Once again the latest iPhone introduces revolutionary new ideas Android has had for years.
We get it. You don't like Apple. We'll all pretend for your benefit that the Android ecosystem hasn't "borrowed" any features from Apple and the Android is the one true system from which all good things originate.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
That's because they didn't know much/anything of the problems/risks with nuclear power plants. Nuclear power did seem like this amazing new technology straight off the pages of a science fiction novel and it had ended the war. Of course they were interested. There was a substantial lag between learning about it and what it could do and then figuring out what the risks and problems with it were. Over time we learned that there were significant practical problems with fission as a power source and some very real risks and it took a while for the public to absorb this argument. People are by nature bad at evaluating risk (we tend to be risk averse) so it's hardly surprising that eventually public opinion in many places swung against nuclear power over time. Public opinion of the risk of nuclear power demonstrably is at odds with the real objective risk but if you want to build more nuclear fission plants then you need to deal with that very real fear in the political arena.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was...
Greenpeace was a small player in a much bigger drama and I think you hugely overestimate their influence in this debate. But even if we stipulate to what you are saying, it is absolutely true that nuclear fission as a power source does carry substantial risks. To pretend that these risks don't exist would be foolish. You cannot argue that fission is 100% safe or that catastrophes cannot happen and remain credible. There isn't a fission power plant we've ever made that doesn't carry real risks and doesn't required oversight and maintenance from humans. Even simple designs like RTGs carry meaningful risks.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The reason Chernobyl was/is scary is that there is currently no way to prove that a similar disaster couldn't happen again elsewhere. It was confirmation of an already existing fear. There is not a single fission plant in operation today that does not have failure modes with potentially severe consequences. The failures are mostly remote but potentially very severe and that is the sort of risk we as humans are worst at evaluating. Use airplanes as an example - they are objectively very safe and yet many people are absolutely terrified of them because some of the failure modes are potentially quite severe and out of their control. Until you can trot out a scientist that can show that a meltdown or radiation release or similar disaster is provably impossible you're going to have a hard time getting public opinion back in favor of nuclear fission in many parts of the world. And even then a lot of people won't believe the evidence. I probably find that as disappointing as you do but it's the reality we live in thanks to human nature.
Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared of
And we've been told (with some justification and evidence) to be scared of fission for decades now. That's already done and reversing it is going to be really hard thanks to human nature. Getting people to accept something new is a lot easier than getting them to stop fearing something familiar that they think (rightly or wrongly) is dangerous.
For the record, I'm actually in favor of increased use of fission to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But to pretend that it is without risk or that it will be politically easy is just foolish naivety.
It's no longer 1946. Modern fear of nuclear fission is due to media sensationalism.
Three problems with that argument. 1) Even if you are right and the fears are purely out of media hype, the fears still are real and they still matter. In politics perception is reality and politics matter here. If people are afraid of something they are going to fight it even if those fears are completely unjustified in the face of objective facts. 2) Even the most advanced reactors we have today are still not fail-safe with zero risk. They still depend on substantial amounts of human intervention to operate safely and any time humans are required there are risks. 3) Engineers still make design mistakes. Fukashima happened in large part because of engineering mistakes. There is no way to prove that the engineers have build a perfectly safe fission reactor given the state of the art in technology. Engineering mistakes are the most dangerous types of mistakes because they are the ones you are least likely to know about ahead of time and the hardest to mitigate against.
There also still is the waste disposal problem which hasn't been solved but that's a separate issue from safe operation.
re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past.
You talk about human nature wanting personal vehicles and then take exactly the opposite argument here. Human nature doesn't change just because its convenient for your argument. People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change. And their fears are not without some rational basis in many cases. The problem with fission as a power source is simply that when it goes wrong it can go REALLY wrong. Given that humans are imperfect sooner or later you are going to have a major catastrophe if we rely on nuclear fission. We've already had two good sized disaster and they are unlikely to be the last. There has been no breakthrough that eliminates the problems and risks associated with it. Are modern reactors safer? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. Should we use more fission? Perhaps but it probably won't happen.
I think fossil fuels are a clear and present danger to us as a species but thinking that we are just going to switch over to fission to replace fossil fuels is mostly just wishful thinking. Nuclear fission simply has become to big of a boogey man and a political hot potato to be a realistic alternative any time soon.
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
They could be swappable. However they also are big enough to have very large battery packs which should last a good long time presuming the power to weight ratio make sense. Also remember that electric does not necessarily mean battery powered. You can draw power from a tap like many light rail systems do and it's still electric.
Due to efficiencies of scale the worst coal power plants to EV systems are still likely to be twice a pollutant efficient as a ICE vehicle.
Citation needed. That also isn't a particularly meaningful comparison since only about 1/3 of US power comes from coal. It's quite possible to power an EV entirely with non-fossil fuel sources.
