There is no way that most developing countries have the technical expertise to build or maintain massive solar or wind farms or the money to replace millions of solar panels when they reach EOL in 20-30 years.
You have a peculiar notion about how much power Africans use right now. They haven't been buying the literal billions of electrical appliances and devices that the developed world has bought in the last century. They have no use for massive anything. Africans are currently going from zero light bulbs to one light bulb. It's a huge step up in what it enables, but it is not a big step. And the light bulb they're connecting to it is LED. For that sort of power draw, there effectively is no EOL for a solar panel. The panels being deployed to Africa today (and everywhere else) will still be generating 80% of their original capacity in 20 years, and panel degradation tends to level off in the technologies in use today, so in 30 years those panels will still be producing something close to 80%. Same for 40 years and 50 years.
Africa will be interested in deploying moar power when Africa has moar appliances, which is not something that is going to happen quickly. Outside of South Africa and select enclaves of warlords, Africa is where the US was 150 years ago. There's power in cities, not very widespread even there, and nothing anywhere else. Africa has to actually develop before there's much demand for electricity, and if we are all exceedingly fortunate, they won't have the benefit of having the only infrastructure undamaged by a world war to help themselves. So it's going to take time.
So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load? It'll only make it harder later if they don't. It is up to champions of renewable energy to SHOW that they can.
For residential base load they certainly can. Otherwise this or this wouldn't be a thing. For commercial base load, that will depend on whether or not the required amount of uninterruptible heavy industrial processes exceeds the amount of available hydro power backed by the usual wind and photovoltaic. Given the size of the list of, for instance, wafer manufacturers, this seems at least ball park possible. Figuring out an alternative process for manufacturing cement will probably be tricky, since powdered coal kilns are just so effective, but maybe biogas can hack it. Heavy industry will be the last thing to switch over, and maybe it never will. There's always fission.
I see the point for youtube as everyone and his dog upload stuff there without giving any thought to copyrights and/or compensation (at least ContentID and monetizing has been added as an afterthought)
This is the part that Slashdot has weirdly forgotten. YouTube has licenses and pays for everything! They even complained about how hard it was to get all the required contracts back in 2006, but they did it. So yes, back in the misty ancient past, YouTube was full of infringing works. They have licenses and pay royalties for everything now, thanks to ContentID. Trent is whining about something completely irrelevant.
Could ants detect signs of human civilization from their ant hill in the forest? Probably not, but this doesn't change the fact that human civilization exists, and side from occasional lawn extermination are largely unconcerned with ants. We are not contacted because our civilization is likely not at all unique and not at all interesting to entities capable of contacting us.
We are concerned with ants. We study them. We build ant-farms. We use them in research.
Not part of the thread, but I'll chime in anyway. You said:
Each inflection point where the population growth rate increased was a point when prosperity suddenly increased. It's why population grows as food prices fall.
And that is quite obviously true, historically.
You also said:
Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing.
Elsewhere, you've pointed out that it requires the labor of approximately 1% of the population to feed the rest, and this number has been dropping radically for 100 years. You've been making a pretty good case that the basis for the cost of anything, anywhere, is the cost of human labor. Now, there's such a thing as a strawberry picking machine. A prototype, but operational in fields today, not just a laboratory curiosity. We are rapidly approaching the point where it requires zero human labor to feed the entire population. 797 tonnes of wheat harvested in 8 hours takes 6 guys. Plus spectators. How long before those 6 drivers are no longer required? That leaves only the labor of the supply chain that builds and runs the equipment, which is also rapidly automating. When the last drop of labor is squeezed out of the food supply chain, does that result in unbounded population growth? A gigantic explosion of new people?
Your interlocutor has been trying to point out a new fact. Regardless of ongoing technological development, population is plateauing across the developed world. In Japan, the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe, native population growth is, in fact, a negative number. There is no growth. None. Without immigration, population in the US would be declining. Population in Japan IS declining. Japan hit the zero point more than a decade ago, in 2004, and has been negative every year since, with one lone (lonely?) exception. Attempts at explanation include the psychological as well as the economic, but regardless of the reason(s), it is happening.
So despite new CPUs, despite new combine harvesters, despite new berry-picking robots destined to reduce the cost of staple foods and luxury foods alike, population is only growing everywhere those technologies are not.
