What is specifically stopping Uber from providing an autonomous driver service so hard to warrant being classified as a pipedream event?
55 karma · joined January 24, 2023
"You want A game or you want THE game?"
Maybe add a slide showing how much concentrated toward the very best game revenues are.
We can convert one in the other, at different conversion rates granted, but still.
Energy input cost is a line in every company spreadsheet, it can block or allow companies to succeed. Today this line is kept artificially low because we base our economies on a very exothermic open loop CH to CO. Closing this loop is not an option because basic thermodynamics, which is the very logic behind carbon removal.
We have to stop entering this path as much as possible.
We will always, 100% of the times, expend more energy to reverse a irreversible process than we could possible extract from this irreversible process.
This statement is valid regardless of the path chosen.
Which naturally spawns the argument 'let's not reverse it, let's do CH to CO to Cx, all we have to do is find x'.
The problem is this is not valid because we burn a lot of fuel.
Even if we found x, it would not be enough to sustain our rate of carbon emissions. In 2022 the world consumed 5.8*10^12 liters of crude oil.
So it would be necessary to include y. And z. Etc until n.
Inevitably including a regeneration step Cn + H to CH + n.
Now the path looks like:
CH -> CO -> Cx -> Cy -> (...) -> Cn -> CH
Which is a closed loop, meaning net power loss. With 100% confidence.
Maybe the one who oxidizes CH pays the bill to remove the CO2 emitted. Is it even possible to put such measure worldwide? Logistics would suddenly be prohibitively expensive for all but the most valuable products per weight/volume. Globalization is addicted to fossil fuels.
Well, that is literally all we did and build and invest in the last century or so. The very power grid of the world is based on carbon fuels. We can't run our carbon removal machinery on dirty power or we would be emitting more than we could possible remove.
It becomes 100% clear the winning strategy is not removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is replacing all machines and appliances that burn carbon. Worldwide.
Not all are possible, ofc. But a stove ayy.
By simple thermodynamics we can be 100%, not 99%, 100% sure, that the energetic cost of removing CO2 from the freaking atmosphere is higher than the benefit of putting it there in the first place.
Totally different logistics requirements
Can this scale up? Or is this a small scale only solution?
Transportation. How much energy would a truck be able to move? How does it compare to a tank truck? Weight is absolutely relevant here.
Also, production. Consider that reducing iron is measured by millions of tons per year per plant, and right now, it's done burning it with plain old coal.
Seems very odd to me the subtitle of the news is 'carbon free fuel'. That alone is a massive bullshit indicator, but I digress.
How something that may have a 10% global energy recovery efficiency could beat a pure redox power storage solution? This question has been avoided so far.
Crust iron is all oxide. Fe at 5% average. In some locations obviously more concentrated up to 90% ore. Not all sites are viable for mining, and this is very important to understand. Just because there is plenty of iron out there doesn't mean all of it is commercial grade.
This means energy input to turn iron oxide into iron, which the article claims could be used as fuel and/or long term energy storage.
-Fuel I don't believe for a second.
-Energy storage it's a maybe. It needs to commercially beat plenty of options. Which to me seems unlikely since the path still includes heat and steam engine which would incurr at a cicle loss of at least 50%. And this being conservative etc. Would mean a steam engine operated in a very narrow power band - which would mean a baselevel powerplant not a peaker powerplant. And didn't yet consider other possible losses, as for one, the Fe degradation over time. Energy cycles that count on heat and engine are wasteful. Could this waste be compensated by a much cheaper capex and/or opex relative to Li or similar batteries? That's a big Maybe.
I myself want to believe there is a solution to renewables intermittency. But on this one in particular, I'm quite bearish for the reasons above.
No it's not.
Inside the crust both Si and Al are more common.
There is plenty of Fe, which is all in oxide form. Mining and processing required.
https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4539/12414/0/webview?Expires...
This means it's required infinite energy to reach c speed for any mass.
And c speed is quite slow for space travel.
Just for the fun of it, let's imagine humanity has assembled, in space, an aircraft-carrier sized vessel, fully equipped to function and nurture the little humans living inside of it.
Weight: 100 ktons.
Power is infinite ok, because badly rewarded nerds discovered new physics. Good for them they are now immortals of human history.
With Lorentz kinetic energy equation, one can estimate the kinect energy this vessel would have while traveling at say, 1% of the speed of light.
Energy: 4.5*10^20 J.
This is about two thirds of the total energy Earth receives from the sun in one hour. Or close enough to the energy the world consumed in 2017.
Now we have humans inside a vessel hurdling through space at 0.01 c, in addition to the pre-existing humans in a planet swirling through space. But there is a problem! It would take 424 years to reach the nearest star system. So we need to go faster and maybe break things. Hopefully not the hull, though.
F*** it let's go 0.5 c and reach Andromeda in about 9 years - long enough to write a book.
Energy: 1.4*10^24 J.
That's 3x the energy released by the Chicxulub meteor impact. Or 30+ times the 2003 world's total fossil fuel reserves.
Which raises the question what is the fuel being used?
Doesn't matter ok because new physics, we are transforming mass literally in energy no constraints 100% efficiency lol.
By e=mc^2 that fuel would weight - at least - 14.9 ktons.
There is margin for error, since the vessel would be shedding mass, and getting lighter. That would allow engineering to run the global process at 80% efficiency, which is a very realistic metric and maybe miss a turn or two on the way to the neighboring star.
Returns not included.
International institutions such as the Bank of International Settlements have recognized PIX as a successful case:
https://www.bis.org/publ/bisbull52.htm
A similar service has been prepared for years, and US Federal Reserve will launch FedNow this July:
In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoying a really nice service.
Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.
The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.
BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of career civil servants hired rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. They answer to the government, not a political party.
The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term for the nine members of the BCB’s Board of Governors that does not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the dismissal of the Board’s members.
The personal information and the information related to the operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
All transactions take place through digitally signed messages that travel in encrypted form.
In Brazil it is called PIX, and was implemented in 2020. Last month it has processed more than 3 million operations.
Works 24/7, 0 fees to end users, low cost for business. IMO, going cashless is not an "if", it is a "when".
It's cheaper to be dirty yet we still take showers. Maybe it's time to clean the supply chains instead of blaming the consumers.
Yikes.
Criticism The Socialist Worker argues that it is a myth used to prevent wage increases.[6] Tribune magazine also sees the concept as rhetoric intended to hold down worker wages.[7]
Milton Friedman criticised the concept of wage-price spirals, arguing "It's the external manifestation of inflation, but not its source... the inflation arises from one and only one reason: an increase in a quantity of money."[8] Wage-price spirals will break naturally if the quantity of money is not increased, albeit in the meanwhile "there will for a time be a continuation of inflation" as well as "some measure of recession and unemployment".[8]
In a high inflation economy, salaries lags behind prices increases.
This is because revenue of companies typically follow inflation indexes with a much shorter delay.
First the workers need to feel they are getting shafted and this takes time. Like, first they burn through savings, then they see news 'inflation double digits', then they see pay increase in single digits and this takes 1~2 years. Then they feel a reduction in quality of life. Then they negotiate adjustment and if companies refuses sometimes they strike, sometimes they leave for another job, sometimes they take the shaft.
On a wide scale, the reduction of purchasing power causes the demand for non essential goods to drop massively, while the demand for essential goods remains stable. The reason for this is simple: people cut the luxury if they have been shafted at their job. But they can't cut essential goods.
So it's better to be a company that sells essentials goods in a high inflation scenario eg: oil and gas, meaning people can't cut you from their budget.