Yes I am using hyperbole and I would welcome someone with enough time to disprove me.
No thanks. You made the claim. Cite your source and prove your case. Don't ask us to do your homework for you.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse.
And what is your point? Electric vehicles can be powered by both/either fossil fuels or non-emitting sources of power. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc are all potential sources of generation, none of which emit substantial carbon during normal operation. Roughly 1/3 of power in the US comes from non-fossil fuel sources so right off the bat your emissions drop by up to 1/3 per vehicle. And it's a lot easier to control emissions from 1 power plant than millions of little engines. Electric vehicles give you a choice of power sources and make it easier to control your pollution. Internal combustion vehicles do not.
No he really isn't. He can try but that just makes him an asshole trying to profit from the death of his daughter which is reprehensible. Tesla had nothing to do with his daughter's decisions.
That doesn't mean he is free to win money from Tesla at trial though.
He doesn't have to win money from Tesla to cost Tesla a lot of money defending against a frivolous lawsuit.
Even if the daughter isn't to blame, the owner of the car - her boss - who was also killed, gave her the keys (or whatever you use to operate the Tesla).
The driver is to blame. Whoever gave her the keys does not mitigate that meaningfully. It's really simple. Don't drive a high powered car unless A) you are competent to handle that vehicle when sober and B) are actually sober.
The daughter might be an adult but still relatively young whreas the boss was 44, old enough to have obtained a Tesla as a personal/company vehicle, yet he stupid enough to get drunk and allow another drunk to drive him home/wherever.
27 is more than old enough to know better than to drive drunk. That is not young and certainly not young enough to excuse such a lapse of judgement.
...as much as I'd like to strongly disagree with him, I'm simply not going to go after something a parent says after losing a child. No matter how dumb or self-destructive the child was, etc.
Fair enough. I will do it. His daughter was driving drunk and by doing so endangered the lives and property of others. It's tragic that anyone lost their life but the reality is that his daughter was apparently 100% at fault here. Tesla did not cause her to crash or to operate a vehicle in an irresponsible fashion. I don't care how distraught he is, that doesn't give him a free pass to put the blame where it doesn't belong. He's lashing out and hurting still more people who had nothing to do with his daughter's foolish behavior and I'm not fine with that.
That person is grasping at whatever straws they can to maintain their sanity. They're out of bounds.
His sanity is of no concern to me when he starts trying to hurt other people to sooth his grief.
Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
If he said it then it's not the newspaper's fault for reporting that. Say what you mean and mean what you say.
A report released last week by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department disclosed that Speckman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.21, almost three times the legal limit in the state of Indiana
And it is the car at fault? Yeah I'm not buying it either. Methinks the drinking had a lot more do do with this crash than any other factor. I understand it is hard for some parents to believe that their precious snowflake might have made a bad choice and earned a Darwin Award.
Should Trump move to weaken the dollar, I predict he, too, will be impeached.
Trump has little control over the strength of the dollar or the economy in general. The amount of influence presidents have over the economy is almost always hugely overestimated. Yes there are some things Trump could do around the edges but anything that would have a truly substantial impact would require an act of Congress so he wouldn't be acting alone. The value of the dollar is mostly influenced by the Federal Reserve which does not report to the president and large macro-economic factors over which the president has very little control. When people talk about the president "doing something" about the economy they mostly are asking him to look like he's trying to do something because in reality he doesn't have much to work with.
A weak dollar is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that your exports are more competitive but it also means everything you import is more expensive. Conversely a strong dollar makes buying imports cheaper but makes your exports more expensive. Pick your poison. China has intentionally maintained a weak currency to support their export oriented economy. So do you want a strong dollar which makes everything you buy at Walmart from China cheaper or do you want a weak dollar which improves our ability to sell stuff to other countries but will increase the cost of much of what you buy? If the Trump manages to impose tariffs like he has promised on foreign made goods that will have all the negative effects of weakening the dollar without the positive benefits of actually weakening the dollar. (It makes everything we buy more expensive but doesn't make what we sell cheaper) That's one of the many reasons he is an idiot for suggesting it.
Trump may get impeached (very unlikely but possible) but with an republican congress he'd have to do something a LOT more heinous than try weaken the dollar. And even if he did, Pence is not exactly a welcome replacement.
Some beliefs are correct, some beliefs are false, and some cannot be proven in either direction. But there are no facts which are a matter of opinion, and a belief is false if it doesn't match the facts. That, of course, doesn't stop people from believing in it.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't always matter if you are factually correct. Ignorance and stupidity can be weaponized rather easily. Our recent election is a great example of that from any number of angles (pick your favorite) but it's clear that many people mistakenly think facts are actually opinions. You still need to understand what others think even if it makes no sense at all. Stupid, ill-informed people still get to vote and if you don't want them to rule your life you had better be paying attention to what they are doing.
