My point is that there are a lot of daunting challenges to building a reliable commercial-scale fusion plant. They are probably all solvable. It is an open question whether you can solve all of those problems and produce a competitive source of electricity. For myself, I doubt it.
You're right. That is still a heck of a lot of enriched lithium. I got my numbers from skimming my sources.
I still think there is no guarantee that scaling up will necessarily be less expensive. New engineering problems are likely to arise as you scale up. And yes, while you will not need as much instrumentation in a production reactor, there is a lot of stuff a production reactor will need (like the ability to run more than thirty minutes) that isn't included in that cost. My own guess is that it will probably be a wash.
I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.
For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.
Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.
Some of the problems remaining to be solved:
Neutron flux (part 1). Most of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is in the high-energy neutron produced by the reaction. The best estimate is that the neutron flux from a 1GW fusion reactor would be one or two orders of magnitude higher than from a fission reactor. No known material can withstand that neutron flux. One other way to look at it is that in five years of operation, every atomic nucleus in whatever radiation shield you build will be hit hundreds of times over a five year period.
Neutron flux (part 2). the deuterium-tritium reaction produces one neutron. That neutron has to (1) heat a working fluid that can be used to run a turbine, and (2) strike a lithium nucleus with enough energy to breed tritium. You need to do that with every damned neutron to have a self-sustaining system. This is made even more challenging by the fact that neutrons will be emitted isotropically from the reactor. Yes, there are materials that can act as neutron amplifiers, but no one has ever done that on a large scale and it probably won't be easy or simple.
Lithium. You are going to need a lot of it. A 1GW reactor will probably need around 10000 tons of lithium. At $7/kg, that is seventy billion dollars worth of lithium. That is also a significant percentage of the world's annual production of lithium.
Tritium. Once you've made the tritium from the lithium, you need to get it back into the plasma where it can do some good. I note that both tritium and lithium will easily react with each other and separating them will be tricky.
Helium removal. Your fusion reaction will produce helium. Too much helium in the plasma will interfere with the reaction and lower the efficiency of the reactor. You need a system to get the helium out of the plasma without cooling it down. This system must operate continuously.
Scaling. W7X has a plasma volume of around 30 cubic meters. A 1GW fusion plant would need a plasma volume on the order of 1000 cubic meters. W7X will cost around a billion dollars -- straight-up extrapolation implies a cost north of 30 billion dollars. That doesn't include all of the systems described above or a turbine to actually generate electricity. I also point out that scaling up isn't necessarily cheaper either.
I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.
Try getting a database spread across multiple servers without good clock sync. Try getting version control + build systems working well over a network without good clock sync.
It is kind of like having unguarded critical sections in your code. You might get something that works most of the time but you'll be left with mysterious and messy failures that are hard to explain, hard to reproduce, and make you want to gouge your own eyeballs out. I'd rather keep my eyeballs in their sockets where they belong, thank you.
And most of us are too busy to write our own multi-server database systems that don't require clock sync. When you come out with yours let me know.
If "making yourself available" means answering a short phone call and answering a quick question (e.g. 'what is the root password for "fitzroy"?) then it is not unreasonable. As the article says, it violates the fair labor standards act to contract to work without compensation. So it isn't probably enforceable in general.
A big part of my reaction to this story was anger. Not that it happened, but that I have been putting up with this crap for at least ten years and it isn't news until some bozo from Stockton has it happen to him.
I understand the border search exemption, but it is obvious to me that their intent (at least when searching my stuff) is to go on a fishing expedition -- twice after a few hours of snooping the homeland security ass^h^h^hofficer began to ask me questions about people who had sent me emails. Questions like "How did I know this person?" and "Why did they send this email to me?" It wasn't like these people were terrorists or drug dealers, they were obviously just on a fishing expedition.
Like TFA says (with immense understatement), "bio-weapons hardly ever work the first time." More accurately, having a complex bio-weapon like ebolapox or birdthrax work the first time you tried it would be like writing a couple million lines of C code and have it compile cleanly and execute more or less correctly the first time without any testing.
Also, if you want to survive the global plague you would be unleashing you would have to develop and test a vaccine as well.
I suspect strongly that the testing process would be easily detectable and that could probably give one ample warning time that an outbreak is coming. If a mysterious disease wiped out an entire village in, say, Syria or Yemen I'd argue that would more likely be a bioweapon than a natural outbreak.