It seems history is no longer an adequate guide to economic and population expectations.
Congratulations to everyone at Space X who contributed to this awesome achievement! You have made space flight exciting again!
I agree with you. Completely.
And the fact that is being met with by a yawn from the popular press is a signal that the incredible achievements of SpaceX are "the new normal."
I'm not ready for "the new normal". I made comments a few months back about how the Air Force range officers are completely unaccustomed to the operational tempo SpaceX will have to achieve in order to fill all their contracts. I didn't realize that I was completely unaccustomed to their new operational tempo. I've missed watching the last two launches live. I'm used to being able to look at the SpaceX site once every quarter and not missing anything. This is ridiculous.
*shakes fist* Damn you Elon Musk for changing the world so fast! And get your rocket off the scorched remnants of my lawn!
This is me being naiive, but if it's a stationary, land-based installation, do you really care if you need flywheels that are 20x as massive as comparable Li batteries?
Probably you do. You have room for a fridge worth of batteries in your basement. You probably don't have room for 20 fridges worth of flywheel, in a giant monolithic installation that can't be moved.
Companies possibly care for the same reason. They have room for 20 fridges worth of batteries, but they don't have as much room for the 4x5 fridge footprint of the equivalent flywheel, and installing the flywheel requires a crane and a massive hole in the building, which costs a lot more than a couple guys with dollies trundling batteries through regular doors.
The commercial flywheels with the 5 Wh/kg density in use right now tend to be gigantic industrial installations. That severely limits where and how many can be installed. Also, they were installed in order to deal with a very particular electrical load problem that was difficult to solve other ways, namely massive short-term demand followed by massive short-term "recharging". Most of the places you want energy storage aren't like that. The transients in your house can be handled by a handful of (beefy) capacitors or super-capacitors, and then the batteries can take up the ongoing load just fine. The advantages of the flywheel (few as they are) are mostly unnecessary for a great many of the electrical loads in the world.
20" high resolution color zero-power-while-not-refreshing photo frame? Shut up and take my money!
This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be. Program it to change the photo once a week from the internal SD card and a single battery charge could last half a year, if the designers are smart enough to implement it with a microcontroller instead of an Android-running behemoth. And it should have the longevity, too. I still use my eInk bookreader I bought in 2007 daily, and it works great, after far more frequent page turns than a photo frame is likely to need.
I would advocate for non-removable internal storage accessed via USB in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on FAT32, but it would be a shame not to make the storage upgradeable given that Samsung seems to be determined to make it possible to lose a terabyte in the couch cushions.
If the problem is ethics, surely the solution would be to obtain military funding for this. A source of genetically engineered animal-human hybrids, combining the best features of both, would be invaluable to a modern military that needs new ways to fight a radically different type of enemy to that it was set up to do. The military could have at its disposal superhumans with animal senses, and at the same time push forward medical technology to benefit everyone.
What could possibly go wrong?
I read a sci fi novel in the university library with precisely that premise back in 1996. Human-tiger hybrids for "supersoldiers", bunnygirls as their "comfort detachment."
As I recall, it wasn't a particularly bad book, for pulp. Can't remember the author or title for the life of me.
How do you think that'll stack for recycling and what not? You know a shit ton of it will end up in dumps with toxic liquids leaking out.
This bizarre meme just won't die. Lead batteries contain toxic materials. Nickel cadmium batteries contain toxic materials. Lithium ion batteries are not lead or NiCd batteries. They are in no way comparable in terms of toxicity. There is nothing in a lithium battery that is remotely dangerous to you. The compounds in them are biologically inert, either immediately or shortly after exposure to air and water.
And Tesla has no intention of landfilling battery packs. Used battery packs are worth money. Even when they're beyond reuse outside of a car, they're incredibly cheap to recycle. Cheap enough that Tesla already knows when it will be cost effective to recover the materials from out of service packs. TLDR, 1 billion batteries every 10 years NOT bad. Most will be recycled. Why do you pretend that replacing a Tesla battery pack involves flipping the car over, opening up the little plastic door, and popping the batteries out with your hands? That's when batteries get landfilled. And that's not a relevant scenario.
I thought from the title of the app that it was going to be a nice handy lab notebook app, with lots of helpful features and prompts for documenting your experimental apparatus. Maybe even specifically student/teacher friendly.