Encrypted email is not âoeuser friendlyâ for the average Joe because for the most part, people arenâ(TM)t interested in it, and so brain-dead easy apps generally have not been developed.
Probably because it's basically impossible to make encryption easy AND simultaneously do it right. It's just not an easy problem. The difficulty is less in the encryption itself (thought that's not trivial) but in key management. It's very difficult to get people to do key management properly. Even tech savvy people have a hard time with it. For the technologically clueless it is simply beyond them. Good luck explaining encryption keys to your grandmother who just wants to see pictures of her grand kids. Furthermore both parties in a communication have to agree that keeping to contents secret is of sufficient value to bother with all the headaches encryption brings. And make no mistake it brings a lot of headaches if you are doing it right.
Speaking for myself I'd be happy to use encryption routinely. But I bet you can guess how man people I interact with feel the same way. The number is a pretty good approximation of zero. I don't see any way to make it easy enough that it is transparent to a typical person who doesn't work for the DOD or NSA.
Having said that, my employer, the Department of Defense, uses Outlook and a card with a chip in it that stores my credentials, and I can encrypt an email simply by clicking on a button.
Great. You have an employer who is willing to do the hard work of managing both ends of the communication chain and can employ people who actually understand it all and has a compelling interest in keeping communications secure. That describes almost nobody else outside of the DOD, NSA or similar organization. And it is utterly useless when communicating with people outside the DOD who do not have access to your tech.
But what if your belief is right and the others are wrong?
That's as often a matter of opinion as it is of fact. And just because you are factually correct doesn't mean others cannot run roughshod over you anyway. Religions are inherently based in beliefs with no basis in reality and yet they often dominate government policy.
What do you gain from listening to stupidity?
You learn what others are thinking so it doesn't catch you by surprise. Bad things happen when you underestimate how effective stupidity can be when employed strategically. Dumb people in a large group are dangerous even when they are wrong.
I have 4 or 5 news sites bookmarked that I visit on a regular basis. I trust them. I don't always agree with them but I trust they are not intentionally lying to me. Why would I go outside of that?
Because the real world is a lot more complicated than any 5 news sites could possibly pretend to cover. Nobody is asking you to trust everything you hear. But if you just live in an echo chamber then you are going to get it wrong a lot.
Plenty. I've never had a FaceBook account (or Twitter) and have no plans to change that. I don't trust the company and it quite plainly has limited utility for me personally. Not judging if you get a lot out of it but it's just not for me. My wife feels the same way. Probably about 2/3 of my family uses FaceBook at least occasionally and about 1/3 of us can't be bothered.
You could say the same thing about any single news source. My father-in-law gets all his news from the paper version of the wall street journal and whatever nonsense the local evening news is spouting off that day plus a bit of Rush Limbaugh. Needless to say he has a rather narrow and unhealthy world view because he never hears any ideas that contradict what he already believes. Getting your news from a single source or even a narrow group of sources is almost certain to result is a very weird view of how the world should work.
It's an ESR article. Eric never uses the word "hacker" in the latter sense.
This is true. He keeps fighting that fight looooong after it has been lost. Nobody outside of a few pedantic geeks (like many of us here) use the word hacker in the positive sense ESR insists it should mean.
i remember on old apples there was a special hole puncher to make the disk double-sided (on the apple you had to flip the disk but ibm could read both sides).
You didn't need a special hole puncher. A regular round hole puncher worked fine and I did this routinely. If you wanted nice square notches an exacto knife would do the job. You only bought the "special" disk notching hole puncher for showing off.
With all of my changes I made to my house, I now use less electricity than in 1993 when I bought it.
Which raises the question of how bad was the energy efficiency of your house when you bought it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a hater and I really do think what you say you are doing is great. But if the home was relatively efficient to begin with it's harder to make improvements than if it was an energy sink hole. My home for instance was built in 2001. I've done some similar improvements to what you describe and I've saved some money on my monthly bill but it's not a night and day difference because the house was comparatively efficient to begin with. Decently insulated, reasonably efficient furnace, etc. I'm probably going to replace my furnace and AC in the next 5 years and I should get a good bump in efficiency from that. But I started from a pretty good place so it's harder to make improvements without dropping a LOT of money on the problem. Far more than is economically sensible.
I do not consider the idea that energy use will always have to go up as inevitable.
I suppose you are correct that it is not inevitable but so far all the data we have points that way, at least for the population as a whole. I'm not aware of any meaningful period where total human energy use has declined - ever. Presumably there is some carrying capacity for humans but we clearly haven't reached it yet. Until we do, I don't really see any credible circumstance where total human energy use declines except for a major war/catastrophe unless we invoke some hypothetical technology breakthrough that we cannot currently predict.
We are moving toward a point source power generation system where individual households are not affected by what happens on the grid.