I've said it before... what we need to do to make manned space travel a permanent thing and not an expensive luxury is to find and develop order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs, lighter and stronger materials, and much more reliable systems.
The long pole in the tent on costs nowadays is getting to orbit. If your launch costs to orbit are tens of thousands of dollars per kg your mars mission, which would require hundreds of tons of material put into orbit, will rapidly eat up any imaginable budget. If you can cut launch costs by factors of ten or a hundred the whole thing becomes a lot more doable.
How would you do it? For bulk materials and fuel, I'd probably go with a space cannon. Just because it sounds so damned cool. For getting people and more delicate things into orbit, I'd probably want do something like the black horse space plane concept using mid-air refueling of oxidizer and a non-cryogenic fuel. Actually emerging nanotechnologies have a lot of promise in novel fuel formulations that have very high energy to weight and are non-cryogenic.
The question I would ask in response is why is nuclear so expensive?
At its core, it shouldn't be....
The situation you have with power plants is that turbine costs are pretty much the same per watt -- whether you run steam, burn natural gas, run water (e.g. hydro), or have the wind turn it. Yes, there are quite a bit of engineering differences in the details, but everything in modern power production is pretty optimized so you end up with costs in the same general range. Now you can't run uranium (or coal) through a turbine, so you need a separate stage to heat the water (or working fluid of your choice). That right there adds enough cost and complexity to make fission (and coal, for that matter) uncompetitive. Unless you can make the nuclear part free you aren't going to get very far.
Given the direction costs are going on wind and solar, you'd be better off building three times the capacity and buying a bunch of batteries over building a nuclear plant.
For all of the talk about fission plants being dispatchable, very few people point out that current plant designs don't really let you throttle the power output very well, so in their own way fission plants are about as annoying as renewables in terms of balancing the grid.
The other problem with a fission plant over a renewable plant is that a fission plant is a bigger investment risk. If you are deploying solar panels out in the Mojave Desert you can start selling power pretty quickly, and if you decide to scale back your project you won't lose everything. A similar argument applies to wind power projects. With a fission plant you are looking at 5 years to build one on an existing site if everything goes perfectly. And if something goes wrong you can't build half a plant.
There is a hellacious difference (both moral and legal) between someone who genuinely has drawn a different conclusion from the data and someone who is being paid to confuse and obfuscate that data in the pursuit of profit.
Let me just say [pause to check the "Post Anonymously" box] that as someone in the financial industry, I have seen equally egregious mistakes (and far worse) when it comes to password security. Ashley Madison's password security is no worse than what you will find in the industry. That's what happens when you let "web developers" or an off-shore team have access to security credentials.
Let me just say that as someone who worked (and still sometimes consults/insults) in the computer security industry, I have seen highly qualified people (software engineers, architects, cryptographers) repeatedly make boneheaded mistakes with respect to handling encrypted or otherwise confidential data. I've made a few of those mistakes myself. Honestly, this stuff is quite difficult to get right.
The only "answer" is to have ruthlessly simple designs and implementations that can (and will) be repeatedly reviewed by trusted third parties.
If you are writing software, and need to handle encrypted data somewhere, be paranoid! The question is whether you can be paranoid enough, and that almost certainly will not be the case.
... except that practical fusion proposals don't use straight-up hydrogen. Rather they use deuterium (still pretty abundant) and tritium (rare with a short half-life that you have to manufacture somewhere, probably in a fission reactor). Some other proposed designs use isotopes of helium (notably helium-3) or boron or lithium, which again may well have to be produced as a byproduct of fission reactions.
I'd feel better about talking about fusion without the handwaving. The big hand wave is that you can use straight-up hydrogen, which is extremely unlikely in the short term since you have a much higher activation energy, and we can't even get the activation energy for deuterium-tritium reactions yet.
The other big hand wave is about radioactive waste. Since most of the energy output of likely fusion reactions we could use will be from neutrons, we will have to capture those neutrons in some moderating material (probably water) and produce heat -- which will of course make the water at least somewhat radioactive. Some neutrons will be absorbed by the mechanical components which will make them somewhat radioactive as well, and if you are producing enough energy it will probably be a challenge to find materials that can be durable enough to survive the neutron flux and still make a practical reactor.
