This is an interesting post. And you are correct in that by living frugally you would not need to work quite as much.
However, there is a major factor you are neglecting : certain costs are very large regardless of how much you save elsewhere. The three main ones are :
a. Education. There are bargain price educational programs, I admit. Train to do a trade skill like nurse or electrician, and it's a short and inexpensive period in school, followed by a longer period of training at decent pay. But if you do want a real degree, it's going to cost a fortune unless you are very lucky or live in a state with heavily subsidized schools.
b. Health Care. You can only avoid major expenses here by being lucky or choosing to die when you get sick. Prevention helps some but you can still easily have bad luck.
c. Housing. Want to live somewhere where high paying jobs are? You can't buy a small house like you describe for a reasonable price, they aren't on the market.
So someone in town notices you can order bulk freight goods that his neighbors need for less than Amazon. So he orders some, and charges a little extra for his services. Fast forward a year and now he needs a place to store all this stuff....
So prices can't really go up to being above what they were before Amazon, at least not for long. No, the equilibrium would be everyone buys most things online but they have to coordinate bulk orders for stuff like cement. You know....
I don't know why google's money men backed this venture, it's a complete non starter. Here's the reason : for several years now, you've been able to purchase 30+ SEER rating (30 EER) mini splits anytime you want, for between $1300-$1800 per packaged system. With installation that's $2500 to $3k. So with installation, you would need 3-4 for a normal sized house, or about $10k cost.
Look here : for closed loop geothermals, 30 EER is equal or better performance to every geothermal system you can buy : https://www.energystar.gov/ind...
Unlike geothermal, you can DIY your mini split installs. I did, and it cost me $5k to install three 33 SEER Fujitsus. They heat and cool the whole place (1700 square feet). You just drill a hole through the wall and mount brackets on either side and it's just a prepackaged system ready to go. You need 2 sizes of ordinary hand wrench for the refrigerant connections, a few drops of some special goop to put into the connections to make sure it won't leak, and a vacuum pump you can borrow for free from autozone. Also used a $100 micron gauge to make sure I was pulling a hard enough vacuum that I sold back on ebay afterwards.
Technically correct...the best kind of correct. I was implicitly referring strictly to electronic component cost and development time costs, since there's only going to be a handful of Curiosity rover style projects per decade but there are many thousands of projects to develop safe computerized control systems for cars and robots and everything else.
You know, that would be epic. "Battlebots : Live fire edition. Sponsored by the U.S. Army". It would have to be done on a special range and all the technicians would retreat to a bunker and then through hard wires, arm the power and weapon systems of the dueling robots. It would be an unrestricted class, with the exception that every weapon has to have a safety system that is supplied by the military, and the weapons themselves would be restricted to commonly available military ordnance.
To make it more realistic, each robot starts suspended on a cable above the battlefield and gets dropped from 20 feet. The robot must be under a certain weight limit. (to simulate an airborne insertion). Later seasons would begin imposing random communication losses from enemy jamming (network switch interrupts data stream to each competitors robot semi-randomly). Eventually the robots would require near fully autonomy, as the software gets better.
Spectators would be seeing a battlefield that would be basically the real thing.
So the reason the Curiosity rover uses FPGAs with ternary logic (and just 2 computers if I recall) is to save on weight. If they were going to optimal cost efficiency they'd have redundant computers and do what the FPGAs are doing in firmware.
I wonder if this means it's actually cheaper to use 3 separate computers, on cheap off the shelf hardware, than one armored and extra redundant computer. For example, spacecraft guidance or for an autonomous car.
You know that several FPGA manufacturers offer this. Xilinx offers a method where this is done in software - when you do design synthesis, more than triple the gates are needed for every circuit allocated in the design. (I think it's done at a higher level - truth tables with the triple redundant bits are generated)
Some do it in hardware, so your design synthesis is the same but the actual software programmable subunits use ternary redundancy.
So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass, and ditto the prices for the other elements in the CRTs (I assume the copper wiring got ripped out right away), then oh fucking well. Invisible hand at work - just need to make sure the storage of the CRTs is adequate to contain the toxic lead.
And yeah, maybe 200 years from now we'll have mined out all the surface lead and it'll be worth recycling them properly. Or maybe just 20 years from now we'll develop robotic disassemblers (with good manipulators and machine vision that can actually properly see and grab stuff and figure out which part of the TV it's looking at like a human worker would) that can economically take these things apart for the goodies inside for less than mining the same elements fresh.
The main issue here is a failure for society to properly bill the costs for proper storage of this stuff. Or maybe they should just for residential landfill operators to make the landfills capable of accepting CRT and other waste, since realistically that's what most people are going to do with their broken electronics.
With the atmospheric injection, it's been proposed to use sulfur dioxide, since there are naturally occurring experiments where volcano's release a bunch of that.
I've also read it's possible to make lighter than air reflective beads and inject them into the upper atmosphere (no idea what they are made out - they are probably very tiny). As long as the beads aren't toxic, and they have a consistent reflectivity, predicting the results is fairly easy. Also you don't have to do it all at once - you can inject some and measure what happens. If it turns out to be a bad thing or to cause more cooling than expected, just don't inject as much on the next dose. This is a straightforward process - what's really happening is a lot of politically correct people are against it because they are morons and they feel this would encourage the further use of fossil fuels since it removes the primary known harm.