But no, it's just another sensor data grapher, like a hundred others, except with more googlie eyes staring at you.
The carbon fiber flywheels are where they went wrong...
The carbon fiber flywheels were necessary to achieve an energy density anywhere close to useful. Flywheels spinning fast enough to store a useful amount of energy relative to their mass and volume have a tendency to fly apart. Commercial electrical energy storage flywheels run in the neighborhood of 5 Wh/kg. Lithium ion, by comparison, is easily over 100 Wh/kg. The carbon fiber was an effort to get that energy storage density up.
Laboratory model flywheels made of ceramic composites can manage up to 400 Wh/kg, but their absolute storage capacity is tiny, and nobody has figured out how to scale them up.
OK, water is less dense than gravel, but water can be pumped as opposed to loading and unloading gravel from those train cars and the attendant friction loss?
There's no reason to load or unload the train cars at all. Their loads are static, and could in fact be poured concrete, so you can extract as much energy as possible when they roll back down hill, and store as much as possible while you're pushing them up hill.
Presumably water is considerably less useful in Nevada because it's a desert. The water isn't available, and if it were, it would tend to evaporate. Possibly brackish water could be used, though it's harder on equipment, but I don't know if sufficient quantities of even brackish water are available in Nevada.
I'm not sure if you're joking or are honest here. The idea of storing off-peak energy is to save up energy that is being created when there isn't demand. Which is exactly what you are saying, and exactly what is being done here.
He's suggesting deploying it on commercial rail links through the mountains, not a dead end line that's literally pushing rocks up a hill. So something useful happens as a side effect of temporary energy storage (goods arrive at their destination).
If you do manage to innovate sufficiently to charge $20, then thanks to IP knock-offs can appear here for $11 before your prototypes arrive you hoped to get certified. Meanwhile the knock-offs with fake UL, CE, and FCC stamps start appearing at WallMart, and when you try and get them to sell yours they inform you they already have a cheaper supplier. Who is a shell company owned by the company you contracted to make yours.
I have half a dozen product ideas of the same order of magnitude as you're describing, and the 20 years of professional coding experience to pull off at least the software side. Theoretically I have the necessary hardware education, but I lack the experience. Acquiring the necessary hardware experience is an uphill battle and a big big disincentive to pursuing it is exactly what you describe. If I go to all that work, learn what I need to know, and launch a successful Kickstarter that exceeds the scale of what can be done by hand in my basement, what then? I have to outsource assembly, and my market gets eaten before I get started.
Valve seems to have found the solution. The Steam Controller is manufactured in the US. By robots. They built a massively automated production line. It works, if you have the capital. Given that 30% of the cash in the entire US economy is held by 5 companies, the capital-intensive solution is likely forever beyond the grasp of small business. So it goes with end-stage capitalism.
And my own notion of non-cloud home automation lies dormant since I got laid off in 2010 and lost touch with my former coworker, the electrical engineer who was doing the circuit designs. (I've been using X-10 since 1998, and wanted something better.)
From what I recall, every packet that the original Doom sent was a broadcast packet. Some large networks like universities blocked it because it was causing havoc to their networks.
It was. My university didn't know how to block it, but they did start hunting around in the labs for us. HP's network printers had such cruddy CPUs that discarding all the Doom packets would slow them to a crawl and they'd stop printing anything.
Lol.. so now my child might be sitting alone in a car with another random passenger?
Yes? Why is this so shocking to Americans? In cities in Europe, children as young as 11 ride public transportation totally unsupervised, both to and from school and to activities. Subways, buses, trams, with multiple transfers, plus walking on city streets.
Peasants: You mean, on that barren lava plane on a 45 degree slope? Authorities: Yes, that's the place! Peasants:... why exactly are we doing this, again?
Religious Authorities: Because we'll cut your hearts out and burn them if you don't. Peasants: Oh.
>quote>If anything, agriculture needs more labor intensive but less polluting human touch.
You do realize that many current economic activities are less polluting when done by a machine than by a human, right? Pollution is generated when feeding a human. LESS pollution is generated when running a robot on electricity to do the same job, even when that electricity is generated by burning coal. Making agriculture more labor intensive blows that equation all to hell, making the pollution required to feed a human far worse than it currently is. The pollution a combine tractor emits to harvest a large field is a few hundred kilograms from burning diesel. The pollution emitted to feed enough humans to do the same work in the same amount of time is orders of magnitude higher.