A lot of the information that has been released, most notably employee emails and internal company documents, couldn't possibly have also been on the servers that held the databases for the AM site. So either (1) the hackers thoroughly penetrated the company and got *everything*, or (2) the people running AM were stupider than I believe possible (actually you would have to *work* to put all of your eggs in one basket that way), or (3) someone swiped backup tapes when they were on their way out the door.
The last theory is the simplest.
Most places I worked at did offsite backups. The backups were left at the front desk for the courier to pick up each day. If some backups went missing there probably wouldn't be a freakout -- they'd just figure someone had thrown them in the trash or picked them up by mistake. Even if they did freak out they would do so very privately.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that the system calls that you use to arrange time sync are, well, fragile and obscure and all-too-frequently broken by a new OS release. Also, a lot of bugs with respect to time synchronization are subtle and quick to anger and require quite a bit of time to reproduce and analyze.
In some ways, it would be a heck of a lot easier if we just forgot about stuff like having a monotonically increasing clock and clock skew caused by network latency. Just have everyone hard-set their clock every day from a GPS receiver, say. Of course, you'd end up with poor synchronization amongst hosts, which would easily cause its own kind of havoc. And your timestamps would be untrustworthy during that period where you are hard-setting the clock. There isn't a perfect solution.
In the early and mid '90s, I advocated for managing software developers as creative people, rather than as an engineers. There are arguments for and against that position. A lot of my argument for that position focused around the observation that in most conventional engineering problems, what the problem you were solving and what the pieces you were using to solve the problem and how they fit together was pretty well-defined. This is rarely the case with most software projects.
When I was shopping various projects to VCs around 1994 and 1995 I often used the term "software band" to describe the kind of development organization I wanted to build. Usually right before being escorted out of the building...
It seems disappointing to me that we now use the term "Rock Star" to describe a person who is merely extremely capable, but seem to have forgotten that there might have to be a very different management approach to get the most out of such a person. My own suspicion is that there are a lot of latent rock stars out there, that if they were just aimed properly would be able to do awesome things. Maybe that is a pipe dream.
... or at least fired and not allowed to design ever again.
First off, on the floor plans the only window that opens is on the same side as the silly gullwing door. So no cross ventilation. I also see no obvious vents to compensate. It is going to get awfully stinky in there before you suffocate.
Oh, and the kitchenette? Is the range top electric? Good luck with that and that tiny solar array and batteries. On the other hand, if it is a propane range top you will suffocate much more quickly.
And that cute little solar array on top of the egg? Well, unless you are in Ecuador at certain times of the year a lot of your expensive solar cells will always be in the shade, not doing you a bit of good. People who actually have used solar would realize that an array that small needs to be mounted on a platform so you can at least point it south at the optimum angle for the season.
I also completely fail to understand how the egg shape makes it easy to collect water.
Speaking as someone who actually lived off the grid for 18 months, it was extremely disheartening to realize that a substantial majority of my power was being spent converting from DC to AC then back to DC (I worked it out and actually measured it, it was about 65 percent of the generated power was being radiated away as heat). So I spent several months building 12VDC adapters for my laptop, my satellite internet connection, and the battery chargers for my cellphone and digital camera. Since USB was extremely newfangled I ended up with a design that was a major fire hazard where the adaptors screwed into 12VDC light sockets. It worked, but it was ugly.
I am coming full circle back to solar, largely as a backup power source. My best estimate for a large propane generator and the shack to put it in that will power my well pump, my refrigerator, the infloor radiant heating system, and a few outlets to charge that damned cellphone is around fifteen grand. A comparable solar power system runs about the same, but I won't be paying for propane (nor will my refrigerator or heat be running at night).
I'd worked at nine different startups until I finally got reasonably lucky. Seriously, that is roughly the odds. Somewhere around ten percent of them are really successful. And that is honestly all you need. Is it really any worse than working as second assistant icon bezel engineer at some giant company on a project that you know will get killed anyway in the next reorg? The pay is roughly the same and the frustration and alienation level are comparable, if for different reasons.
Startups can be a lot of fun, especially if you don't get too emotionally attached or take it too seriously. And all you need is to be in the right place at the right time once and you can retire to a monastery in Bhutan or go fly-fishing in Montana. That isn't too bad a deal.
As for the lying part, I'd more accurately describe it as a kind of self-delusion or cognitive dissonance. One of the hard parts about being the founder of a company is that 24/7 you need to be positive and upbeat. My own experience in the founders seat and getting a great many doors slammed in my face by VCs is that if you don't believe in what you are doing, no one else will. Rejection can only make you stronger.