Though in my heart I hope you are right but my logical side tells me that the grid isn't going away any time soon. What I think will happen is that connecting to the grid will over time get more expensive but will still be a necessity for a very long time to come. I do think it would be reasonable for many/most homes and a fair number of businesses to generate a lot of their own power (at least subsistence levels) and then supplement periods of high demand from the grid. It's going to take many decades under the best circumstances to get to that point however. Retrofitting that many buildings just isn't going to happen quickly.
So really, if I am not connected to a grid sourced power system, and later, most people aren't, what does that mean for energy use?
It's an interesting question. First thing to consider is population growth. All other things held constant more people = more energy use. So as long as the population continues to grow we should expect to see a commensurate growth in energy use. Second is what applications for energy use will become available. Computers in the home were just starting to become a thing when I was a child. Nobody refueled their car at their house. Homes had way fewer lights, fewer had dishwashers, fewer had dishwashers, fewer had AC. Homes in the US were considerably smaller on average too. I've seen little indication that people want to walk any of this back. Home automation (for better or worse) is becoming a thing. We always seem to come up with new and clever ways to use more energy than we did before. The third thing to consider is how realistic is it that most homes will actually become energy self sufficient to the point the grid becomes unnecessary. My guess is that they won't. Not completely anyway within the lifetime of anyone reading this. I do think that lots of homes could generate most of their own power most of the time but occasionally will still need to tap into a grid. I'd be happy to be wrong but I don't see the evidence pointing that way currently.
I'm not surprised DHS is "considering" something like this. Certain gestapo elements in our government always are trying thuggish and ill considered tactics to make their lives easier. This is plainly a stupid and counterproductive idea to anyone with a functioning brain but the danger is real enough. The good news is that the companies affected (Facebook, Twitter, etc) have lots of money and flesh eating lawyers to fight such an over-reach by the government. I don't generally trust Facebook but I do trust their profit motive and DHS forcing people to hand over passwords is a clear and present danger to their bottom line.
Pretty well. Last I checked batteries are still a thing and the sun is always shining on roughly half the globe at any given time. Plus it's pretty easy to move power from place to place or did you forget about those power lines we have strung up everywhere. And of course there still are nuclear plants and fossil fuel plants aren't going away in the next several decades at minimum.
Really think that will be the case over the lifetime of a power plant ?
Yes. Oh I'm sure the price of coal will fluctuate and become more competitive at times but as long as fracking remains viable, natural gas will have a price advantage over coal. Once solar and wind reach sufficient scale there really becomes little reason to continue to have this massive infrastructure to support coal as a fuel source on the scale we do today. Cheap solar = expensive coal.
Yes and no. Most biofuels really are just an inefficient conversion of diesel to biofuel. Solar is a necessary part of the equation but until you can get substantially more of the stored solar out of the biofuel than the cost of the diesel you put into farming it then it isn't really anything more than a conversion with no net energy gain. This is the main problem with corn generated ethanol. It's not clear that it results in more energy than the diesel fuel used to create it.
"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"
No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.
The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.
That's not how investing in new technologies works. Nothing new is cheaper until it can get to sufficient scale. Cars were not cheaper than horses for quite a number of years after the car was invented. Email wasn't cheaper than postal mail at first. Furthermore when you take the full cost of coal (including pollution mitigation), solar and wind are cheaper TODAY - without subsidies even. They only seem more expensive because coal doesn't have to clean up after itself. When we stop allowing fossil fuels to dump endless amounts of pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere without direct economic cost, then you can come and tell me how expensive wind and solar are.
The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.
"Most abundant energy source"? Nope. Solar energy is far more abundant and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground. The earth receives more energy in one hour from the sun than all of humanity uses in an entire year. "Cheapest"? Wrong again. Currently natural gas is cheaper in many cases at today's prices. So is on-shore wind, geothermal, and hydro. Nuclear is about equal to coal. Solar PV is competitive even without subsidies and falling fast. If you take into account the full cost of coal (including pollution) then it isn't even close to the cheapest option for power generation. Coal only seems cheap because we don't require coal plants to mitigate the full cost of the pollution (including CO2) that they produce. Yes the US has a lot of coal but the best thing we could possibly do with that is to leave most of it in the ground.
If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.
Why would we do such an idiotic thing? Natural gas plants currently make a lot more economic sense and while not clean are certainly cleaner than coal plants. Perhaps you don't care to actually be able to breathe the air? If you want to see the effects of your suggestion in real life I encourage you to go travel to China and see the results of abundant coal power. Never mind the fact that burning all that sequestered carbon is without question going to wreak havoc with the global climate. What, you thought that putting billions of tons of carbon that is currently buried into the atmosphere would come without consequence? That's a foolish and dangerous thing to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again the latest iPhone introduces revolutionary new ideas Android has had for years.