An offshore tax haven doesn't mean the money stays in a hole in the ground.....as soon as money is invested, velocity is increased.
Money dumped into the stock market to buy more shares of Apple is not "invested". It is being dumped into a hole in the ground, for all intents and purposes. This is true of effectively 100% of the stock, bond, and commodity markets worldwide. Extra investment into existing successful companies does nothing but inflate stock prices. It does not increase the velocity of money. The current world investment markets are where money goes to die, not where it goes to move faster.
The world's multinationals are slow, incredibly conservative behemoths. They do not initiate new projects just because their stock price goes up. Far from it. Their CxOs and boards profit-take, transferring wealth from the company into their own pockets, which they then turn around and "invest" into the companies controlled by their cronies, who will perform exactly the same process.
This is a firm expectation of the participants in the current markets, and they actively punish companies that buck the trend. Look what happened when Tesla broke the all-time product launch record when it announced the Model 3 and realized it would need to build a whole lot more cars a lot faster than they had planned. They announced they would be radically increasing their capital investment over the next two years, and the market punished them. Their stock price dropped 11% in 3 days.
Let me repeat that in slightly different words. Tesla booked more order value in one week for a consumer product than any company in history, including the market's darling Apple, and when they announced that they would increase their economic activity in order to fulfill those orders in a reasonable time frame, the participants in the market started selling their stock for 11% less than they were selling it on Monday.
Modern capital markets do not behave in any way like economists think they should. They are not investment platforms. They are giant games of chance, completely divorced from the economic activity of the companies involved. Money dumped into the modern capital markets, especially the US capital markets, is not being invested at all. It is being dumped into a hole in the ground, in an effort to make a number get bigger, and the mechanisms that are expected to be used to make that number get bigger are actively detrimental to economic activity.
The vast majority of modern investment either does not affect or decreases the velocity of money.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against.
For the record, I wasn't railing about "space nutters". I was preempting the usual Slashdot complainers.
They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature.
I'm not seeing what they're missing. The rover landed. Building anything on the lunar surface is, for the time being, just more of the same. Land a bunch of pieces and make sure at least one has the wheels and the lifting capacity to trundle around and collect all the pieces and set them next to each other.
I strongly suspect that the US notion of a lunar base and the Chinese notion of a lunar base are very different. We're not talking buried domes with grass and trees inside them. We're talking ISS-style tin cans, except on the ground. The first thing an arriving astronaut will have to do is trudge across a lunar maria dragging a set of jumper cables to manually hook up the solar array. Which will be deployed from another tin can using a wrench and a goddamn hand crank. (I suspect there are plenty of US astronauts who would be delighted with such a simple design, instead of the usual baroque NASA fare.) I'm quite certain that Chinese engineers have the necessary skills and experience to make that happen. Especially with a thorough and complete data dump of the ISS designs to start from, which I am certain has been in their possession for years.
My largest complaint about the Chinese astronaut corps though is the lack of an operational tempo where those astronauts definitely are not getting the experience needed in space to actually perform the tasks that are going to be needed when the going gets tough.
I agree they're relatively inexperienced. I think their engineers are going to attempt to make up as much of that shortfall as they possibly can with automation. For the rest, they'll get it the same way the US did: trying to do stuff. And are they really that inexperienced? They performed their first manned docking procedure 4 years ago. On the first try.
Before I toss out my own number, I'll note one other thing that also hasn't filtered into Western media very well. Their publicly announced plan is to build a base on the moon by 2020. In the very next breath, they also announced that said base will not be occupied by a human for up to a decade afterwards. They'll build a base, but it won't be occupied for years, until their extremely timid testing is completed to their satisfaction.
So, I agree they won't be done by 2020. But I'm not nearly as pessimistic about their operational temp. I predict it will take 10 years to get the various chunks landed on the moon and shuffle them into proximity to each other. And I predict it will be 2030 before a human cracks a hatch and climbs into it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way that most developing countries have the technical expertise to build or maintain massive solar or wind farms or the money to replace millions of solar panels when they reach EOL in 20-30 years.
