To me, the most interesting aspect of Stratolaunch is the flexibility enabled by positioning your "launch pad" at just the right place. But I don't know if that will be enough to sustain them in the current market. A lot has changed since they started working on this project, with SpaceX and Rocket Lab both providing "budget" launch services, not to mention Blue Origin waiting in the wings. It will be interesting to see how/if they manage to find their niche.
What I've heard is that not enough of Maxwell's shareholders have signed onto the deal yet to pass the 50% threshold. And since TSLA stock has taken a beating recently, they may have to renegotiate.
Sorry, I fudged the numbers a bit because my Volt is a 2013, before the version-2 upgrade in 2016. You're right, the newer range is 53 mi, not 55, though the actual mileage you get depends on the temperature outdoors and how you drive. I'm pretty sure the curb weight of the first-gen Volt is 3700 lbs, but it could be that Google gave me bogus info (I didn't dig very deep). As for the mileage, I've taken several long trips already in the couple of months I've had the car, and I'm getting around 38 mpg, which is (IIRC) what they advertised for it.
Even most PHEV automobiles have very little all-electric range. The car that comes closest to the description in TFS is the Chevy Volt, with 55 mi EV range plus unlimited gas-powered range at ~38 mpg, which is pretty good mileage for a car that weighs 3700 lbs. It's the only PHEV I'm aware of that can truly function as 100% EV or 100% ICE -- If you never plug it in, it functions just like an ICE car; if you never fuel it, if functions just like a pure EV. Most (if not all) of the other PHEVs have such short all-electric range that they're essentially useless as a pure EV. (There may be some new ones coming out that I'm not aware of.)
Having just bought a used Volt myself recently, the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am with the engineering. (It's a shame they're about to stop making them, but I chalk that up to GM's inept marketing.) Seems to me they could just up-scale the Volt's drive train to semi-tractor size, and they'd have a pretty compelling product.
I was never in it for the money before, but I'd like to at least have that option. In particular, I was PO'd because they took away something I already had. Originally, anyone could get monetized, but they wouldn't start paying out until you earned your first $100. I had just barely gotten started down that path when they pulled the rug out. If I'd applied a few months earlier, I might have gotten grandfathered-in before they changed the rules.
In the long run it doesn't matter that much. If I ever hope to earn much of anything from YouTube, I'll need way more than 1k subscribers anyway. It's just the principle that's annoying... they're putting up unnecessary hurdles. From their POV, they might argue that it's too much hassle to keep track of all those 43-cent accounts. To which my reply would be: "Yeah, you'd probably need a computer to keep track of all that."
You just don't understand the challenges of a small business
Sorry if my imprecise use of language led you to believe I was trying to run a "small business" on my YouTube channel. If it helps, feel free to substitute the phrase "screw over" with any of the following: vex; miff; annoy; frustrate; or bebother.
LOL, yup... "random crap" is a pretty fair description of the 19 (I just counted them) videos I've uploaded in the last seven years. What I should have said was that I'm still going to put some actual work into it one of these days...;-)
That said, I agree with your assessment for the most part. But I figure if I can get four times as many subscribers as videos on my channel without even trying, it might be worth putting a little effort into it, and see what happens.
Yeah, they keep moving the goalposts just when I get to the 5-yard line. I had just gotten monetized a couple of years ago, and had racked up a whole 43 cents in revenue, when they changed the rules so you needed 10k views. Some time later, just as I was getting close to 10k views, they changed it again, so now you need 1000 subscribers (I currently have 76). Meanwhile, my analytics page still shows that 43 cents of revenue... along with 28k views and 5k hours of view time.
I'll keep working on it for now, but if they screw me over again I might have to bail out.
If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
This seems like an opportunity for cement manufacturers to make some extra money, along with great PR for their eco-friendly carbon capture. So why aren't they doing it yet? If Carbon Engineering claims they can produce fuel at a cost that's comparable to US gasoline, then it would almost certainly be a lot cheaper with a concentrated source of CO2.
Yes. 1Q19 demand was pulled into 4Q18, and at the moment they still have thousands of units on ships in transit to China and Europe, effectively pushing those deliveries into 2Q19. So last quarter in particular was a low point in deliveries.
Yes, exactly. Even as Cringely publishes this piece, Tesla is racking up billions of miles worth of real-world data to train their AP system. But all we hear about in the news is the occasional accident or near-miss, we don't hear about all those safe miles... nor are these incidents put in context of how much safer the autopilot is than a human driver in most circumstances.
That said, however, I think the "hype" Cringely's talking about is that true Level-5 autonomy that allows driverless taxis long-haul trucks. That really is an open question which, kinda like fusion energy, always seems to be "just a few years" in the future. Tesla is making great strides, for sure, but even the Tesla owners I'm familiar with don't think it's Level-5 "ready" yet.
Wow, you gave it a whole ten seconds. Jeezuz, don't strain yourself, man!
Seriously though, if the intro doesn't appeal to you, it might be worth having a peek at one or two of the others, before writing off the entire series. But if it's not to your taste, I guess that's just the way it goes.
In order to avoid looking foolish, it would be a good idea to familiarize oneself with the work of Peter Hadfield, aka Potholer54. He knocks down the common myths and misconceptions on both sides of the issue, often with good humor, and always with peer-reviewed science. Well worth the time.
Transit is infrastructure, so the illusion is in commercial expectations.
Private companies can do just fine, as long as there is competition and reasonable gov't regulation. Here in Taipei, public transit is pretty awesome. There are multiple private bus companies, but they all use a common price scheme set by the gov't. They have RFID cards which can be used for buses and the MRT, and the card can also function as a cash-storage device, and can be used to buy stuff at any convenience store. With an additional registration process (essentially, they want your email address) the card can also be used to access the local bicycle-sharing program.
On top of that, taxis are ubiquitous and cheap -- again, privately run, but heavily regulated -- with a mix of large fleets and self-employed owner-operators. So even when the buses quit running (around 11pm) you can still get home from the pub at a very reasonable cost. I've never owned a car here, but I even gave up the motorcycle about 8~10 years ago (gave it to one of my employees) because I never used it, and it was always a hassle to find parking. Public transit is just too easy here.
So, no, I don't think that "commercial expectations" necessarily prevent the delivery of excellent service to the public. Nor do I think that gov't regulation is too burdensome on private enterprise.The same half-dozen bus companies have been serving Taipei since I first came here in 1990, and they're all still in business, and seem to be doing just fine, judging by how well they maintain and upgrade their buses.
This battle over funding the NYC subway has been brewing for quite a while, with Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo each pointing fingers at the other. And it was a big issue in the Dems' gubernatorial primary recently, as Cynthia Nixon accused Cuomo of failing to spend money that was appropriated (or something like that...) I don't know much about the NYC situation, but I'm quite certain that public transit is cool, because I use it every day.
Amory Lovins, a well-known advocate of renewable energy, likes to tell the story of how the whales were saved from extinction in the mid-1800s by "profit maximizing capitalists" who brought kerosene to market, which rapidly wrecked the market for whale oil. This is the same story... renewables are simply getting to be cheaper than fossil fuels now, and the trend is only going to continue as technology improves and fossil fuels become harder to extract.
Musk talked about this project in an interview last week. He talks about how surprisingly little innovation has occurred in tunneling technology lately. Everything is still running on diesel power, requiring massive infrastructure to feed fresh air to the operation. In early talks with experts, he asked if they were limited by power or by heat, and they didn't have an answer.
So that's a big part of the reason why he started the Boring Company in the first place. He not only had the selfish motivation to alleviate his own commuting woes, he also found an industry ripe for disruption. Just switching from diesel to electric (an area in which he has some expertise) they can greatly reduce the cost, and that's just the first step in a longer plan.
Some of both, obviously, but more of the latter IMHO. The guy is under a lot of stress lately, and he's letting his inner demons spill out via Twitter occasionally, leading to some serious consequences for himself and his companies (and shareholders).
Ironically, this is all happening just as Tesla is ramping up Model 3 production to break-even level, where they'll be able to start posting legitimate GAAP profits. If he can just contain his demons for a few more weeks, Tesla will be in a much better position, and the short-sellers will be less of a concern.
Running a little experimental reactor for a couple years tells you nothing about the commercial viability let alone safety.
Pardon my French: horseshit. Obviously we build smaller ones on the way toward building bigger ones -- whether it be nukes or jets or whatever -- it's called engineering.
One of the biggest problems with "molten salt" or liquid sodium reactors is that if the reaction vessel holding this mix of highly radioactive sodium and uranium mixture is every directly exposed to water or oxygen it will explode, burn and fill the atmosphere with a highly radioactive cloud of burning sodium which will then rain down on the surrounding countryside
You seem to be conflating molten salt with molten sodium. They are completely different. Sodium by itself is highly reactive, whereas sodium chloride (though somewhat corrosive) is quite stable. If you hit a LFTR with a bunker-buster bomb, it would indeed spray radioactive molten salt around the countryside. But it would rapidly solidify and fall to the ground, where it would be easy to find with a geiger counter. (Unlike radioactive steam which just floats away...)
you have to do stuff like the current Georgia reactor under construction and spend $20 Billion building a pressure vessel that can survey tidal waves and earthquakes
The reason for that pressure vessel is because water boils at 100C, and nuclear reactors are just getting warmed up around 400C. So a water-cooled reactor needs plumbing that can handle 150 atmospheres of pressure, just so they can run the reactor at the barely efficient temperature of 300C. But since FLiBe doesn't even melt until 360C (and doesn't boil until well over 1400C) you have a very heat-dense material that can both transport your fuel (enabling on-the-fly reprocessing) and cool your reactor over a broad range of heat regimes... and it does all this at ambient pressure. So you don't need that $20B pressure vessel in the first place.
Watch the video I linked above, it will explain all this in greater detail, and save me the trouble of writing it.
Thanks for the link! I've been a fan of Sorensen's for many years, but I didn't know he was working on using SNF now too. I don't know enough about TransAtomic's approach to critique it, but your points all make sense to me. My only nitpick would be the reason why molten salt is the enabling factor in the efficiency gains: your argument is that salts don't mind getting smacked around in the neutron flux (they remain chemically stable); whereas I would say the key factor is that liquids are more chemically miscible than solids... this is what allows the fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, which in turn allows all (or nearly all) of the fuel to be burned while waste products are continually removed. Both of these aspects are important.
molten salt reactors are a interesting idea but are untested
Molten salt reactors are proven technology. They ran one at Oak Ridge for thousands of hours back in the 1960s. There's a ton of info about this online, such as this lecture from a few years ago about LFTR. The Chinese currently have the most active (and best funded) program in this area. With any luck we might see a commercial product from them in the next few years, which could be a real game changer.
claims two orders of magnitude improvements in anything are probably bullshit
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the 10^2 improvement is largely based on the horrific inefficiency of our current fleet of solid-fuel, water moderated nukes, which is something like 0.7%. The vast majority of this efficiency gain is due to the liquid-fuel design (in this case, molten salt), which allows fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, whereas "traditional" nukes use solid fuel rods which degrade over time, and become unusable long before their energy content is anywhere near used up.
Other molten salt designs are under development, such as LFTR, which have similar claims on improved efficiency. The main difference is that this one (WAMSR) was supposed to be able to burn up existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. Apparently that particular trick turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated.
As for tapes, we have your guys on tape talking about decades of voter fraud.
Citation needed.
Every effort to find evidence of voter fraud has come up with bupkis. Even the recent one appointed by Trump, and helmed by Mr. Voter-Suppression himself, Kris Kobach. All they ever find is a handful of isolated cases, mostly mistakes or misunderstandings (eg: voting in the wrong precinct).
If these "tapes" you refer to actually exist, I think we'd have all heard them by now. Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, here's a video of Paul Weyrich, one of the "godfathers" of modern conservatism, clearly expressing his preference for reducing the number of people who are eligible to vote.
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To me, the most interesting aspect of Stratolaunch is the flexibility enabled by positioning your "launch pad" at just the right place. But I don't know if that will be enough to sustain them in the current market. A lot has changed since they started working on this project, with SpaceX and Rocket Lab both providing "budget" launch services, not to mention Blue Origin waiting in the wings. It will be interesting to see how/if they manage to find their niche.
What I've heard is that not enough of Maxwell's shareholders have signed onto the deal yet to pass the 50% threshold. And since TSLA stock has taken a beating recently, they may have to renegotiate.
Sorry, I fudged the numbers a bit because my Volt is a 2013, before the version-2 upgrade in 2016. You're right, the newer range is 53 mi, not 55, though the actual mileage you get depends on the temperature outdoors and how you drive. I'm pretty sure the curb weight of the first-gen Volt is 3700 lbs, but it could be that Google gave me bogus info (I didn't dig very deep). As for the mileage, I've taken several long trips already in the couple of months I've had the car, and I'm getting around 38 mpg, which is (IIRC) what they advertised for it.
Even most PHEV automobiles have very little all-electric range. The car that comes closest to the description in TFS is the Chevy Volt, with 55 mi EV range plus unlimited gas-powered range at ~38 mpg, which is pretty good mileage for a car that weighs 3700 lbs. It's the only PHEV I'm aware of that can truly function as 100% EV or 100% ICE -- If you never plug it in, it functions just like an ICE car; if you never fuel it, if functions just like a pure EV. Most (if not all) of the other PHEVs have such short all-electric range that they're essentially useless as a pure EV. (There may be some new ones coming out that I'm not aware of.)
Having just bought a used Volt myself recently, the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am with the engineering. (It's a shame they're about to stop making them, but I chalk that up to GM's inept marketing.) Seems to me they could just up-scale the Volt's drive train to semi-tractor size, and they'd have a pretty compelling product.
I was never in it for the money before, but I'd like to at least have that option. In particular, I was PO'd because they took away something I already had. Originally, anyone could get monetized, but they wouldn't start paying out until you earned your first $100. I had just barely gotten started down that path when they pulled the rug out. If I'd applied a few months earlier, I might have gotten grandfathered-in before they changed the rules.
In the long run it doesn't matter that much. If I ever hope to earn much of anything from YouTube, I'll need way more than 1k subscribers anyway. It's just the principle that's annoying... they're putting up unnecessary hurdles. From their POV, they might argue that it's too much hassle to keep track of all those 43-cent accounts. To which my reply would be: "Yeah, you'd probably need a computer to keep track of all that."
You just don't understand the challenges of a small business
Sorry if my imprecise use of language led you to believe I was trying to run a "small business" on my YouTube channel. If it helps, feel free to substitute the phrase "screw over" with any of the following: vex; miff; annoy; frustrate; or bebother.
LOL, yup... "random crap" is a pretty fair description of the 19 (I just counted them) videos I've uploaded in the last seven years. What I should have said was that I'm still going to put some actual work into it one of these days... ;-)
That said, I agree with your assessment for the most part. But I figure if I can get four times as many subscribers as videos on my channel without even trying, it might be worth putting a little effort into it, and see what happens.
Yeah, they keep moving the goalposts just when I get to the 5-yard line. I had just gotten monetized a couple of years ago, and had racked up a whole 43 cents in revenue, when they changed the rules so you needed 10k views. Some time later, just as I was getting close to 10k views, they changed it again, so now you need 1000 subscribers (I currently have 76). Meanwhile, my analytics page still shows that 43 cents of revenue... along with 28k views and 5k hours of view time.
I'll keep working on it for now, but if they screw me over again I might have to bail out.
If you want to make synthetic fuel, why not just build the Fischer-Tropsch plant, and the hydrogen source, next to cement plants and avoid the extra cost and complexity and energy use of extracting it from the very dilute form of air?
This seems like an opportunity for cement manufacturers to make some extra money, along with great PR for their eco-friendly carbon capture. So why aren't they doing it yet? If Carbon Engineering claims they can produce fuel at a cost that's comparable to US gasoline, then it would almost certainly be a lot cheaper with a concentrated source of CO2.
Yes. 1Q19 demand was pulled into 4Q18, and at the moment they still have thousands of units on ships in transit to China and Europe, effectively pushing those deliveries into 2Q19. So last quarter in particular was a low point in deliveries.
I guess the problem is totally solved now. Hurray!
Yes, exactly. Even as Cringely publishes this piece, Tesla is racking up billions of miles worth of real-world data to train their AP system. But all we hear about in the news is the occasional accident or near-miss, we don't hear about all those safe miles... nor are these incidents put in context of how much safer the autopilot is than a human driver in most circumstances.
That said, however, I think the "hype" Cringely's talking about is that true Level-5 autonomy that allows driverless taxis long-haul trucks. That really is an open question which, kinda like fusion energy, always seems to be "just a few years" in the future. Tesla is making great strides, for sure, but even the Tesla owners I'm familiar with don't think it's Level-5 "ready" yet.
Now I'm wondering if this will affect Google Hangouts, Google Drive, and other such amenities...?
Wow, you gave it a whole ten seconds. Jeezuz, don't strain yourself, man!
Seriously though, if the intro doesn't appeal to you, it might be worth having a peek at one or two of the others, before writing off the entire series. But if it's not to your taste, I guess that's just the way it goes.
In order to avoid looking foolish, it would be a good idea to familiarize oneself with the work of Peter Hadfield, aka Potholer54. He knocks down the common myths and misconceptions on both sides of the issue, often with good humor, and always with peer-reviewed science. Well worth the time.
Transit is infrastructure, so the illusion is in commercial expectations.
Private companies can do just fine, as long as there is competition and reasonable gov't regulation. Here in Taipei, public transit is pretty awesome. There are multiple private bus companies, but they all use a common price scheme set by the gov't. They have RFID cards which can be used for buses and the MRT, and the card can also function as a cash-storage device, and can be used to buy stuff at any convenience store. With an additional registration process (essentially, they want your email address) the card can also be used to access the local bicycle-sharing program.
On top of that, taxis are ubiquitous and cheap -- again, privately run, but heavily regulated -- with a mix of large fleets and self-employed owner-operators. So even when the buses quit running (around 11pm) you can still get home from the pub at a very reasonable cost. I've never owned a car here, but I even gave up the motorcycle about 8~10 years ago (gave it to one of my employees) because I never used it, and it was always a hassle to find parking. Public transit is just too easy here.
So, no, I don't think that "commercial expectations" necessarily prevent the delivery of excellent service to the public. Nor do I think that gov't regulation is too burdensome on private enterprise.The same half-dozen bus companies have been serving Taipei since I first came here in 1990, and they're all still in business, and seem to be doing just fine, judging by how well they maintain and upgrade their buses.
This battle over funding the NYC subway has been brewing for quite a while, with Mayor DeBlasio and Governor Cuomo each pointing fingers at the other. And it was a big issue in the Dems' gubernatorial primary recently, as Cynthia Nixon accused Cuomo of failing to spend money that was appropriated (or something like that...) I don't know much about the NYC situation, but I'm quite certain that public transit is cool, because I use it every day.
Amory Lovins, a well-known advocate of renewable energy, likes to tell the story of how the whales were saved from extinction in the mid-1800s by "profit maximizing capitalists" who brought kerosene to market, which rapidly wrecked the market for whale oil. This is the same story... renewables are simply getting to be cheaper than fossil fuels now, and the trend is only going to continue as technology improves and fossil fuels become harder to extract.
Musk talked about this project in an interview last week. He talks about how surprisingly little innovation has occurred in tunneling technology lately. Everything is still running on diesel power, requiring massive infrastructure to feed fresh air to the operation. In early talks with experts, he asked if they were limited by power or by heat, and they didn't have an answer.
So that's a big part of the reason why he started the Boring Company in the first place. He not only had the selfish motivation to alleviate his own commuting woes, he also found an industry ripe for disruption. Just switching from diesel to electric (an area in which he has some expertise) they can greatly reduce the cost, and that's just the first step in a longer plan.
Some of both, obviously, but more of the latter IMHO. The guy is under a lot of stress lately, and he's letting his inner demons spill out via Twitter occasionally, leading to some serious consequences for himself and his companies (and shareholders).
Ironically, this is all happening just as Tesla is ramping up Model 3 production to break-even level, where they'll be able to start posting legitimate GAAP profits. If he can just contain his demons for a few more weeks, Tesla will be in a much better position, and the short-sellers will be less of a concern.