We get it. You don't like Apple. We'll all pretend for your benefit that the Android ecosystem hasn't "borrowed" any features from Apple and the Android is the one true system from which all good things originate.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
That's because they didn't know much/anything of the problems/risks with nuclear power plants. Nuclear power did seem like this amazing new technology straight off the pages of a science fiction novel and it had ended the war. Of course they were interested. There was a substantial lag between learning about it and what it could do and then figuring out what the risks and problems with it were. Over time we learned that there were significant practical problems with fission as a power source and some very real risks and it took a while for the public to absorb this argument.
People are by nature bad at evaluating risk (we tend to be risk averse) so it's hardly surprising that eventually public opinion in many places swung against nuclear power over time. Public opinion of the risk of nuclear power demonstrably is at odds with the real objective risk but if you want to build more nuclear fission plants then you need to deal with that very real fear in the political arena.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was...
Greenpeace was a small player in a much bigger drama and I think you hugely overestimate their influence in this debate. But even if we stipulate to what you are saying, it is absolutely true that nuclear fission as a power source does carry substantial risks. To pretend that these risks don't exist would be foolish. You cannot argue that fission is 100% safe or that catastrophes cannot happen and remain credible. There isn't a fission power plant we've ever made that doesn't carry real risks and doesn't required oversight and maintenance from humans. Even simple designs like RTGs carry meaningful risks.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The reason Chernobyl was/is scary is that there is currently no way to prove that a similar disaster couldn't happen again elsewhere. It was confirmation of an already existing fear. There is not a single fission plant in operation today that does not have failure modes with potentially severe consequences. The failures are mostly remote but potentially very severe and that is the sort of risk we as humans are worst at evaluating. Use airplanes as an example - they are objectively very safe and yet many people are absolutely terrified of them because some of the failure modes are potentially quite severe and out of their control. Until you can trot out a scientist that can show that a meltdown or radiation release or similar disaster is provably impossible you're going to have a hard time getting public opinion back in favor of nuclear fission in many parts of the world. And even then a lot of people won't believe the evidence. I probably find that as disappointing as you do but it's the reality we live in thanks to human nature.
Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared of
And we've been told (with some justification and evidence) to be scared of fission for decades now. That's already done and reversing it is going to be really hard thanks to human nature. Getting people to accept something new is a lot easier than getting them to stop fearing something familiar that they think (rightly or wrongly) is dangerous.
For the record, I'm actually in favor of increased use of fission to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But to pretend that it is without risk or that it will be politically easy is just foolish naivety.
It's no longer 1946. Modern fear of nuclear fission is due to media sensationalism.
Three problems with that argument. 1) Even if you are right and the fears are purely out of media hype, the fears still are real and they still matter. In politics perception is reality and politics matter here. If people are afraid of something they are going to fight it even if those fears are completely unjustified in the face of objective facts. 2) Even the most advanced reactors we have today are still not fail-safe with zero risk. They still depend on substantial amounts of human intervention to operate safely and any time humans are required there are risks. 3) Engineers still make design mistakes. Fukashima happened in large part because of engineering mistakes. There is no way to prove that the engineers have build a perfectly safe fission reactor given the state of the art in technology. Engineering mistakes are the most dangerous types of mistakes because they are the ones you are least likely to know about ahead of time and the hardest to mitigate against.
There also still is the waste disposal problem which hasn't been solved but that's a separate issue from safe operation.
re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past.
You talk about human nature wanting personal vehicles and then take exactly the opposite argument here. Human nature doesn't change just because its convenient for your argument. People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change. And their fears are not without some rational basis in many cases. The problem with fission as a power source is simply that when it goes wrong it can go REALLY wrong. Given that humans are imperfect sooner or later you are going to have a major catastrophe if we rely on nuclear fission. We've already had two good sized disaster and they are unlikely to be the last. There has been no breakthrough that eliminates the problems and risks associated with it. Are modern reactors safer? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. Should we use more fission? Perhaps but it probably won't happen.
I think fossil fuels are a clear and present danger to us as a species but thinking that we are just going to switch over to fission to replace fossil fuels is mostly just wishful thinking. Nuclear fission simply has become to big of a boogey man and a political hot potato to be a realistic alternative any time soon.
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
They could be swappable. However they also are big enough to have very large battery packs which should last a good long time presuming the power to weight ratio make sense. Also remember that electric does not necessarily mean battery powered. You can draw power from a tap like many light rail systems do and it's still electric.
Due to efficiencies of scale the worst coal power plants to EV systems are still likely to be twice a pollutant efficient as a ICE vehicle.
Citation needed. That also isn't a particularly meaningful comparison since only about 1/3 of US power comes from coal. It's quite possible to power an EV entirely with non-fossil fuel sources.
Yes I am using hyperbole and I would welcome someone with enough time to disprove me.