Oh, and by the way, mercury is a toxic substance with pretty specific rules with respect to disposal. I doubt leaving it in an abandoned warehouse is complying with those rules.
Seriously, some kid likes to play with chemistry. Good on him.
I made plenty of bombs when I was a kid. Even had a cop talk to me. All he said was make sure nobody got hurt and don't start a fire you can't put out.
I've found that you can go a long way with in-jokes and circumlocutions that only an employee at the given location could know.
An example might be the name of a local watering hole. Especially if there is an in-joke name at the company. That way you send one of your guys an email that says, "Your new password is the official name of the West Conference Room -- change it sooner than immediately" or "Your new password is the name of the hot waitress at Poltergeist Chinese -- change it sooner than immediately". This works all the better if "Poltergeist Chinese" isn't the official name of the restaurant in question (god I hope it isn't).
Usually you end up having a lot of gadgets in the office that are beyond the ken of IT, either out of laziness, willful blindness, or just not telling them. In most shops those gadgets all usually end up having the same password for sanity purposes, and if they are behind a decent firewall and not directly connected to the Big Wires that really isn't a problem. Usually there will be a common and well-known password (hopefully not something like "password" or "secret" or "please", although I have seen all three). If you have this kind of situation, you can send an email of the form, "your new password is the usual and accustomed password, change it right away."
If the intent is to catch actual criminal wrongdoing, rather than make large swathes of the population criminal, the structuring rules are a very good examples of a bad law. First off, the reporting requirements are poorly understood by banking officials who should know better, and the actual reporting can be for cash amounts of as little as $3000.
A few years back I was involved in what became a rather complicated transaction to buy a rather expensive used car. Because the owners were extremely flakey and confused there ended up being a number (I think five) wire transfers to different accounts. This produced a blizzard of enquiries from my bank and later from federal officials with various agencies with three-letter acronyms. All of the enquiries were worded in a maximally threatening way. All I wanted to do was buy a stupid car. Which turned out to be a piece of shit anyway.
There are lots of examples of this. The Migratory Bird Treaty act is a great example. Say you find some bird feathers in your yard, and decide to keep them. Say your kids find some more and keep them too. Oops! $5000 fine per feather. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And by the way, if you can identify your bird feathers and they came from non-migratory birds, you are fine. Unless they are eagle feathers, in which case you are screwed. Except if you are Native American and using the eagle feathers for legitimate cultural purposes.
Don't even get me started on insider trading laws. Oh hell, as the insider trading laws are written, there is no way to be employed by a company doing useful work and not be at least technically in violation of said laws. Whatever guidance your corporate attorneys give you is based on the SECs guidance on what they actually want to prosecute. That guidance could change tomorrow if they decide to go after you.
I remember somewhere that this kind of administrative law crap was a substantial factor in what caused the American Revolution.
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My point is that there are a lot of daunting challenges to building a reliable commercial-scale fusion plant. They are probably all solvable. It is an open question whether you can solve all of those problems and produce a competitive source of electricity. For myself, I doubt it.
You're right. That is still a heck of a lot of enriched lithium. I got my numbers from skimming my sources.
I still think there is no guarantee that scaling up will necessarily be less expensive. New engineering problems are likely to arise as you scale up. And yes, while you will not need as much instrumentation in a production reactor, there is a lot of stuff a production reactor will need (like the ability to run more than thirty minutes) that isn't included in that cost. My own guess is that it will probably be a wash.
I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.
For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.
Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.
Some of the problems remaining to be solved:
I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.
Sources: matter2energy, Do The Math
Good luck on that.
Try getting a database spread across multiple servers without good clock sync. Try getting version control + build systems working well over a network without good clock sync.
It is kind of like having unguarded critical sections in your code. You might get something that works most of the time but you'll be left with mysterious and messy failures that are hard to explain, hard to reproduce, and make you want to gouge your own eyeballs out. I'd rather keep my eyeballs in their sockets where they belong, thank you.
And most of us are too busy to write our own multi-server database systems that don't require clock sync. When you come out with yours let me know.
If "making yourself available" means answering a short phone call and answering a quick question (e.g. 'what is the root password for "fitzroy"?) then it is not unreasonable. As the article says, it violates the fair labor standards act to contract to work without compensation. So it isn't probably enforceable in general.
A big part of my reaction to this story was anger. Not that it happened, but that I have been putting up with this crap for at least ten years and it isn't news until some bozo from Stockton has it happen to him.