Running a little experimental reactor for a couple years tells you nothing about the commercial viability let alone safety.
Pardon my French: horseshit. Obviously we build smaller ones on the way toward building bigger ones -- whether it be nukes or jets or whatever -- it's called engineering.
One of the biggest problems with "molten salt" or liquid sodium reactors is that if the reaction vessel holding this mix of highly radioactive sodium and uranium mixture is every directly exposed to water or oxygen it will explode, burn and fill the atmosphere with a highly radioactive cloud of burning sodium which will then rain down on the surrounding countryside
You seem to be conflating molten salt with molten sodium. They are completely different. Sodium by itself is highly reactive, whereas sodium chloride (though somewhat corrosive) is quite stable. If you hit a LFTR with a bunker-buster bomb, it would indeed spray radioactive molten salt around the countryside. But it would rapidly solidify and fall to the ground, where it would be easy to find with a geiger counter. (Unlike radioactive steam which just floats away...)
you have to do stuff like the current Georgia reactor under construction and spend $20 Billion building a pressure vessel that can survey tidal waves and earthquakes
The reason for that pressure vessel is because water boils at 100C, and nuclear reactors are just getting warmed up around 400C. So a water-cooled reactor needs plumbing that can handle 150 atmospheres of pressure, just so they can run the reactor at the barely efficient temperature of 300C. But since FLiBe doesn't even melt until 360C (and doesn't boil until well over 1400C) you have a very heat-dense material that can both transport your fuel (enabling on-the-fly reprocessing) and cool your reactor over a broad range of heat regimes... and it does all this at ambient pressure. So you don't need that $20B pressure vessel in the first place.
Watch the video I linked above, it will explain all this in greater detail, and save me the trouble of writing it.
Thanks for the link! I've been a fan of Sorensen's for many years, but I didn't know he was working on using SNF now too. I don't know enough about TransAtomic's approach to critique it, but your points all make sense to me. My only nitpick would be the reason why molten salt is the enabling factor in the efficiency gains: your argument is that salts don't mind getting smacked around in the neutron flux (they remain chemically stable); whereas I would say the key factor is that liquids are more chemically miscible than solids... this is what allows the fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, which in turn allows all (or nearly all) of the fuel to be burned while waste products are continually removed. Both of these aspects are important.
molten salt reactors are a interesting idea but are untested
Molten salt reactors are proven technology. They ran one at Oak Ridge for thousands of hours back in the 1960s. There's a ton of info about this online, such as this lecture from a few years ago about LFTR. The Chinese currently have the most active (and best funded) program in this area. With any luck we might see a commercial product from them in the next few years, which could be a real game changer.
claims two orders of magnitude improvements in anything are probably bullshit
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the 10^2 improvement is largely based on the horrific inefficiency of our current fleet of solid-fuel, water moderated nukes, which is something like 0.7%. The vast majority of this efficiency gain is due to the liquid-fuel design (in this case, molten salt), which allows fuel to be reprocessed on the fly, whereas "traditional" nukes use solid fuel rods which degrade over time, and become unusable long before their energy content is anywhere near used up.
Other molten salt designs are under development, such as LFTR, which have similar claims on improved efficiency. The main difference is that this one (WAMSR) was supposed to be able to burn up existing stockpiles of spent nuclear fuel. Apparently that particular trick turned out to be more difficult than they anticipated.
For every 6 CO2 molecules and Water molecules you put in, you get 1x glucose molecule, and 1x O2 molecule.
Glucose is C6-H12-O6... I'm pretty sure you'd get 6x O2 molecules, not 1x.
As for tapes, we have your guys on tape talking about decades of voter fraud.
Citation needed.
Every effort to find evidence of voter fraud has come up with bupkis. Even the recent one appointed by Trump, and helmed by Mr. Voter-Suppression himself, Kris Kobach. All they ever find is a handful of isolated cases, mostly mistakes or misunderstandings (eg: voting in the wrong precinct).
If these "tapes" you refer to actually exist, I think we'd have all heard them by now. Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, here's a video of Paul Weyrich, one of the "godfathers" of modern conservatism, clearly expressing his preference for reducing the number of people who are eligible to vote.