No thanks. You made the claim. Cite your source and prove your case. Don't ask us to do your homework for you.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse.
And what is your point? Electric vehicles can be powered by both/either fossil fuels or non-emitting sources of power. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc are all potential sources of generation, none of which emit substantial carbon during normal operation. Roughly 1/3 of power in the US comes from non-fossil fuel sources so right off the bat your emissions drop by up to 1/3 per vehicle. And it's a lot easier to control emissions from 1 power plant than millions of little engines. Electric vehicles give you a choice of power sources and make it easier to control your pollution. Internal combustion vehicles do not.
He is free to blame whoever he wants.
No he really isn't. He can try but that just makes him an asshole trying to profit from the death of his daughter which is reprehensible. Tesla had nothing to do with his daughter's decisions.
That doesn't mean he is free to win money from Tesla at trial though.
He doesn't have to win money from Tesla to cost Tesla a lot of money defending against a frivolous lawsuit.
Even if the daughter isn't to blame, the owner of the car - her boss - who was also killed, gave her the keys (or whatever you use to operate the Tesla).
The driver is to blame. Whoever gave her the keys does not mitigate that meaningfully. It's really simple. Don't drive a high powered car unless A) you are competent to handle that vehicle when sober and B) are actually sober.
The daughter might be an adult but still relatively young whreas the boss was 44, old enough to have obtained a Tesla as a personal/company vehicle, yet he stupid enough to get drunk and allow another drunk to drive him home/wherever.
27 is more than old enough to know better than to drive drunk. That is not young and certainly not young enough to excuse such a lapse of judgement.
...as much as I'd like to strongly disagree with him, I'm simply not going to go after something a parent says after losing a child. No matter how dumb or self-destructive the child was, etc.
Fair enough. I will do it. His daughter was driving drunk and by doing so endangered the lives and property of others. It's tragic that anyone lost their life but the reality is that his daughter was apparently 100% at fault here. Tesla did not cause her to crash or to operate a vehicle in an irresponsible fashion. I don't care how distraught he is, that doesn't give him a free pass to put the blame where it doesn't belong. He's lashing out and hurting still more people who had nothing to do with his daughter's foolish behavior and I'm not fine with that.
That person is grasping at whatever straws they can to maintain their sanity. They're out of bounds.
His sanity is of no concern to me when he starts trying to hurt other people to sooth his grief.
Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
If he said it then it's not the newspaper's fault for reporting that. Say what you mean and mean what you say.
A report released last week by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department disclosed that Speckman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.21, almost three times the legal limit in the state of Indiana
And it is the car at fault? Yeah I'm not buying it either. Methinks the drinking had a lot more do do with this crash than any other factor. I understand it is hard for some parents to believe that their precious snowflake might have made a bad choice and earned a Darwin Award.
Should Trump move to weaken the dollar, I predict he, too, will be impeached.
Trump has little control over the strength of the dollar or the economy in general. The amount of influence presidents have over the economy is almost always hugely overestimated. Yes there are some things Trump could do around the edges but anything that would have a truly substantial impact would require an act of Congress so he wouldn't be acting alone. The value of the dollar is mostly influenced by the Federal Reserve which does not report to the president and large macro-economic factors over which the president has very little control. When people talk about the president "doing something" about the economy they mostly are asking him to look like he's trying to do something because in reality he doesn't have much to work with.
A weak dollar is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that your exports are more competitive but it also means everything you import is more expensive. Conversely a strong dollar makes buying imports cheaper but makes your exports more expensive. Pick your poison. China has intentionally maintained a weak currency to support their export oriented economy. So do you want a strong dollar which makes everything you buy at Walmart from China cheaper or do you want a weak dollar which improves our ability to sell stuff to other countries but will increase the cost of much of what you buy? If the Trump manages to impose tariffs like he has promised on foreign made goods that will have all the negative effects of weakening the dollar without the positive benefits of actually weakening the dollar. (It makes everything we buy more expensive but doesn't make what we sell cheaper) That's one of the many reasons he is an idiot for suggesting it.
Trump may get impeached (very unlikely but possible) but with an republican congress he'd have to do something a LOT more heinous than try weaken the dollar. And even if he did, Pence is not exactly a welcome replacement.
Some beliefs are correct, some beliefs are false, and some cannot be proven in either direction. But there are no facts which are a matter of opinion, and a belief is false if it doesn't match the facts. That, of course, doesn't stop people from believing in it.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't always matter if you are factually correct. Ignorance and stupidity can be weaponized rather easily. Our recent election is a great example of that from any number of angles (pick your favorite) but it's clear that many people mistakenly think facts are actually opinions. You still need to understand what others think even if it makes no sense at all. Stupid, ill-informed people still get to vote and if you don't want them to rule your life you had better be paying attention to what they are doing.