You have a peculiar notion about how much power Africans use right now. They haven't been buying the literal billions of electrical appliances and devices that the developed world has bought in the last century. They have no use for massive anything. Africans are currently going from zero light bulbs to one light bulb. It's a huge step up in what it enables, but it is not a big step. And the light bulb they're connecting to it is LED. For that sort of power draw, there effectively is no EOL for a solar panel. The panels being deployed to Africa today (and everywhere else) will still be generating 80% of their original capacity in 20 years, and panel degradation tends to level off in the technologies in use today, so in 30 years those panels will still be producing something close to 80%. Same for 40 years and 50 years.
Africa will be interested in deploying moar power when Africa has moar appliances, which is not something that is going to happen quickly. Outside of South Africa and select enclaves of warlords, Africa is where the US was 150 years ago. There's power in cities, not very widespread even there, and nothing anywhere else. Africa has to actually develop before there's much demand for electricity, and if we are all exceedingly fortunate, they won't have the benefit of having the only infrastructure undamaged by a world war to help themselves. So it's going to take time.
So the first question is just, do renewables actually work to replace base load? It'll only make it harder later if they don't. It is up to champions of renewable energy to SHOW that they can.
For residential base load they certainly can. Otherwise this or this wouldn't be a thing. For commercial base load, that will depend on whether or not the required amount of uninterruptible heavy industrial processes exceeds the amount of available hydro power backed by the usual wind and photovoltaic. Given the size of the list of, for instance, wafer manufacturers, this seems at least ball park possible. Figuring out an alternative process for manufacturing cement will probably be tricky, since powdered coal kilns are just so effective, but maybe biogas can hack it. Heavy industry will be the last thing to switch over, and maybe it never will. There's always fission.
I see the point for youtube as everyone and his dog upload stuff there without giving any thought to copyrights and/or compensation (at least ContentID and monetizing has been added as an afterthought)
This is the part that Slashdot has weirdly forgotten. YouTube has licenses and pays for everything! They even complained about how hard it was to get all the required contracts back in 2006, but they did it. So yes, back in the misty ancient past, YouTube was full of infringing works. They have licenses and pay royalties for everything now, thanks to ContentID. Trent is whining about something completely irrelevant.
You mean #brownsaredelicious...
Could ants detect signs of human civilization from their ant hill in the forest? Probably not, but this doesn't change the fact that human civilization exists, and side from occasional lawn extermination are largely unconcerned with ants. We are not contacted because our civilization is likely not at all unique and not at all interesting to entities capable of contacting us.
We are concerned with ants. We study them. We build ant-farms. We use them in research.
Well that explains a few things.
Not part of the thread, but I'll chime in anyway. You said:
Each inflection point where the population growth rate increased was a point when prosperity suddenly increased. It's why population grows as food prices fall.
And that is quite obviously true, historically.
You also said:
Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing.
Elsewhere, you've pointed out that it requires the labor of approximately 1% of the population to feed the rest, and this number has been dropping radically for 100 years. You've been making a pretty good case that the basis for the cost of anything, anywhere, is the cost of human labor. Now, there's such a thing as a strawberry picking machine. A prototype, but operational in fields today, not just a laboratory curiosity. We are rapidly approaching the point where it requires zero human labor to feed the entire population. 797 tonnes of wheat harvested in 8 hours takes 6 guys. Plus spectators. How long before those 6 drivers are no longer required? That leaves only the labor of the supply chain that builds and runs the equipment, which is also rapidly automating. When the last drop of labor is squeezed out of the food supply chain, does that result in unbounded population growth? A gigantic explosion of new people?
Your interlocutor has been trying to point out a new fact. Regardless of ongoing technological development, population is plateauing across the developed world. In Japan, the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe, native population growth is, in fact, a negative number. There is no growth. None. Without immigration, population in the US would be declining. Population in Japan IS declining. Japan hit the zero point more than a decade ago, in 2004, and has been negative every year since, with one lone (lonely?) exception. Attempts at explanation include the psychological as well as the economic, but regardless of the reason(s), it is happening.
So despite new CPUs, despite new combine harvesters, despite new berry-picking robots destined to reduce the cost of staple foods and luxury foods alike, population is only growing everywhere those technologies are not.
It seems history is no longer an adequate guide to economic and population expectations.
Congratulations to everyone at Space X who contributed to this awesome achievement! You have made space flight exciting again!
I agree with you. Completely.
And the fact that is being met with by a yawn from the popular press is a signal that the incredible achievements of SpaceX are "the new normal."