I understand the border search exemption, but it is obvious to me that their intent (at least when searching my stuff) is to go on a fishing expedition -- twice after a few hours of snooping the homeland security ass^h^h^hofficer began to ask me questions about people who had sent me emails. Questions like "How did I know this person?" and "Why did they send this email to me?" It wasn't like these people were terrorists or drug dealers, they were obviously just on a fishing expedition.
... sometimes literally.
Like TFA says (with immense understatement), "bio-weapons hardly ever work the first time." More accurately, having a complex bio-weapon like ebolapox or birdthrax work the first time you tried it would be like writing a couple million lines of C code and have it compile cleanly and execute more or less correctly the first time without any testing.
Also, if you want to survive the global plague you would be unleashing you would have to develop and test a vaccine as well.
I suspect strongly that the testing process would be easily detectable and that could probably give one ample warning time that an outbreak is coming. If a mysterious disease wiped out an entire village in, say, Syria or Yemen I'd argue that would more likely be a bioweapon than a natural outbreak.
I've said it before... what we need to do to make manned space travel a permanent thing and not an expensive luxury is to find and develop order-of-magnitude improvements in launch costs, lighter and stronger materials, and much more reliable systems.
The long pole in the tent on costs nowadays is getting to orbit. If your launch costs to orbit are tens of thousands of dollars per kg your mars mission, which would require hundreds of tons of material put into orbit, will rapidly eat up any imaginable budget. If you can cut launch costs by factors of ten or a hundred the whole thing becomes a lot more doable.
How would you do it? For bulk materials and fuel, I'd probably go with a space cannon. Just because it sounds so damned cool. For getting people and more delicate things into orbit, I'd probably want do something like the black horse space plane concept using mid-air refueling of oxidizer and a non-cryogenic fuel. Actually emerging nanotechnologies have a lot of promise in novel fuel formulations that have very high energy to weight and are non-cryogenic.
The question I would ask in response is why is nuclear so expensive?
At its core, it shouldn't be. ...
The situation you have with power plants is that turbine costs are pretty much the same per watt -- whether you run steam, burn natural gas, run water (e.g. hydro), or have the wind turn it. Yes, there are quite a bit of engineering differences in the details, but everything in modern power production is pretty optimized so you end up with costs in the same general range. Now you can't run uranium (or coal) through a turbine, so you need a separate stage to heat the water (or working fluid of your choice). That right there adds enough cost and complexity to make fission (and coal, for that matter) uncompetitive. Unless you can make the nuclear part free you aren't going to get very far.
Given the direction costs are going on wind and solar, you'd be better off building three times the capacity and buying a bunch of batteries over building a nuclear plant.
For all of the talk about fission plants being dispatchable, very few people point out that current plant designs don't really let you throttle the power output very well, so in their own way fission plants are about as annoying as renewables in terms of balancing the grid.
The other problem with a fission plant over a renewable plant is that a fission plant is a bigger investment risk. If you are deploying solar panels out in the Mojave Desert you can start selling power pretty quickly, and if you decide to scale back your project you won't lose everything. A similar argument applies to wind power projects. With a fission plant you are looking at 5 years to build one on an existing site if everything goes perfectly. And if something goes wrong you can't build half a plant.
There is a hellacious difference (both moral and legal) between someone who genuinely has drawn a different conclusion from the data and someone who is being paid to confuse and obfuscate that data in the pursuit of profit.
Let me just say [pause to check the "Post Anonymously" box] that as someone in the financial industry, I have seen equally egregious mistakes (and far worse) when it comes to password security. Ashley Madison's password security is no worse than what you will find in the industry. That's what happens when you let "web developers" or an off-shore team have access to security credentials.
Let me just say that as someone who worked (and still sometimes consults/insults) in the computer security industry, I have seen highly qualified people (software engineers, architects, cryptographers) repeatedly make boneheaded mistakes with respect to handling encrypted or otherwise confidential data. I've made a few of those mistakes myself. Honestly, this stuff is quite difficult to get right.
The only "answer" is to have ruthlessly simple designs and implementations that can (and will) be repeatedly reviewed by trusted third parties.
If you are writing software, and need to handle encrypted data somewhere, be paranoid! The question is whether you can be paranoid enough, and that almost certainly will not be the case.
I actually think this is one of the most awesome things I have seen on slashdot in a long time.
Someone did a real science experiment with fifty bucks worth of parts and two coffee cans.
It was episode 10, airing in September 2003. Oh, and I hope the FBI can find burning man, unlike Lt. Dangle and his crew.
... except that practical fusion proposals don't use straight-up hydrogen. Rather they use deuterium (still pretty abundant) and tritium (rare with a short half-life that you have to manufacture somewhere, probably in a fission reactor). Some other proposed designs use isotopes of helium (notably helium-3) or boron or lithium, which again may well have to be produced as a byproduct of fission reactions.
I'd feel better about talking about fusion without the handwaving. The big hand wave is that you can use straight-up hydrogen, which is extremely unlikely in the short term since you have a much higher activation energy, and we can't even get the activation energy for deuterium-tritium reactions yet.
The other big hand wave is about radioactive waste. Since most of the energy output of likely fusion reactions we could use will be from neutrons, we will have to capture those neutrons in some moderating material (probably water) and produce heat -- which will of course make the water at least somewhat radioactive. Some neutrons will be absorbed by the mechanical components which will make them somewhat radioactive as well, and if you are producing enough energy it will probably be a challenge to find materials that can be durable enough to survive the neutron flux and still make a practical reactor.
This whole thing screams "inside job".
A lot of the information that has been released, most notably employee emails and internal company documents, couldn't possibly have also been on the servers that held the databases for the AM site. So either (1) the hackers thoroughly penetrated the company and got *everything*, or (2) the people running AM were stupider than I believe possible (actually you would have to *work* to put all of your eggs in one basket that way), or (3) someone swiped backup tapes when they were on their way out the door.
The last theory is the simplest.
Most places I worked at did offsite backups. The backups were left at the front desk for the courier to pick up each day. If some backups went missing there probably wouldn't be a freakout -- they'd just figure someone had thrown them in the trash or picked them up by mistake. Even if they did freak out they would do so very privately.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that the system calls that you use to arrange time sync are, well, fragile and obscure and all-too-frequently broken by a new OS release. Also, a lot of bugs with respect to time synchronization are subtle and quick to anger and require quite a bit of time to reproduce and analyze.
In some ways, it would be a heck of a lot easier if we just forgot about stuff like having a monotonically increasing clock and clock skew caused by network latency. Just have everyone hard-set their clock every day from a GPS receiver, say. Of course, you'd end up with poor synchronization amongst hosts, which would easily cause its own kind of havoc. And your timestamps would be untrustworthy during that period where you are hard-setting the clock. There isn't a perfect solution.
In the early and mid '90s, I advocated for managing software developers as creative people, rather than as an engineers. There are arguments for and against that position. A lot of my argument for that position focused around the observation that in most conventional engineering problems, what the problem you were solving and what the pieces you were using to solve the problem and how they fit together was pretty well-defined. This is rarely the case with most software projects.
When I was shopping various projects to VCs around 1994 and 1995 I often used the term "software band" to describe the kind of development organization I wanted to build. Usually right before being escorted out of the building...
It seems disappointing to me that we now use the term "Rock Star" to describe a person who is merely extremely capable, but seem to have forgotten that there might have to be a very different management approach to get the most out of such a person. My own suspicion is that there are a lot of latent rock stars out there, that if they were just aimed properly would be able to do awesome things. Maybe that is a pipe dream.
... or at least fired and not allowed to design ever again.
First off, on the floor plans the only window that opens is on the same side as the silly gullwing door. So no cross ventilation. I also see no obvious vents to compensate. It is going to get awfully stinky in there before you suffocate.
Oh, and the kitchenette? Is the range top electric? Good luck with that and that tiny solar array and batteries. On the other hand, if it is a propane range top you will suffocate much more quickly.
And that cute little solar array on top of the egg? Well, unless you are in Ecuador at certain times of the year a lot of your expensive solar cells will always be in the shade, not doing you a bit of good. People who actually have used solar would realize that an array that small needs to be mounted on a platform so you can at least point it south at the optimum angle for the season.
I also completely fail to understand how the egg shape makes it easy to collect water.
Kill it before it reproduces, please.
Speaking as someone who actually lived off the grid for 18 months, it was extremely disheartening to realize that a substantial majority of my power was being spent converting from DC to AC then back to DC (I worked it out and actually measured it, it was about 65 percent of the generated power was being radiated away as heat). So I spent several months building 12VDC adapters for my laptop, my satellite internet connection, and the battery chargers for my cellphone and digital camera. Since USB was extremely newfangled I ended up with a design that was a major fire hazard where the adaptors screwed into 12VDC light sockets. It worked, but it was ugly.
