> (It is absolutely trivial to ruin an LTO tape. I've had dozens destroyed by Iron Mountain.)
Stats please.
Iron Mountain are trying to sell their "services" to $orkplace and I've been resisting for a long time due to these kind of stories. It's getting harder and harder to veto manglement wanting to farm stuff out to them vs buying a few more data safes.
1: They're expensive. 2: BDXL drives are rare and expensive, with only 2 makers left. 3: The lifespan of the discs is potentially less than a decade.
By the time you start taking that into account it's a better bargain to buy a (very expensive) LTO7 drive and feed it with (relatively cheap) 6TB capacity tapes. Or step back a generation and buy a (cheaper) LTO6 drive and (very cheap) 2.5TB tapes. (those are raw capacity, not the "compressed" claims made for them)
The only caveat with this approach is that you should ensure your environment is clean. They're somewhat dust-sensitive.
You're completely correct and why light regulation is needed.
The problem is that the assholes can use excessive regulation to win out too, buying laws that eliminate competition.
I've seen this happen specifically in taxis, where heavy regulation in the town that I grew up in resulted in taxis only being provided by one company (a supposed cooperative) that were expensive, badly maintained AND slow to turn up. (1970s/80s)
That regulation was a response to an unregulated market in the 1950s where the opposite problem occurred.
These days they seem to have solved the problem. There are multiple taxi companies - but compulsary regular vehicle inspections, limits on driver hours along with tools to enforce it and regular driver checks. As a result taxi costs are about half what they were 10 years ago and the drivers are a lot politer, but they don't get to live in the most expensive part of town anymore.
Heavy fog/snowing == system slows down to safe speeds - which most humans do not and is why we end up with massive fogbound pileups.
The Joshua Brown trailer incident was specifically because the system wasn't programmed to encounter clotheslining events - and given that Joshua _always_ recorded his trips, there's still the nagging question of what happened to his dashcam - it's never been found. (IE: there are a lot of unanswered questions about the crash and the conduct of the trucker)
The chinese tesla incident is debateable (the guy was in a lane which the overhead gantries were signalling as closed and if you've driven in china you'll know how bad the driving is generally), but more to the point the system and manuals give explicit warning that it cannot detect and react in time to stationary objects directly in front when travelling at 50+mph.
Tesla's "autopilot" is an advanced driver assist/cruise control, NOT a self driving system. That's why the germans have legally prohibited Tesla from calling it "autopilot" or anything else which implies the driver can stop paying attention to the road.
Sensor costs are what's driving the attempts to reduce the numbers - but in some cases it makes more sense to use more, lower powered sensors with a narrower field of view.
WRT software updates: The security concerns are primarily about the complete lack of attention paid to any kind of security. A car doesn't need to be 100% connected to update its systems (there are good reasons for NOT doing it whilst in motion) and redhat's RPM updates come with better signature verification than most automotive updates, so the first target for improvement is fairly easy tow.
Bear in mind that automated driving systems don't have to be perfect, just better than the majority of human drivers - and that really isn't difficult to achieve. For areas outside of the robot's experience the vehicle will need to _stop_ and then hand control over to the passenger or a remote operator. Handing over control whilst moving is simply too dangerous to even consider.
The old saw about people standing in front of a car and blocking it is a strawman. A human driver would eventually start pushing through or drive around the obstacle and so will a robot. (They will have to learn to do this for instances like driving through herds of cows or flows of sheep, as I had to do regularly when living in rural areas)
For the most part it won't take legislation to force people out of the driver's seat.
Once the stats come in showing that robots are safer than meatsacks, the differential in insurance premiums will take care of the rest.
At some point further down the track (as robots become ubiqutous) you can expect the requirements for actually holding a driving license become _much_ tougher and you'll also see a requirement for XYZ number of hours/year to keep the license, just like aviation licensing.
The _vast_ majority of people who drive, do so for the vast majority of the time because they have to, not because they want to. This is a primary factor in driver distraction (they'd rather be doing something else) and as such the initial tranche of change will be done voluntarily.
"I have never encountered more mean spirited drivers anywhere in the world. I honestly think the drivers in Paris believe that they are on earth purely to punish each other."