Encrypted email is not âoeuser friendlyâ for the average Joe because for the most part, people arenâ(TM)t interested in it, and so brain-dead easy apps generally have not been developed.
Probably because it's basically impossible to make encryption easy AND simultaneously do it right. It's just not an easy problem. The difficulty is less in the encryption itself (thought that's not trivial) but in key management. It's very difficult to get people to do key management properly. Even tech savvy people have a hard time with it. For the technologically clueless it is simply beyond them. Good luck explaining encryption keys to your grandmother who just wants to see pictures of her grand kids. Furthermore both parties in a communication have to agree that keeping to contents secret is of sufficient value to bother with all the headaches encryption brings. And make no mistake it brings a lot of headaches if you are doing it right.
Speaking for myself I'd be happy to use encryption routinely. But I bet you can guess how man people I interact with feel the same way. The number is a pretty good approximation of zero. I don't see any way to make it easy enough that it is transparent to a typical person who doesn't work for the DOD or NSA.
Having said that, my employer, the Department of Defense, uses Outlook and a card with a chip in it that stores my credentials, and I can encrypt an email simply by clicking on a button.
Great. You have an employer who is willing to do the hard work of managing both ends of the communication chain and can employ people who actually understand it all and has a compelling interest in keeping communications secure. That describes almost nobody else outside of the DOD, NSA or similar organization. And it is utterly useless when communicating with people outside the DOD who do not have access to your tech.
But what if your belief is right and the others are wrong?
That's as often a matter of opinion as it is of fact. And just because you are factually correct doesn't mean others cannot run roughshod over you anyway. Religions are inherently based in beliefs with no basis in reality and yet they often dominate government policy.
What do you gain from listening to stupidity?
You learn what others are thinking so it doesn't catch you by surprise. Bad things happen when you underestimate how effective stupidity can be when employed strategically. Dumb people in a large group are dangerous even when they are wrong.
I have 4 or 5 news sites bookmarked that I visit on a regular basis. I trust them. I don't always agree with them but I trust they are not intentionally lying to me. Why would I go outside of that?
Because the real world is a lot more complicated than any 5 news sites could possibly pretend to cover. Nobody is asking you to trust everything you hear. But if you just live in an echo chamber then you are going to get it wrong a lot.
I don't have FaceTwit. Are there any others?
Plenty. I've never had a FaceBook account (or Twitter) and have no plans to change that. I don't trust the company and it quite plainly has limited utility for me personally. Not judging if you get a lot out of it but it's just not for me. My wife feels the same way. Probably about 2/3 of my family uses FaceBook at least occasionally and about 1/3 of us can't be bothered.
You could say the same thing about any single news source. My father-in-law gets all his news from the paper version of the wall street journal and whatever nonsense the local evening news is spouting off that day plus a bit of Rush Limbaugh. Needless to say he has a rather narrow and unhealthy world view because he never hears any ideas that contradict what he already believes. Getting your news from a single source or even a narrow group of sources is almost certain to result is a very weird view of how the world should work.
It's an ESR article. Eric never uses the word "hacker" in the latter sense.
This is true. He keeps fighting that fight looooong after it has been lost. Nobody outside of a few pedantic geeks (like many of us here) use the word hacker in the positive sense ESR insists it should mean.
i remember on old apples there was a special hole puncher to make the disk double-sided (on the apple you had to flip the disk but ibm could read both sides).
You didn't need a special hole puncher. A regular round hole puncher worked fine and I did this routinely. If you wanted nice square notches an exacto knife would do the job. You only bought the "special" disk notching hole puncher for showing off.
With all of my changes I made to my house, I now use less electricity than in 1993 when I bought it.
Which raises the question of how bad was the energy efficiency of your house when you bought it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not being a hater and I really do think what you say you are doing is great. But if the home was relatively efficient to begin with it's harder to make improvements than if it was an energy sink hole. My home for instance was built in 2001. I've done some similar improvements to what you describe and I've saved some money on my monthly bill but it's not a night and day difference because the house was comparatively efficient to begin with. Decently insulated, reasonably efficient furnace, etc. I'm probably going to replace my furnace and AC in the next 5 years and I should get a good bump in efficiency from that. But I started from a pretty good place so it's harder to make improvements without dropping a LOT of money on the problem. Far more than is economically sensible.
I do not consider the idea that energy use will always have to go up as inevitable.
I suppose you are correct that it is not inevitable but so far all the data we have points that way, at least for the population as a whole. I'm not aware of any meaningful period where total human energy use has declined - ever. Presumably there is some carrying capacity for humans but we clearly haven't reached it yet. Until we do, I don't really see any credible circumstance where total human energy use declines except for a major war/catastrophe unless we invoke some hypothetical technology breakthrough that we cannot currently predict.
We are moving toward a point source power generation system where individual households are not affected by what happens on the grid.