I am coming full circle back to solar, largely as a backup power source. My best estimate for a large propane generator and the shack to put it in that will power my well pump, my refrigerator, the infloor radiant heating system, and a few outlets to charge that damned cellphone is around fifteen grand. A comparable solar power system runs about the same, but I won't be paying for propane (nor will my refrigerator or heat be running at night).
I'd worked at nine different startups until I finally got reasonably lucky. Seriously, that is roughly the odds. Somewhere around ten percent of them are really successful. And that is honestly all you need. Is it really any worse than working as second assistant icon bezel engineer at some giant company on a project that you know will get killed anyway in the next reorg? The pay is roughly the same and the frustration and alienation level are comparable, if for different reasons.
Startups can be a lot of fun, especially if you don't get too emotionally attached or take it too seriously. And all you need is to be in the right place at the right time once and you can retire to a monastery in Bhutan or go fly-fishing in Montana. That isn't too bad a deal.
As for the lying part, I'd more accurately describe it as a kind of self-delusion or cognitive dissonance. One of the hard parts about being the founder of a company is that 24/7 you need to be positive and upbeat. My own experience in the founders seat and getting a great many doors slammed in my face by VCs is that if you don't believe in what you are doing, no one else will. Rejection can only make you stronger.
Seattle was wrecked long ago. Amazon is merely defiling the carcass.
Oh, and by the way, mercury is a toxic substance with pretty specific rules with respect to disposal. I doubt leaving it in an abandoned warehouse is complying with those rules.
Seriously, some kid likes to play with chemistry. Good on him.
I made plenty of bombs when I was a kid. Even had a cop talk to me. All he said was make sure nobody got hurt and don't start a fire you can't put out.
I've found that you can go a long way with in-jokes and circumlocutions that only an employee at the given location could know.
An example might be the name of a local watering hole. Especially if there is an in-joke name at the company. That way you send one of your guys an email that says, "Your new password is the official name of the West Conference Room -- change it sooner than immediately" or "Your new password is the name of the hot waitress at Poltergeist Chinese -- change it sooner than immediately". This works all the better if "Poltergeist Chinese" isn't the official name of the restaurant in question (god I hope it isn't).
Usually you end up having a lot of gadgets in the office that are beyond the ken of IT, either out of laziness, willful blindness, or just not telling them. In most shops those gadgets all usually end up having the same password for sanity purposes, and if they are behind a decent firewall and not directly connected to the Big Wires that really isn't a problem. Usually there will be a common and well-known password (hopefully not something like "password" or "secret" or "please", although I have seen all three). If you have this kind of situation, you can send an email of the form, "your new password is the usual and accustomed password, change it right away."
If the intent is to catch actual criminal wrongdoing, rather than make large swathes of the population criminal, the structuring rules are a very good examples of a bad law. First off, the reporting requirements are poorly understood by banking officials who should know better, and the actual reporting can be for cash amounts of as little as $3000.
A few years back I was involved in what became a rather complicated transaction to buy a rather expensive used car. Because the owners were extremely flakey and confused there ended up being a number (I think five) wire transfers to different accounts. This produced a blizzard of enquiries from my bank and later from federal officials with various agencies with three-letter acronyms. All of the enquiries were worded in a maximally threatening way. All I wanted to do was buy a stupid car. Which turned out to be a piece of shit anyway.
There are lots of examples of this. The Migratory Bird Treaty act is a great example. Say you find some bird feathers in your yard, and decide to keep them. Say your kids find some more and keep them too. Oops! $5000 fine per feather. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse. And by the way, if you can identify your bird feathers and they came from non-migratory birds, you are fine. Unless they are eagle feathers, in which case you are screwed. Except if you are Native American and using the eagle feathers for legitimate cultural purposes.
Don't even get me started on insider trading laws. Oh hell, as the insider trading laws are written, there is no way to be employed by a company doing useful work and not be at least technically in violation of said laws. Whatever guidance your corporate attorneys give you is based on the SECs guidance on what they actually want to prosecute. That guidance could change tomorrow if they decide to go after you.
I remember somewhere that this kind of administrative law crap was a substantial factor in what caused the American Revolution.