On the other hand, the Parisian public transportation system is very good and gets you most places faster than can be driven.
Paris has a major pollution problem. It's surprising that cars aren't banned within the old city wall ring road already.
Self-driving cars are covered in sensors. It's no longer "your word against his" when it comes to insurance claims.
If automated cars are seen to have significant faults which result in them causing crashes, software updates can rectify that across the fleet quickly - with humans that means extra individual training which most won't do.
Bear in mind that most human drivers are barely competent to actually pilot a machine and tend to be easily distracted - automotons will be paying 100% attention 100% of the time in 100% of directions ("tunnel vision" is a major contributor to crashes). Even the absolute best humans have bad days and make tens of mistakes per hour and one of the larger challenges for automated vehicles is taking account of human driver errors (eg, when the human fails to yield right of way, etc)
"Would you trust one of these things to haul nuclear waste or toxic chemicals? "
More than I would trust a human driver. At least I know it would be paying 100% attention 100% of the time and not be distracted by XYZ unrelated item.
People primarily 'avoid' public transportation for convenience/availability reasons and secondarily due to perceived poor driving. Busses in particular tend to be sized for peak periods and the number of drivers available, without regard to the damage they do to the roads (Damage is related to the 5th power of axle weight and the 2nd power of speed), which in turn results in their running costs being uneconomic outside of peak periods. If you have self-driving busses there are pretty good arguments in favour of using more, smaller ones on the road when assessing the overall costs - some cities have found that pushing people towards public transport has actually resulted in significantly higher road maintenance expenses despite an overall reduction in pollution, etc.
It's also worth noting that the single biggest cause of traffic congestion isn't so much the number of cars on the road so much as assholes driving selfishly. In the case of "ghost tailbacks" on british motorways (no crash, just stopped/slowed traffic for no apparent reason) it's been discovered that if only 10-15% of drivers observe safe/legal following distances these will dissipate in a matter of minutes, vs persisting for hours. The ramifications for mostly-automated roads are interesting and advanced v2v communications may not prove necessary.
The reason they tend to be heavily regulated is because lack of regulation has historically led to cut throat competition which invariably leads to a situation where safety is compromised and/or taxi companies start a rapid boom/bust cycle. Some form of light regulation to ensure safety and to try and stabilise periodic gluts/shortages of taxis is desireable.
Light regulation usually turns to heavy regulation due to regulatory capture. A "stable market" where competition can neither increase or decrease excludes newcomers and usually results in consumer prices increasing - which is clearly counterproductive to the economy as a whole.
The interesting thing is that for all the vaunted "competition" and "free market" rhetoric thrown about, the USA has some of the most regulated and monopolistic markets in the world across most sectors of its economy and for the most part these aren't legislated that way for the benefit of consumers. When you start digging into who's associated with who, the country isn't much different to certain kleptocracies that the leadership likes to portray as "the enemy"
For city dwellers - especially ones not in the endless suburbia of the USA, the non-owning model is gaining a lot of traction, in conjunction with more and better quality public transport - many cities are taking active steps to discourage car ownership and use (such as congestion charges, high parking fees and outright bans on cars in some areas) - not just on pollution grounds but also because cars are a significant hazard on heavily used streets.
Public transportation is only filth and squalor (like many USA ones are) because people let it be like that. In many other parts of the world, public transport is clean, efficient and cheap - and even executives use it, or cycle to work (or both. Bikes on trains are a common sight in many countries)
The target for many european cities is a reduction in private ownership of at least 90% and a reduction of actual vehicles in cities by 80%
Regarding your scenario regarding work times, everyone being at a particular location at a particular time is becoming less and less necessary, even in factories. By spreading the ridership peak public transportation systems can avoid most of the stressfulness associated with the morning crush.
Disclosure: I drive. There's no public transport where I usually work, in a semi-rural environment. However if work requires I head into a city, picking arrival time even 25 minutes outside the peak means the public transport is uncrowded.
It's not so much an issue that the spectrum is in use, but the ratio of the channel width to the frequency.
