWh per year. https://www.energystar.gov/products/heat_pump_water_heaters/...

Coal emits 1.02 tonne CO2/MWh = 3.8 tonnes CO2 per year savings from the heat pump. Natural gas emits 0.44 tonne CO2/MWh = 1.65 tonne CO2. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48296

That's a pretty substantial saving which will kick in when the next administration reverses Trump's absurd orders to keep existing coal plants open.

> The “DeepSeek moment” comparison is a bit hyperbolic, but the underlying point holds. If sodium-ion can deliver 15,000+ cycles at a fraction of lithium’s raw material cost, it could fundamentally reshape the economics of grid-scale storage. That matters enormously for the energy transition — cheap, long-lasting stationary storage is arguably the single biggest bottleneck to scaling renewable energy. We’ll be watching closely to see if CATL can actually deliver at this scale, but the commitment from HyperStrong suggests the technology is no longer a research project. It’s a product.

This is great to see but LFP cells are already so cheap this will likely be more of an incremental improvement than a fundamental reshaping of the economics of grid scale storage.

Average costs of a new utility scale system are around $125/kWh of which $75/kWh is equipment of which $40/kWh is the LFP cells. [1] This brings cell cost down by over 50% to $19/kWh [2] but that only reduces equipment costs by a bit over 25% and total capital costs by 17%.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

[2] https://www.circularbusinessreview.com/catls-19-kwh-sodium-i...

New batteries have gotten so cheap it likely makes reuse of used batteries uneconomic.

Average costs of a new utility scale system are around $125/kWh of which $75/kWh is equipment of which $40/kWh is the LFP cells.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

Existing batteries used in cars usually have more expensive NMC chemistries. Their nickel and cadmium are worth about $30/kWh alone. They’re possibly worth more recycled for their constituent metals than reused for grid storage.

This is not possible since it is ambiguous. It is impossible to parse “http://127.0.0.1:gopher/“ since that would be valid as either “scheme://user:host/“ or “scheme://host:portname/“.

“http://127.0.0.1:70/“ is unambiguous since 70 is not a valid host.

FWIw I’ve had no problems with smells from our Ubbi Steel diaper pail which uses regular garbage bags. (Do use thicker bags though.)

These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038.

Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.

That ignores operating costs and battery costs are falling fast and your assumptions seem overly pessimistic. A 2025 project in Italy came out at $120/kWh made up of $70/kWh in equipment and $50/kWh in engineering and grid connection costs. (The grid connection will still be good and concrete pads can be reused so replacing after 20 years will cost less even before price drops in equipment.)

Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].

With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].

So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/02/lessons-from-france...

Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter.

Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.

Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.

Googling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3].

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope...

[2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-...

[3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...

Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.

Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.

Absolutely fascinating. Now watching some of the others in the series.

This is nonsense, heat pumps are more efficient at smaller temperature differentials. I suspect we don't see them much in San Francisco only because there is so little need for heating and cooling the potential savings are smaller.

Solar is surprisingly useful in the UK since it is anti-correlated with wind power, the UK's largest electricity source.

Solar peaked at 42% of UK electricity generation the other day:

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/24/uk-solar-generation-h...

> What is Canada supposed to do when it's ~6000 km from the equator and might not want to rely on the US for electricity regardless?

Most Canadians live quite far south. Toronto is on the same latitude as France’s Mediterranean coast and they of course have plentiful hydropower. Solar is surprisingly useful even in more northerly places like the UK or Denmark since it is anti-correlated with wind power.

Thanks for sharing! I'm not sure your table under Why Clone is quite correct.

10x 512MB idle VMs should not take 5GB on Firecracker if they are started from snapshots since the 512MB memory file is mmap'ed with MAP_PRIVATE so is copy on write.

Firecracker has diff snapshots: https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker/blob/main...

Very low historical life expectancies are driven by childhood illness and maternal mortality. If you made it to 15 your life expectancy might be somewhere in your late 50s.

There isn’t data for life expectancy at 15 before 1950 for India here (when it was 60) but you can see the it for Sweden back to 1751.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-at-age-15...

Thanks for the clarification. It is completely impossible for WAL mode since that uses shared memory. I must have conflated that with non-WAL mode in my mind.

From https://sqlite.org/wal.html

> All processes using a database must be on the same host computer; WAL does not work over a network filesystem. This is because WAL requires all processes to share a small amount of memory and processes on separate host machines obviously cannot share memory with each other.

1.6GWh for €1B which seems about 5x as expensive as lithium-ion grid scale batteries.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Construction-start-for-world-s-...

As others have pointed out the electricity price is only set by gas when gas is needed, but that's only part of your bill. Renewables now make up over half of UK electricity generation and they are financed through Contracts for Difference which are ultimately paid for by a supplier obligation levy on electricity bills.

When market electricity prices are lower than the strike price for a CfD, electricity users end up paying the difference through the levy and when the market price is higher it reduces the amount levied. So for the renewable portion of UK electricity generation we effectively pay the fixed strike price of the CfD whatever the market price.

SQLite’s locking is not NFS safe so this would not work.

The orange peel is going to decompose and produce CO2 either way. Methane is produced when there is not enough oxygen available while decomposing, which certainly seems a possibility if it's dumped in big piles.

I believe they only offer up to 100mbps. Having 1Gb down from Comcast is definitely useful at times. I just wish I could get more than 30Mb up.

We have an ISP (Monkeybrains) that offers this in SF but it’s only up to 100 Mbps each way.

I recently tried AT&T fixed wireless which runs over the mobile network but it seems too congested to offer high speeds so ended up back with Comcast.

I wish there was a way to achieve that same outcome in my internet backwater of San Francisco.

Nearby blocks have symmetrical GB fibre from Sonic but we only have shity 30MB up from Comcast.

Again opportunity costs. It almost always makes sense to spend the money on the most efficient means to achieve the goal. Money spent paying farmers and ethanol refiners to inefficiently produce 25% lower carbon fuel could instead be directed at other endeavours that for the same cost reduce carbon emissions more.

Opportunity costs essentially. The effort that goes into growing and refining corn ethanol could be better spent on reducing fuel consumption instead of dedicating five acres of land to provide the equivalent net yearly fossil fuel consumption of a single average car using 500 gallons of gasoline to drive about 15000 miles.

Passive house standards first gained popularity in Germany and Scandinavia but it seems the principles have been adapted to quite a wide range of climate zones now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

The problem is corn requires a lot of fossil fuel energy input, mostly in the form of fertiliser. The net energy output is only around 1.3 so an acre of corn produces maybe 400 gallons of gasoline equivalent output requires 300 gallons of gasoline equivalent in energy inputs.

Ethanol from sugarcane makes a lot more sense. Corn ethanol is just a wasteful subsidy for farmers paid for by drivers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance