Interesting perspective. Another view: solar panels on your roof, using your car battery for your house nighttime needs means that during doomsday your energy intensive lifestyle doesn't have to change at all.
You have to be very careful when talking about relative pollutant emissions. Yes, the average EV is heavier and results in more tire wear and tire dust, but note that these particles are much larger (pm10 or larger) than most ICE particulates (~pm2.5). Heavier particles fall out of the air much faster and don't get stuck in the bottom of lungs. Overall pm2.5 particles are far more harmful to human health once inhaled as well.
Regarding maintenance, road wear is a high order function with axle weight - so trucks and weathering contribute the vast majority of wear. So light duty cars getting a bit heavier won't make much difference, and regulations already bound axle weights, so it won't be increasing for EV heavy duty vehicles.
This all being said, the average American city and suburb suck and totally need to be reorganized around literally anything except the automobile. Visiting the Netherlands just made me sad...thinking this is how nice cities can be. I imagine the mental health benefits of such city planning could even outweigh the environmental ones.
Anecdotally from my experience in CA, my friends have been in a total of 6 crashes and not a single other driver was insured. Makes sense why my un/underinsured driver line item on my car insurance is ~40% of the total.
"Identity theft" as a term has always struck me as a terrible description of what is happening. A bank falsely reporting to a credit agency that I am a debtor (when a criminal hands over some exclusively public information about me to get credit) seems like a slam-dunk definition of defamation. It meets the 4-part definition I'm aware of with (1) statement of fact (2) made to a 3rd party that (3) harms the reputation of the plaintiff while (4) acting negligently. (4) is of course the hardest to prove, but surely if all the information a bank asks to verify identity is in the public domain, that seems pretty clear to me.
This is nothing special - at current bitcoin prices, I don't see how a miner could be profitable with electricity above $100/MWh. They're shutting down (for peak hours) because it's not economic to keep running. The regulator asking for conservation is just window dressing.
There is a fundamental physics limit at play here: the diffraction limit is linear with the aperture diameter and gives an upper bound on the resolution of a telescope. Having a longer exposure doesn't help - that's for resolving very faint objects (more light collected -> higher signal-to-noise). To resolve a building-sized object on an exoplanet, regardless of its intensity, we'd need a telescope the size of the solar system. There are some proposals to use the gravitational lensing of our sun to create such a telescope, but those projects are decades at least from implementation.
The true irony is when we take the fossil-fueled crops and turn them back to energy with efficiency that barely breaks even, depending on your assumptions.
There's some confusion here - GP was arguing against time-of-use rates. I wanted to highlight the irrationality of that argument. Rather I should have written "Another way to think about [your proposal against TOU] is..."
Another way to think about this is that people who are cost conscious cannot adjust their schedules to save money. They're forced to pay rates rates that aren't just daily average rates, they're averages weighted based on when customers without price signal incentives would like to use energy. If you want to help the old lady down the street, removing this cost signal has to be one of the most expensive ways possible.
You have to be careful what you ask for - I certainly like pretty pictures myself, but one of the reasons that Juno is so successful as a scientific mission is because it was kept to the barebones and managed scope so aggressively. With Juno ($1B for an outer planets mission) we got Flagship mission-quality science for a New Frontiers price. There's a good interview with Mark Wolverton on Planetary Radio that discusses how this happened.
I used to feel similarly about audio but have figured out the right settings for acceleration (1.2-1.4x) and silence trimming in pocketcasts to increase the informational content and keep it interesting - it works for me now. (that and finding the most interesting content for me)
I've had good experiences using Freetaxusa for several years. This year, however, I discovered that they don't support ISO exercise-and-hold behavior. They advertise support for form 6251 but don't allow you to enter anything in line 2i (or any lines not directly supported). Made a real mess.
It's actually not crazy on Ingenuity: vacuum really isn't an issue for most chips, the epoxy packages are totally okay from 0-1atm. The temperatures are also kept benign - One of the advantages of being in a near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere is that heat transfer is very slow. Ingenuity keeps to a fairly narrow (-20 to 60C iirc) temperature range even without substantial power spent on heaters. It gets warm during a heat-soak event after flying, and on the cold side, it doesn't get below the temps allowed for the li-ion battery. Note that it isn't designed to survive a bad martian winter, though this is mostly due to decreased power generation rather than lower temperatures.
I wonder if we need something like the services NREL performs for solar cells - a standardized test suite that labs/companies can bring their research cells to be tested.
Yes, but less so. Much of the chemical energy and ignition potential is removed by discharging the battery, but many of the remaining components (electrolyte as an example) are still flammable.
I think the biggest contributor is shrinking the size of the engineering effort. The cost scaling curve for large infrastructure projects is often not beneficial - the idea is that a (50%) smaller reactor requires substantially smaller containment, on-site development, etc, which should reduce costs by far more than 50%. More parts can be build in a factory rather than on-site, and higher unit volumes can support a learning curve.
I just moved into a house where the contractor thought you could daisy chain ethernet like a standard phone line. The ports at the end of the chain did work amazingly, but unsurprisingly, the ones in the middle with tens of feet of unterminated stubs... Didn't.
Sure, the NRC is not approving new reactor designs, and this is a real problem. One of the quoted articles cites the cost decline in South Korean nuclear as the example that regulations matter. Missing is the context that nuclear power in SK has been moving in the opposite direction in cost in the past 15 years - quickly. Nuclear projects all around the world are over budget and behind schedule; the subsidies required to get them built keep increasing. Even China hasn't started construction of a new commercial reactor since 2016. The costs of GenIII+ designs just seem uncontrollable. I certainly do hope that GenIV designs can address these costs and trends - and an awful regulatory environment certainly makes this tough - but I have a hard time seeing how the costs can come down enough to make nuclear economically feasible beyond particular niches.
I haven't, personally, though there is always a chance that I have had low rates of failures that I haven't noticed.
Said personal domain is a .hk domain though, and I have had an issue where US defense-contractor type domains silently block all email from China or China adjacent domains or IP blocks.
I use a personal Gmail account and my custom domain hosted on zoho (for free) . Each user on the custom/zoho redirects all the mail to Gmail. Gmail is configured to default use the zoho smtp server as the outbound. This has worked great for me for years. When my parents' custom domain needs to be migrated shortly, I expect to set them up with the same thing.
The major issue is the energy storage, not the power plant itself. The penalty of the battery mass scales far worse than a tank holding very energy dense rocket propellant.
DPRK certainly has strategic ICBM's that currently threaten the West Coast. Hwasong-14/KN20 tested in 2017 could do it, and more recent developments are adding payload (so you can mirv) and a bit more range to hit the rest of the US. Once you have enough payloads to overwhelm THAAD, which isn't too difficult considering the ~$1B/interceptor price tag, it's pretty clear that given reasonable numbers of existing DPRK capabilities, they could successfully certainly land a nuke in Anchorage, Seattle, perhaps LA.
They're actually moving their focus from strategic missiles to tactical nuclear missiles now (despite ongoing strategic development). KJU has been discussing his desires for large numbers of tactical nuclear weapons as part of the DPRK strategy, and they're making lots of progress in that direction.
My father used to fly with the RAF - he told me that old pilots who were about to lose their licenses due to age/health used to 'go out with a bang' flying under a bridge rather than quietly aging out of their license. IIRC, Tower Bridge in London was a favorite. This was decades ago, but I'm curious if the motivations were similar here.
Diffusion is definitely not sufficient--natural convection is usually sufficient to do this on earth, but gravity is a requirement for most natural air convection.
Interestingly, a surprisingly large percentage of a spacecraft's power draw is spent just on air circulation (other conditioning adds as well).
I dealt with USB-C hell when I was setting up my new office. BYO (choose your own) laptops meant that the USB-C ports on each employee's laptop had different capabilities (alt mode for DP 2-lanes? 4-lanes? HDMI? etc...) and the same for monitors and docks.
I got about half way through designing this device (PCBs went out, firmware never written), intending it mostly for identifying sources and sinks before I had largely solved the office's problems and my needs faded.
If there's collective interest, I could get back at it to finish the job.
Where do you see that vaccinations increased after FDA approval (Aug 23)? I'm looking at the NYTimes vaccine dashboard and don't see any meaningful spike after that date.