Most antennas and RF circuits have an absolute maximum usable deviation of about 1.2x from their centre frequency and channelisation is usually somewhat narrower than that. That's why there are more usable wifi channels at 5GHz than at 2.45GHz (The original channel number assignments are based on 802.11 1.6MB/s rangelan systems, which didn't suffer from overlap due to their narrow bandwidth)
This is just generalities based on passive circuits with "standard" Q factors. It's possible to get greater bandwidth at any given centre frequency but there are invariably tradeoffs in sensitivity, efficiency or circuit complexity.
atmospheric absorbtion is not linear with frequency - or it'd be opaque to visible light.
There are a number of clear "windows" across the frequency spectrum.
Extrapolating anything from 2.45GHz in particular is unwise, as this was specifically left as an unlicensed ISM band in the first place because of its susceptability to path losses caused by water.
Large wind turbines are surprisingly expensive to run. The 2MW+ ones have an alarming tendency to shred their gearboxes or have them catch fire - to the point where they're barely breaking even with subsidies - and having 8MW ones at sea makes it that much harder/more expensive to maintain them.
The cost of reticulating the network to them is also a big deal. Windpower generation is seldom located convenient to demand centres.
I'm fairly sure that practical molten salt nuclear systems will result in forests of turbines being abandoned, as unlike [PB]WRs, MSRs can be _safely_ located near or in population/demand centres and not be dependent on geologically unstable features (rivers tend to track fault lines and drought conditions mean river-cooled xWR systems have to be derated in hot weather, lakes and seas are subject to tsunamis) and will be substantially cheaper to operate than current nuke tech (which is around half the cost of wind/solar as it is), due to the reduced waste handling costs.
It's worth noting that Edison's original power plans were for regionalised, distributed power generation, but our current worldwide centralised power generation model was proven more economically and physically practical more than 80 years ago. Solar/Wind plants are in many ways a step back to that century-old philosophy with its attendant massive administrative complexity. Whilst grid automation could handle a good deal of the load/generation balancing, politicalisation of generation makes it much harder for planners and operators - and the cost of that interference is borne by energy consumers, with approximately 40% of the average UK power bill being attributable to wind/solar systems that only average 4-6% of the actual generation.
Wind and solar systems are only going to stop being a network menace when they are teamed with energy storage local to the generation plant, to smooth the peaky feeds they provide. At that point their economics largely go out the window as you need ~50% increase in generation capacity to maintain the same overall output - and that's on top of actual output over time being only 15-20% of nameplate rating, necessitating massive overbuild to get real capacity to where it's needed. It effectively takes 1800-2200 2MW turbines to match _one_ 1200MW power station, not the 600 you'd think at first blush - and even then 600 turbines is a LOT of space. (Yes, oceanic turbines are bigger but see comments above about the gearboxes and reticulation - there are only so many spaces suitable to install them anyway)
The thing about windfarms is that the low hanging fruit goes quickly - one example being the Tararua/Te Apiti/Te Rere Hau farms in New Zealand which are unusual as it they are in an area with near constant wind year round. The first tranche of turbines generated steady power, but followup ones have proven to be less and less cost effective, with more complaints about noise. Even these farms, with a near-constant wind supply don't go anywhere near nameplate output levels when averaged over a year.
Yes, there are times in europe when wind reaches 100% of energy consumption - but if you look closer you'll usually see that it's a combination of extremely low demand period coupled with unusually high winds over a widespread area, and until the issue of generation when the sun's not around and there's no wind coupled with demand peaks (such as Europe's rather notorious cold, still cloudless nights) is addressed, you'll still need backing capacity - which right now is fossil based. If you can make it practical to supply this with nuclear then for the incremental cost of enlarging the nuclear plant you also just made all those turbines/solar panels redundant.
"Alternative energy production has been growing at an exponential pace for 40 years and there's no reason for us to think that the rate of growth will slow anytime soon. "
The problem is that even if you carpet the countryside in windmails and panels you can only match existing power generation. In order to eliminate carbon you need to also convert domestic/industrial heating and as much transportation as possible to electricity AND get developing countries on board
That translates to an increase in demand in developed countries somewhere between 6-8 times and 20-50 times in developing countries over existing electricity generation capacity.