Well it's also likely that 10 million pumping stations in the arctic are more expensive than anticipated. So it might be 3 trillion instead of 500 million
A pipe supported by gigantic aerostats is also probably going to be more than 10 billion, but 60 billion is still affordable. 3 trillion is not. You already can't really see the stars in urban areas, where most people live, and space telescopes are a thing.
Ah. That's bad. Though I've heard quoted price tags of a mere 10 billion a year or so to inject particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect light away - that sounds like a better idea. The injection stations also don't have to be in the arctic.
Sure. And if somebody has bothered to do the porting work and write a third party tool that uses a different compiler - and your project has the budget for such a tool - it's better. But it still isn't easy. You still end up reinventing many things.
I do embedded C programming. With this said, I don't think that improvements to the tools are impossible - sure, I have to prevent buffer overflows myself at the present time - but it doesn't have to be this way. The key thing about embedded programming is that hardware designers are lazy. They want to do the least amount of work possible. So instead of making their hardware easy to program, they like to make it in a way that is easiest to them. So every data sheet contains all kinds of special exceptions to the rules that you the programmer have to take into account. And instead of supporting some fancy, easy to program in language, they do the minimum amount of work to make a C compiler work. (it's really minimal - you only need to map a few base instructions to opcodes on the hardware and you can bootstrap the C compiler).
One major issue is while every microcontroller or DSP generally has roughly the same stuff - various ports that do the same thing, the MAC instruction, usually a von Neuman architecture, usually interrupts and DMA - you basically have to scrape the datasheet for weeks to do something you've done before on a different microcontroller.
As I understand it, the problem is that X joules of energy enter the earth from sunlight. Y amount of energy leaves. Energy balance is X-Y. Thanks to greenhouse gasses, Y is now smaller. So net energy is being gained by the earth and it is warming up. This is why the ice is melting.
If the wind powered pumps don't affect Y, I don't see how this does anything.
This is a case of the free market working correctly, though. Beekeepers who do as you say eventually go out of business because their hives die. There are enough beekeepers and they are all independent from each other that so long as some beekeepers do it correctly, they'll still be in business in 5 years. Those beekeepers would expand, since their competition would be out of business, and eventually we live in a world where the only beekeepers in business for long do it right. Business Darwinism in action.
This doesn't always work - monopolies, "too big to fail", and other effects prevent the system from working in many cases. I'm not a libertarian, but this is an example where the invisible hand works correctly.
If we can even figure out what they are, and if there are replacements, and if chemicals still in the environment don't keep killing bees or assholes breaking the laws don't keep using the chemicals after they are banned. Or if the government just refuses to ban the chemicals because the regulators are bribed by big business. Genetic engineering might just be easier.
Sure would take a lot of drones. It might be easier to genetically engineer the bees to have genes to resist whatever is killing them - insecticide or parasites - by splicing in genes from bee species that are resistant but suboptimal for pollination. Bees are basically self replicating drones that can refuel and rebuild themselves from products supplied by the very flowers they are pollinating.
But worst case scenario - if the bees all become extinct - we could use drones instead.
Huh. Never thought of it that way (regarding renewables). Basically, if you can pay for a solar farm and the cost of the energy generated is enough to pay for the monthly payments on the bond to build it, there's minimal risk. The panels and inverters are warrantied by the manufacturer. As long as licensed electricians put together the wiring, an electrical fire is unlikely and even if it happens, the metal boxes and metal conduit sheaths will contain it. Maybe some years you'll get a little less solar than you expected and some years a little more, but it'll average out. A sure thing.
You can get another order of magnitude by moving those algorithms to ASICs and FPGAs. 300 watts is within reasonable bounds for a vehicle electrical bus. I would be willing to bet that the prototype algorithms are running on less power efficient but more programmer friendly GPUs and CPUs mainly.
The 100k figure is mostly driven by the LIDAR. There are cheap LIDARS for this.
A $10k price tag plus a $1k a year license fee is achievable, and this would make self driving taxis readily feasible. Most people probably won't own the first self driving cars in widespread use.
Well, look at it another way. Every human action carries risk. Standing up from your chair after reading this, and you might get a brain aneurism and die right there. No countermeasure against a risk is perfect. So to be fair, with nuclear it's not about trying to make the risks zero, but to make the risks (translated to dollars) significantly less than the value of the energy created. Now, a 100 billion clean kind of ruins the value proposition for nuclear. In fact this one accident might push the net balance of value (compared to alternatives) for nuclear in Japan all the way into the negative. Or not.
As for "slimy PR stunt", I guess. I'm not going to dispute that the nuclear industry in japan has the same problem that the oil industry in the USA has. The wealthy companies have too much power compared to the regulators who are supposed to oversee them.
Remember, nobody has been killed directly from Fukushima, and probably only a handful of people who were wading in that dirty water in the basement picked up enough of a dose that they have a noticeably higher chance of eventual cancer. Oil industry gets people killed all the time. And the net effect of decades of the oil industry operating is devaluing real estate all over the planet. Fukushima only really contaminated the nearby town and some of the water right off the coast.