I'm not ready for "the new normal". I made comments a few months back about how the Air Force range officers are completely unaccustomed to the operational tempo SpaceX will have to achieve in order to fill all their contracts. I didn't realize that I was completely unaccustomed to their new operational tempo. I've missed watching the last two launches live. I'm used to being able to look at the SpaceX site once every quarter and not missing anything. This is ridiculous.
*shakes fist* Damn you Elon Musk for changing the world so fast! And get your rocket off the scorched remnants of my lawn!
This is me being naiive, but if it's a stationary, land-based installation, do you really care if you need flywheels that are 20x as massive as comparable Li batteries?
Probably you do. You have room for a fridge worth of batteries in your basement. You probably don't have room for 20 fridges worth of flywheel, in a giant monolithic installation that can't be moved.
Companies possibly care for the same reason. They have room for 20 fridges worth of batteries, but they don't have as much room for the 4x5 fridge footprint of the equivalent flywheel, and installing the flywheel requires a crane and a massive hole in the building, which costs a lot more than a couple guys with dollies trundling batteries through regular doors.
The commercial flywheels with the 5 Wh/kg density in use right now tend to be gigantic industrial installations. That severely limits where and how many can be installed. Also, they were installed in order to deal with a very particular electrical load problem that was difficult to solve other ways, namely massive short-term demand followed by massive short-term "recharging". Most of the places you want energy storage aren't like that. The transients in your house can be handled by a handful of (beefy) capacitors or super-capacitors, and then the batteries can take up the ongoing load just fine. The advantages of the flywheel (few as they are) are mostly unnecessary for a great many of the electrical loads in the world.
Obviously, this is some serious web 3.0 shit
Oh yeah. From 2009. It was called Google SideWiki, and nobody cared then either. Lasted 2 years.
This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be.
Now they just need to get the colors right.
15 bit color definitely hurts.
20" high resolution color zero-power-while-not-refreshing photo frame? Shut up and take my money!
This is precisely what a digital photo frame should be. Program it to change the photo once a week from the internal SD card and a single battery charge could last half a year, if the designers are smart enough to implement it with a microcontroller instead of an Android-running behemoth. And it should have the longevity, too. I still use my eInk bookreader I bought in 2007 daily, and it works great, after far more frequent page turns than a photo frame is likely to need.
I would advocate for non-removable internal storage accessed via USB in order to avoid paying the Microsoft tax on FAT32, but it would be a shame not to make the storage upgradeable given that Samsung seems to be determined to make it possible to lose a terabyte in the couch cushions.
But anyway, details. Shut up and take my money!
If the problem is ethics, surely the solution would be to obtain military funding for this. A source of genetically engineered animal-human hybrids, combining the best features of both, would be invaluable to a modern military that needs new ways to fight a radically different type of enemy to that it was set up to do. The military could have at its disposal superhumans with animal senses, and at the same time push forward medical technology to benefit everyone.
What could possibly go wrong?
I read a sci fi novel in the university library with precisely that premise back in 1996. Human-tiger hybrids for "supersoldiers", bunnygirls as their "comfort detachment."
As I recall, it wasn't a particularly bad book, for pulp. Can't remember the author or title for the life of me.
How do you think that'll stack for recycling and what not? You know a shit ton of it will end up in dumps with toxic liquids leaking out.
This bizarre meme just won't die. Lead batteries contain toxic materials. Nickel cadmium batteries contain toxic materials. Lithium ion batteries are not lead or NiCd batteries. They are in no way comparable in terms of toxicity. There is nothing in a lithium battery that is remotely dangerous to you. The compounds in them are biologically inert, either immediately or shortly after exposure to air and water.
And Tesla has no intention of landfilling battery packs. Used battery packs are worth money. Even when they're beyond reuse outside of a car, they're incredibly cheap to recycle. Cheap enough that Tesla already knows when it will be cost effective to recover the materials from out of service packs. TLDR, 1 billion batteries every 10 years NOT bad. Most will be recycled. Why do you pretend that replacing a Tesla battery pack involves flipping the car over, opening up the little plastic door, and popping the batteries out with your hands? That's when batteries get landfilled. And that's not a relevant scenario.
I thought from the title of the app that it was going to be a nice handy lab notebook app, with lots of helpful features and prompts for documenting your experimental apparatus. Maybe even specifically student/teacher friendly.