The only viable way of doing this is nuclear power and realistically we should have had MSRs ready 20 years ago. If anyone attempts to hold back developiong countries by restricting their energy generation there _will_ be a war. We can't keep billions of people poor in order to maintain our own affluent lifestyle. (Poor people have more children. The statistically proven way of reducing population growth to zero or negative is to make them affluent. Wars and famine only result in a minor downtick in population which is more than made up in a couple of generations. The Black Death proved that)
I tend to regard wind and solar as an expensive boondoggle because they're so fiddly. If you have upbiquitous MSRs (LFTR) then they're unnecessary irritations on the power grid which operators will be glad to get rid of.
One of the possible motivations that has been put forward is that he never intended to be taken seriously and was using it as a way of promoting his TV career.
Effectively a "Mouse that Roared" strategy.
As for Trump's business acumen, history would suggest that what he's best at is losing shit-tons of money, despite the business managers he surrounds himself with and the only reason he doesn't lose it faster is because he frequently doesn't pay his bills.
He's been playing the game of "Seeing how much he can get away with" his entire life, only this time has the potential to have extremely serious consequences.
"Fossil fuel companies have a direct interest in preventing electric vehicles (and renewable energy) from becoming a thing because it hurts them economically"
IE: All the easy stuff is gone and it's harder to both extract and refine sources which are being pulled out now. This costs more (which is why oil costs more than it did 30 years ago.
The recent price drops were an attempt by the Saudis to put the tight oil suppliers out of business by driving the sale price down below the extraction costs long enough to put them out of business (ie, price war). It's backfired and now their own economy is in trouble. Having lost the war, they're cutting back on production and that's why oil prices are climbing again. You can expect them to breach $200/barrel sometime in the next 2-3 years.
As far as renewables go, yes, wind and solar PV are feelgood solutions but the harsh reality is that in most parts of the world they can match existing power generation capacity, when the elimination of carbon for heating and transport is going to result in electricity requirements increasing by a factor of 4-8 over current capacity and the issue of developing economies having the potential to increase global carbon emissions by a factor of 5 even if the western world stopped using coal/oil/gas tomorrow also needs to be taken into account. (I won't bother rehashing the issue of intermittent power sources and all the hidden subsidies that are keeping renewables afloat. It's a murky rabbit hole when you start looking)
In order to avert major climactic problems, "We" need a crash program to build as many nuclear stations as possible, despite the factor that LFTR isn't practical yet (once it is, they can eat the waste).
That pesky fire problem is solved, but not rolled out (essentially, a fire extinguisher wrap on the cell)
The bigger problem is the cycling issue. 10k cycle cells have been demonstrated in the laboratory but probably another decade off commercial deployment (the target is 100k cycles.). The nice part (if they can make it work) is that the primary ingredient is olivine - one of the most common minerals on the planet.
Then the app developer is breaking the law and can be sued. You can't restrict sales of one version to one country in the EU, even if it's customised for that country.
The reason you're seeing $2 oil is a price war kicked off by the Saudis (who don't pay much to get their oil out of the ground) aimed at undercutting tight oil suppliers (who pay a lot more) and pushing the market price below the costs of extracting tight oil.
That's a strategy they lost (the tight oil suppliers didn't go bankrupt) and has put their entire economy in danger (SA is hugely in debt now and even considering introducing income tax). Prices are now rising quickly and you can expect them to go back to where they were, if not a lot higher.
Incidentally the high oil prices are an indication that we've hit peak oil worldwide - the easy stuff is all gone and now the cost of extracting oil is going up (through most of the 20th century you'd get an energy return of at least 25-50 barrels for every barrel expended. In some areas of extraction the return is down to 5 barrels per barrel expended. Tar sands and shale oil are extremely expensive to process (There's more energy in a bowl of cornflakes than in the same volume of oil shale).
The fact that tar sands are regarded as important is a big indicator. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that such resources were hopelessly uneconomic to extract and would only be a last resort supply.
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> (It is absolutely trivial to ruin an LTO tape. I've had dozens destroyed by Iron Mountain.)
Stats please.
Iron Mountain are trying to sell their "services" to $orkplace and I've been resisting for a long time due to these kind of stories. It's getting harder and harder to veto manglement wanting to farm stuff out to them vs buying a few more data safes.
FWIW: CDRW format is _extremely_ durable, because it's not dye based.