Though in my heart I hope you are right but my logical side tells me that the grid isn't going away any time soon. What I think will happen is that connecting to the grid will over time get more expensive but will still be a necessity for a very long time to come. I do think it would be reasonable for many/most homes and a fair number of businesses to generate a lot of their own power (at least subsistence levels) and then supplement periods of high demand from the grid. It's going to take many decades under the best circumstances to get to that point however. Retrofitting that many buildings just isn't going to happen quickly.
So really, if I am not connected to a grid sourced power system, and later, most people aren't, what does that mean for energy use?
It's an interesting question. First thing to consider is population growth. All other things held constant more people = more energy use. So as long as the population continues to grow we should expect to see a commensurate growth in energy use. Second is what applications for energy use will become available. Computers in the home were just starting to become a thing when I was a child. Nobody refueled their car at their house. Homes had way fewer lights, fewer had dishwashers, fewer had dishwashers, fewer had AC. Homes in the US were considerably smaller on average too. I've seen little indication that people want to walk any of this back. Home automation (for better or worse) is becoming a thing. We always seem to come up with new and clever ways to use more energy than we did before. The third thing to consider is how realistic is it that most homes will actually become energy self sufficient to the point the grid becomes unnecessary. My guess is that they won't. Not completely anyway within the lifetime of anyone reading this. I do think that lots of homes could generate most of their own power most of the time but occasionally will still need to tap into a grid. I'd be happy to be wrong but I don't see the evidence pointing that way currently.
I'm not surprised DHS is "considering" something like this. Certain gestapo elements in our government always are trying thuggish and ill considered tactics to make their lives easier. This is plainly a stupid and counterproductive idea to anyone with a functioning brain but the danger is real enough. The good news is that the companies affected (Facebook, Twitter, etc) have lots of money and flesh eating lawyers to fight such an over-reach by the government. I don't generally trust Facebook but I do trust their profit motive and DHS forcing people to hand over passwords is a clear and present danger to their bottom line.
Hows that go at night ?
Pretty well. Last I checked batteries are still a thing and the sun is always shining on roughly half the globe at any given time. Plus it's pretty easy to move power from place to place or did you forget about those power lines we have strung up everywhere. And of course there still are nuclear plants and fossil fuel plants aren't going away in the next several decades at minimum.
Really think that will be the case over the lifetime of a power plant ?
Yes. Oh I'm sure the price of coal will fluctuate and become more competitive at times but as long as fracking remains viable, natural gas will have a price advantage over coal. Once solar and wind reach sufficient scale there really becomes little reason to continue to have this massive infrastructure to support coal as a fuel source on the scale we do today. Cheap solar = expensive coal.
All biofuels are in fact solar.
Yes and no. Most biofuels really are just an inefficient conversion of diesel to biofuel. Solar is a necessary part of the equation but until you can get substantially more of the stored solar out of the biofuel than the cost of the diesel you put into farming it then it isn't really anything more than a conversion with no net energy gain. This is the main problem with corn generated ethanol. It's not clear that it results in more energy than the diesel fuel used to create it.
"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"
No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.
The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.
That's not how investing in new technologies works. Nothing new is cheaper until it can get to sufficient scale. Cars were not cheaper than horses for quite a number of years after the car was invented. Email wasn't cheaper than postal mail at first. Furthermore when you take the full cost of coal (including pollution mitigation), solar and wind are cheaper TODAY - without subsidies even. They only seem more expensive because coal doesn't have to clean up after itself. When we stop allowing fossil fuels to dump endless amounts of pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere without direct economic cost, then you can come and tell me how expensive wind and solar are.
The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.
"Most abundant energy source"? Nope. Solar energy is far more abundant and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground. The earth receives more energy in one hour from the sun than all of humanity uses in an entire year. "Cheapest"? Wrong again. Currently natural gas is cheaper in many cases at today's prices. So is on-shore wind, geothermal, and hydro. Nuclear is about equal to coal. Solar PV is competitive even without subsidies and falling fast. If you take into account the full cost of coal (including pollution) then it isn't even close to the cheapest option for power generation. Coal only seems cheap because we don't require coal plants to mitigate the full cost of the pollution (including CO2) that they produce. Yes the US has a lot of coal but the best thing we could possibly do with that is to leave most of it in the ground.
If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.
Why would we do such an idiotic thing? Natural gas plants currently make a lot more economic sense and while not clean are certainly cleaner than coal plants. Perhaps you don't care to actually be able to breathe the air? If you want to see the effects of your suggestion in real life I encourage you to go travel to China and see the results of abundant coal power. Never mind the fact that burning all that sequestered carbon is without question going to wreak havoc with the global climate. What, you thought that putting billions of tons of carbon that is currently buried into the atmosphere would come without consequence? That's a foolish and dangerous thing to believe.