But no, it's just another sensor data grapher, like a hundred others, except with more googlie eyes staring at you.
The carbon fiber flywheels are where they went wrong...
The carbon fiber flywheels were necessary to achieve an energy density anywhere close to useful. Flywheels spinning fast enough to store a useful amount of energy relative to their mass and volume have a tendency to fly apart. Commercial electrical energy storage flywheels run in the neighborhood of 5 Wh/kg. Lithium ion, by comparison, is easily over 100 Wh/kg. The carbon fiber was an effort to get that energy storage density up.
Laboratory model flywheels made of ceramic composites can manage up to 400 Wh/kg, but their absolute storage capacity is tiny, and nobody has figured out how to scale them up.
OK, water is less dense than gravel, but water can be pumped as opposed to loading and unloading gravel from those train cars and the attendant friction loss?
There's no reason to load or unload the train cars at all. Their loads are static, and could in fact be poured concrete, so you can extract as much energy as possible when they roll back down hill, and store as much as possible while you're pushing them up hill.
Presumably water is considerably less useful in Nevada because it's a desert. The water isn't available, and if it were, it would tend to evaporate. Possibly brackish water could be used, though it's harder on equipment, but I don't know if sufficient quantities of even brackish water are available in Nevada.
I'm not sure if you're joking or are honest here. The idea of storing off-peak energy is to save up energy that is being created when there isn't demand. Which is exactly what you are saying, and exactly what is being done here.
He's suggesting deploying it on commercial rail links through the mountains, not a dead end line that's literally pushing rocks up a hill. So something useful happens as a side effect of temporary energy storage (goods arrive at their destination).
If you do manage to innovate sufficiently to charge $20, then thanks to IP knock-offs can appear here for $11 before your prototypes arrive you hoped to get certified. Meanwhile the knock-offs with fake UL, CE, and FCC stamps start appearing at WallMart, and when you try and get them to sell yours they inform you they already have a cheaper supplier. Who is a shell company owned by the company you contracted to make yours.
I have half a dozen product ideas of the same order of magnitude as you're describing, and the 20 years of professional coding experience to pull off at least the software side. Theoretically I have the necessary hardware education, but I lack the experience. Acquiring the necessary hardware experience is an uphill battle and a big big disincentive to pursuing it is exactly what you describe. If I go to all that work, learn what I need to know, and launch a successful Kickstarter that exceeds the scale of what can be done by hand in my basement, what then? I have to outsource assembly, and my market gets eaten before I get started.
Valve seems to have found the solution. The Steam Controller is manufactured in the US. By robots. They built a massively automated production line. It works, if you have the capital. Given that 30% of the cash in the entire US economy is held by 5 companies, the capital-intensive solution is likely forever beyond the grasp of small business. So it goes with end-stage capitalism.
And my own notion of non-cloud home automation lies dormant since I got laid off in 2010 and lost touch with my former coworker, the electrical engineer who was doing the circuit designs. (I've been using X-10 since 1998, and wanted something better.)
From what I recall, every packet that the original Doom sent was a broadcast packet. Some large networks like universities blocked it because it was causing havoc to their networks.
It was. My university didn't know how to block it, but they did start hunting around in the labs for us. HP's network printers had such cruddy CPUs that discarding all the Doom packets would slow them to a crawl and they'd stop printing anything.
Good times.
Lol.. so now my child might be sitting alone in a car with another random passenger?
Yes? Why is this so shocking to Americans? In cities in Europe, children as young as 11 ride public transportation totally unsupervised, both to and from school and to activities. Subways, buses, trams, with multiple transfers, plus walking on city streets.
Why are Americans so afraid all the time?
Peasants: You mean, on that barren lava plane on a 45 degree slope? ... why exactly are we doing this, again?
Authorities: Yes, that's the place!
Peasants:
Religious Authorities: Because we'll cut your hearts out and burn them if you don't.
Peasants: Oh.
>quote>If anything, agriculture needs more labor intensive but less polluting human touch.
You do realize that many current economic activities are less polluting when done by a machine than by a human, right? Pollution is generated when feeding a human. LESS pollution is generated when running a robot on electricity to do the same job, even when that electricity is generated by burning coal. Making agriculture more labor intensive blows that equation all to hell, making the pollution required to feed a human far worse than it currently is. The pollution a combine tractor emits to harvest a large field is a few hundred kilograms from burning diesel. The pollution emitted to feed enough humans to do the same work in the same amount of time is orders of magnitude higher.