The problem is that it's very low capacity. :(
the problem with BDXL is threefold:
1: They're expensive.
2: BDXL drives are rare and expensive, with only 2 makers left.
3: The lifespan of the discs is potentially less than a decade.
By the time you start taking that into account it's a better bargain to buy a (very expensive) LTO7 drive and feed it with (relatively cheap) 6TB capacity tapes. Or step back a generation and buy a (cheaper) LTO6 drive and (very cheap) 2.5TB tapes. (those are raw capacity, not the "compressed" claims made for them)
The only caveat with this approach is that you should ensure your environment is clean. They're somewhat dust-sensitive.
You're completely correct and why light regulation is needed.
The problem is that the assholes can use excessive regulation to win out too, buying laws that eliminate competition.
I've seen this happen specifically in taxis, where heavy regulation in the town that I grew up in resulted in taxis only being provided by one company (a supposed cooperative) that were expensive, badly maintained AND slow to turn up. (1970s/80s)
That regulation was a response to an unregulated market in the 1950s where the opposite problem occurred.
These days they seem to have solved the problem. There are multiple taxi companies - but compulsary regular vehicle inspections, limits on driver hours along with tools to enforce it and regular driver checks. As a result taxi costs are about half what they were 10 years ago and the drivers are a lot politer, but they don't get to live in the most expensive part of town anymore.
Heavy fog/snowing == system slows down to safe speeds - which most humans do not and is why we end up with massive fogbound pileups.
The Joshua Brown trailer incident was specifically because the system wasn't programmed to encounter clotheslining events - and given that Joshua _always_ recorded his trips, there's still the nagging question of what happened to his dashcam - it's never been found. (IE: there are a lot of unanswered questions about the crash and the conduct of the trucker)
The chinese tesla incident is debateable (the guy was in a lane which the overhead gantries were signalling as closed and if you've driven in china you'll know how bad the driving is generally), but more to the point the system and manuals give explicit warning that it cannot detect and react in time to stationary objects directly in front when travelling at 50+mph.
Tesla's "autopilot" is an advanced driver assist/cruise control, NOT a self driving system. That's why the germans have legally prohibited Tesla from calling it "autopilot" or anything else which implies the driver can stop paying attention to the road.
Sensor costs are what's driving the attempts to reduce the numbers - but in some cases it makes more sense to use more, lower powered sensors with a narrower field of view.
WRT software updates: The security concerns are primarily about the complete lack of attention paid to any kind of security. A car doesn't need to be 100% connected to update its systems (there are good reasons for NOT doing it whilst in motion) and redhat's RPM updates come with better signature verification than most automotive updates, so the first target for improvement is fairly easy tow.
Bear in mind that automated driving systems don't have to be perfect, just better than the majority of human drivers - and that really isn't difficult to achieve. For areas outside of the robot's experience the vehicle will need to _stop_ and then hand control over to the passenger or a remote operator. Handing over control whilst moving is simply too dangerous to even consider.
The old saw about people standing in front of a car and blocking it is a strawman. A human driver would eventually start pushing through or drive around the obstacle and so will a robot. (They will have to learn to do this for instances like driving through herds of cows or flows of sheep, as I had to do regularly when living in rural areas)
For the most part it won't take legislation to force people out of the driver's seat.
Once the stats come in showing that robots are safer than meatsacks, the differential in insurance premiums will take care of the rest.
At some point further down the track (as robots become ubiqutous) you can expect the requirements for actually holding a driving license become _much_ tougher and you'll also see a requirement for XYZ number of hours/year to keep the license, just like aviation licensing.
The _vast_ majority of people who drive, do so for the vast majority of the time because they have to, not because they want to. This is a primary factor in driver distraction (they'd rather be doing something else) and as such the initial tranche of change will be done voluntarily.
"I have never encountered more mean spirited drivers anywhere in the world. I honestly think the drivers in Paris believe that they are on earth purely to punish each other."
On the other hand, the Parisian public transportation system is very good and gets you most places faster than can be driven.
Paris has a major pollution problem. It's surprising that cars aren't banned within the old city wall ring road already.
Self-driving cars are covered in sensors. It's no longer "your word against his" when it comes to insurance claims.
If automated cars are seen to have significant faults which result in them causing crashes, software updates can rectify that across the fleet quickly - with humans that means extra individual training which most won't do.
Bear in mind that most human drivers are barely competent to actually pilot a machine and tend to be easily distracted - automotons will be paying 100% attention 100% of the time in 100% of directions ("tunnel vision" is a major contributor to crashes). Even the absolute best humans have bad days and make tens of mistakes per hour and one of the larger challenges for automated vehicles is taking account of human driver errors (eg, when the human fails to yield right of way, etc)
"Would you trust one of these things to haul nuclear waste or toxic chemicals? "
More than I would trust a human driver. At least I know it would be paying 100% attention 100% of the time and not be distracted by XYZ unrelated item.
People primarily 'avoid' public transportation for convenience/availability reasons and secondarily due to perceived poor driving. Busses in particular tend to be sized for peak periods and the number of drivers available, without regard to the damage they do to the roads (Damage is related to the 5th power of axle weight and the 2nd power of speed), which in turn results in their running costs being uneconomic outside of peak periods.
If you have self-driving busses there are pretty good arguments in favour of using more, smaller ones on the road when assessing the overall costs - some cities have found that pushing people towards public transport has actually resulted in significantly higher road maintenance expenses despite an overall reduction in pollution, etc.
It's also worth noting that the single biggest cause of traffic congestion isn't so much the number of cars on the road so much as assholes driving selfishly. In the case of "ghost tailbacks" on british motorways (no crash, just stopped/slowed traffic for no apparent reason) it's been discovered that if only 10-15% of drivers observe safe/legal following distances these will dissipate in a matter of minutes, vs persisting for hours. The ramifications for mostly-automated roads are interesting and advanced v2v communications may not prove necessary.
The reason they tend to be heavily regulated is because lack of regulation has historically led to cut throat competition which invariably leads to a situation where safety is compromised and/or taxi companies start a rapid boom/bust cycle. Some form of light regulation to ensure safety and to try and stabilise periodic gluts/shortages of taxis is desireable.
Light regulation usually turns to heavy regulation due to regulatory capture. A "stable market" where competition can neither increase or decrease excludes newcomers and usually results in consumer prices increasing - which is clearly counterproductive to the economy as a whole.
The interesting thing is that for all the vaunted "competition" and "free market" rhetoric thrown about, the USA has some of the most regulated and monopolistic markets in the world across most sectors of its economy and for the most part these aren't legislated that way for the benefit of consumers. When you start digging into who's associated with who, the country isn't much different to certain kleptocracies that the leadership likes to portray as "the enemy"
For city dwellers - especially ones not in the endless suburbia of the USA, the non-owning model is gaining a lot of traction, in conjunction with more and better quality public transport - many cities are taking active steps to discourage car ownership and use (such as congestion charges, high parking fees and outright bans on cars in some areas) - not just on pollution grounds but also because cars are a significant hazard on heavily used streets.
Public transportation is only filth and squalor (like many USA ones are) because people let it be like that. In many other parts of the world, public transport is clean, efficient and cheap - and even executives use it, or cycle to work (or both. Bikes on trains are a common sight in many countries)
The target for many european cities is a reduction in private ownership of at least 90% and a reduction of actual vehicles in cities by 80%
Regarding your scenario regarding work times, everyone being at a particular location at a particular time is becoming less and less necessary, even in factories. By spreading the ridership peak public transportation systems can avoid most of the stressfulness associated with the morning crush.
Disclosure: I drive. There's no public transport where I usually work, in a semi-rural environment. However if work requires I head into a city, picking arrival time even 25 minutes outside the peak means the public transport is uncrowded.
It's not so much an issue that the spectrum is in use, but the ratio of the channel width to the frequency.
Most antennas and RF circuits have an absolute maximum usable deviation of about 1.2x from their centre frequency and channelisation is usually somewhat narrower than that. That's why there are more usable wifi channels at 5GHz than at 2.45GHz (The original channel number assignments are based on 802.11 1.6MB/s rangelan systems, which didn't suffer from overlap due to their narrow bandwidth)
This is just generalities based on passive circuits with "standard" Q factors. It's possible to get greater bandwidth at any given centre frequency but there are invariably tradeoffs in sensitivity, efficiency or circuit complexity.
atmospheric absorbtion is not linear with frequency - or it'd be opaque to visible light.
There are a number of clear "windows" across the frequency spectrum.
Extrapolating anything from 2.45GHz in particular is unwise, as this was specifically left as an unlicensed ISM band in the first place because of its susceptability to path losses caused by water.
Large wind turbines are surprisingly expensive to run. The 2MW+ ones have an alarming tendency to shred their gearboxes or have them catch fire - to the point where they're barely breaking even with subsidies - and having 8MW ones at sea makes it that much harder/more expensive to maintain them.
The cost of reticulating the network to them is also a big deal. Windpower generation is seldom located convenient to demand centres.
I'm fairly sure that practical molten salt nuclear systems will result in forests of turbines being abandoned, as unlike [PB]WRs, MSRs can be _safely_ located near or in population/demand centres and not be dependent on geologically unstable features (rivers tend to track fault lines and drought conditions mean river-cooled xWR systems have to be derated in hot weather, lakes and seas are subject to tsunamis) and will be substantially cheaper to operate than current nuke tech (which is around half the cost of wind/solar as it is), due to the reduced waste handling costs.
It's worth noting that Edison's original power plans were for regionalised, distributed power generation, but our current worldwide centralised power generation model was proven more economically and physically practical more than 80 years ago. Solar/Wind plants are in many ways a step back to that century-old philosophy with its attendant massive administrative complexity. Whilst grid automation could handle a good deal of the load/generation balancing, politicalisation of generation makes it much harder for planners and operators - and the cost of that interference is borne by energy consumers, with approximately 40% of the average UK power bill being attributable to wind/solar systems that only average 4-6% of the actual generation.
Wind and solar systems are only going to stop being a network menace when they are teamed with energy storage local to the generation plant, to smooth the peaky feeds they provide. At that point their economics largely go out the window as you need ~50% increase in generation capacity to maintain the same overall output - and that's on top of actual output over time being only 15-20% of nameplate rating, necessitating massive overbuild to get real capacity to where it's needed. It effectively takes 1800-2200 2MW turbines to match _one_ 1200MW power station, not the 600 you'd think at first blush - and even then 600 turbines is a LOT of space. (Yes, oceanic turbines are bigger but see comments above about the gearboxes and reticulation - there are only so many spaces suitable to install them anyway)
The thing about windfarms is that the low hanging fruit goes quickly - one example being the Tararua/Te Apiti/Te Rere Hau farms in New Zealand which are unusual as it they are in an area with near constant wind year round. The first tranche of turbines generated steady power, but followup ones have proven to be less and less cost effective, with more complaints about noise. Even these farms, with a near-constant wind supply don't go anywhere near nameplate output levels when averaged over a year.
Yes, there are times in europe when wind reaches 100% of energy consumption - but if you look closer you'll usually see that it's a combination of extremely low demand period coupled with unusually high winds over a widespread area, and until the issue of generation when the sun's not around and there's no wind coupled with demand peaks (such as Europe's rather notorious cold, still cloudless nights) is addressed, you'll still need backing capacity - which right now is fossil based. If you can make it practical to supply this with nuclear then for the incremental cost of enlarging the nuclear plant you also just made all those turbines/solar panels redundant.
"Alternative energy production has been growing at an exponential pace for 40 years and there's no reason for us to think that the rate of growth will slow anytime soon. "
The problem is that even if you carpet the countryside in windmails and panels you can only match existing power generation. In order to eliminate carbon you need to also convert domestic/industrial heating and as much transportation as possible to electricity AND get developing countries on board
That translates to an increase in demand in developed countries somewhere between 6-8 times and 20-50 times in developing countries over existing electricity generation capacity.
The only viable way of doing this is nuclear power and realistically we should have had MSRs ready 20 years ago. If anyone attempts to hold back developiong countries by restricting their energy generation there _will_ be a war. We can't keep billions of people poor in order to maintain our own affluent lifestyle. (Poor people have more children. The statistically proven way of reducing population growth to zero or negative is to make them affluent. Wars and famine only result in a minor downtick in population which is more than made up in a couple of generations. The Black Death proved that)
I tend to regard wind and solar as an expensive boondoggle because they're so fiddly. If you have upbiquitous MSRs (LFTR) then they're unnecessary irritations on the power grid which operators will be glad to get rid of.
One of the possible motivations that has been put forward is that he never intended to be taken seriously and was using it as a way of promoting his TV career.
Effectively a "Mouse that Roared" strategy.
As for Trump's business acumen, history would suggest that what he's best at is losing shit-tons of money, despite the business managers he surrounds himself with and the only reason he doesn't lose it faster is because he frequently doesn't pay his bills.
He's been playing the game of "Seeing how much he can get away with" his entire life, only this time has the potential to have extremely serious consequences.
"Fossil fuel companies have a direct interest in preventing electric vehicles (and renewable energy) from becoming a thing because it hurts them economically"
Lest anyone doubt this, they should look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"peak oil" has already been and gone.
IE: All the easy stuff is gone and it's harder to both extract and refine sources which are being pulled out now. This costs more (which is why oil costs more than it did 30 years ago.
The recent price drops were an attempt by the Saudis to put the tight oil suppliers out of business by driving the sale price down below the extraction costs long enough to put them out of business (ie, price war). It's backfired and now their own economy is in trouble. Having lost the war, they're cutting back on production and that's why oil prices are climbing again. You can expect them to breach $200/barrel sometime in the next 2-3 years.
As far as renewables go, yes, wind and solar PV are feelgood solutions but the harsh reality is that in most parts of the world they can match existing power generation capacity, when the elimination of carbon for heating and transport is going to result in electricity requirements increasing by a factor of 4-8 over current capacity and the issue of developing economies having the potential to increase global carbon emissions by a factor of 5 even if the western world stopped using coal/oil/gas tomorrow also needs to be taken into account. (I won't bother rehashing the issue of intermittent power sources and all the hidden subsidies that are keeping renewables afloat. It's a murky rabbit hole when you start looking)
In order to avert major climactic problems, "We" need a crash program to build as many nuclear stations as possible, despite the factor that LFTR isn't practical yet (once it is, they can eat the waste).
That pesky fire problem is solved, but not rolled out (essentially, a fire extinguisher wrap on the cell)
The bigger problem is the cycling issue. 10k cycle cells have been demonstrated in the laboratory but probably another decade off commercial deployment (the target is 100k cycles.). The nice part (if they can make it work) is that the primary ingredient is olivine - one of the most common minerals on the planet.
SpaceX's planned endgame will have more payload to orbit than the SaturnV (Falcon XX heavy)
Right now there aren't such big rockets because there isn't a _need_ for them. I'd still like someone to build a Sea Dragon though.
"But he could also demand you bring a camera into the booth and snap a picture of you making a cross in the right box on the ballot paper"
Which is exactly why taking photos of people voting or in the ballot box is expressly prohibited in most functional democracies.
Why buy the voters when you can simply buy the vote counters?
> you could always point to all the others and say "why this one but not those?".
"Thank you for pointing those out. We're now taking action against them too."
"That's an app developer thing"
Then the app developer is breaking the law and can be sued. You can't restrict sales of one version to one country in the EU, even if it's customised for that country.
The reason you're seeing $2 oil is a price war kicked off by the Saudis (who don't pay much to get their oil out of the ground) aimed at undercutting tight oil suppliers (who pay a lot more) and pushing the market price below the costs of extracting tight oil.
That's a strategy they lost (the tight oil suppliers didn't go bankrupt) and has put their entire economy in danger (SA is hugely in debt now and even considering introducing income tax). Prices are now rising quickly and you can expect them to go back to where they were, if not a lot higher.
Incidentally the high oil prices are an indication that we've hit peak oil worldwide - the easy stuff is all gone and now the cost of extracting oil is going up (through most of the 20th century you'd get an energy return of at least 25-50 barrels for every barrel expended. In some areas of extraction the return is down to 5 barrels per barrel expended. Tar sands and shale oil are extremely expensive to process (There's more energy in a bowl of cornflakes than in the same volume of oil shale).
The fact that tar sands are regarded as important is a big indicator. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that such resources were hopelessly uneconomic to extract and would only be a last resort supply.