An offshore tax haven doesn't mean the money stays in a hole in the ground.....as soon as money is invested, velocity is increased.
Money dumped into the stock market to buy more shares of Apple is not "invested". It is being dumped into a hole in the ground, for all intents and purposes. This is true of effectively 100% of the stock, bond, and commodity markets worldwide. Extra investment into existing successful companies does nothing but inflate stock prices. It does not increase the velocity of money. The current world investment markets are where money goes to die, not where it goes to move faster.
The world's multinationals are slow, incredibly conservative behemoths. They do not initiate new projects just because their stock price goes up. Far from it. Their CxOs and boards profit-take, transferring wealth from the company into their own pockets, which they then turn around and "invest" into the companies controlled by their cronies, who will perform exactly the same process.
This is a firm expectation of the participants in the current markets, and they actively punish companies that buck the trend. Look what happened when Tesla broke the all-time product launch record when it announced the Model 3 and realized it would need to build a whole lot more cars a lot faster than they had planned. They announced they would be radically increasing their capital investment over the next two years, and the market punished them. Their stock price dropped 11% in 3 days.
Let me repeat that in slightly different words. Tesla booked more order value in one week for a consumer product than any company in history, including the market's darling Apple, and when they announced that they would increase their economic activity in order to fulfill those orders in a reasonable time frame, the participants in the market started selling their stock for 11% less than they were selling it on Monday.
Modern capital markets do not behave in any way like economists think they should. They are not investment platforms. They are giant games of chance, completely divorced from the economic activity of the companies involved. Money dumped into the modern capital markets, especially the US capital markets, is not being invested at all. It is being dumped into a hole in the ground, in an effort to make a number get bigger, and the mechanisms that are expected to be used to make that number get bigger are actively detrimental to economic activity.
The vast majority of modern investment either does not affect or decreases the velocity of money.
i often wonder; what is the actual point of american health insurance companies?
1. Profit
2. Profit
3. ????
4. Profit
They're gambling with people's health for money, and just like a casino, the house always wins.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against.
For the record, I wasn't railing about "space nutters". I was preempting the usual Slashdot complainers.
They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature.
I'm not seeing what they're missing. The rover landed. Building anything on the lunar surface is, for the time being, just more of the same. Land a bunch of pieces and make sure at least one has the wheels and the lifting capacity to trundle around and collect all the pieces and set them next to each other.
I strongly suspect that the US notion of a lunar base and the Chinese notion of a lunar base are very different. We're not talking buried domes with grass and trees inside them. We're talking ISS-style tin cans, except on the ground. The first thing an arriving astronaut will have to do is trudge across a lunar maria dragging a set of jumper cables to manually hook up the solar array. Which will be deployed from another tin can using a wrench and a goddamn hand crank. (I suspect there are plenty of US astronauts who would be delighted with such a simple design, instead of the usual baroque NASA fare.) I'm quite certain that Chinese engineers have the necessary skills and experience to make that happen. Especially with a thorough and complete data dump of the ISS designs to start from, which I am certain has been in their possession for years.
My largest complaint about the Chinese astronaut corps though is the lack of an operational tempo where those astronauts definitely are not getting the experience needed in space to actually perform the tasks that are going to be needed when the going gets tough.
I agree they're relatively inexperienced. I think their engineers are going to attempt to make up as much of that shortfall as they possibly can with automation. For the rest, they'll get it the same way the US did: trying to do stuff. And are they really that inexperienced? They performed their first manned docking procedure 4 years ago. On the first try.
Before I toss out my own number, I'll note one other thing that also hasn't filtered into Western media very well. Their publicly announced plan is to build a base on the moon by 2020. In the very next breath, they also announced that said base will not be occupied by a human for up to a decade afterwards. They'll build a base, but it won't be occupied for years, until their extremely timid testing is completed to their satisfaction.
So, I agree they won't be done by 2020. But I'm not nearly as pessimistic about their operational temp. I predict it will take 10 years to get the various chunks landed on the moon and shuffle them into proximity to each other. And I predict it will be 2030 before a human cracks a hatch and climbs into it.