All I'm saying is, it doesn't mean nuclear was a bad decision. Remember, just now, 40 years later, are solar panels starting to not suck.
This isn't a surprise to anyone. What do you think is contaminating all that water they pump out of the basement? Why do you think you can measure a dose outside near the plant? The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a meltdown and the fuel escaped the reactor and some has even escaped containment. The latter is the real problem - a better containment design, and they wouldn't have all this contaminated water because it wouldn't leak like it does. Nor would it have contaminated the surrounding town.
Slashdot Mirror
This is an interesting post. And you are correct in that by living frugally you would not need to work quite as much.
However, there is a major factor you are neglecting : certain costs are very large regardless of how much you save elsewhere. The three main ones are :
a. Education. There are bargain price educational programs, I admit. Train to do a trade skill like nurse or electrician, and it's a short and inexpensive period in school, followed by a longer period of training at decent pay. But if you do want a real degree, it's going to cost a fortune unless you are very lucky or live in a state with heavily subsidized schools.
b. Health Care. You can only avoid major expenses here by being lucky or choosing to die when you get sick. Prevention helps some but you can still easily have bad luck.
c. Housing. Want to live somewhere where high paying jobs are? You can't buy a small house like you describe for a reasonable price, they aren't on the market.
So someone in town notices you can order bulk freight goods that his neighbors need for less than Amazon. So he orders some, and charges a little extra for his services. Fast forward a year and now he needs a place to store all this stuff....
So prices can't really go up to being above what they were before Amazon, at least not for long. No, the equilibrium would be everyone buys most things online but they have to coordinate bulk orders for stuff like cement. You know....
I don't know why google's money men backed this venture, it's a complete non starter. Here's the reason : for several years now, you've been able to purchase 30+ SEER rating (30 EER) mini splits anytime you want, for between $1300-$1800 per packaged system. With installation that's $2500 to $3k. So with installation, you would need 3-4 for a normal sized house, or about $10k cost.
Look here : for closed loop geothermals, 30 EER is equal or better performance to every geothermal system you can buy : https://www.energystar.gov/ind...
Unlike geothermal, you can DIY your mini split installs. I did, and it cost me $5k to install three 33 SEER Fujitsus. They heat and cool the whole place (1700 square feet). You just drill a hole through the wall and mount brackets on either side and it's just a prepackaged system ready to go. You need 2 sizes of ordinary hand wrench for the refrigerant connections, a few drops of some special goop to put into the connections to make sure it won't leak, and a vacuum pump you can borrow for free from autozone. Also used a $100 micron gauge to make sure I was pulling a hard enough vacuum that I sold back on ebay afterwards.
Technically correct...the best kind of correct. I was implicitly referring strictly to electronic component cost and development time costs, since there's only going to be a handful of Curiosity rover style projects per decade but there are many thousands of projects to develop safe computerized control systems for cars and robots and everything else.
You know, that would be epic. "Battlebots : Live fire edition. Sponsored by the U.S. Army". It would have to be done on a special range and all the technicians would retreat to a bunker and then through hard wires, arm the power and weapon systems of the dueling robots. It would be an unrestricted class, with the exception that every weapon has to have a safety system that is supplied by the military, and the weapons themselves would be restricted to commonly available military ordnance.
To make it more realistic, each robot starts suspended on a cable above the battlefield and gets dropped from 20 feet. The robot must be under a certain weight limit. (to simulate an airborne insertion). Later seasons would begin imposing random communication losses from enemy jamming (network switch interrupts data stream to each competitors robot semi-randomly). Eventually the robots would require near fully autonomy, as the software gets better.
Spectators would be seeing a battlefield that would be basically the real thing.
So the reason the Curiosity rover uses FPGAs with ternary logic (and just 2 computers if I recall) is to save on weight. If they were going to optimal cost efficiency they'd have redundant computers and do what the FPGAs are doing in firmware.
I wonder if this means it's actually cheaper to use 3 separate computers, on cheap off the shelf hardware, than one armored and extra redundant computer. For example, spacecraft guidance or for an autonomous car.
You know that several FPGA manufacturers offer this. Xilinx offers a method where this is done in software - when you do design synthesis, more than triple the gates are needed for every circuit allocated in the design. (I think it's done at a higher level - truth tables with the triple redundant bits are generated)
Some do it in hardware, so your design synthesis is the same but the actual software programmable subunits use ternary redundancy.
So as long as you keep the lead from escaping into groundwater (could bury them in a landfill with a clay or plastic lining in a big mountain), this is fine. If lead prices are so cheap that it's easier to mine new lead than it is to recycle it from CRT glass, and ditto the prices for the other elements in the CRTs (I assume the copper wiring got ripped out right away), then oh fucking well. Invisible hand at work - just need to make sure the storage of the CRTs is adequate to contain the toxic lead.
And yeah, maybe 200 years from now we'll have mined out all the surface lead and it'll be worth recycling them properly. Or maybe just 20 years from now we'll develop robotic disassemblers (with good manipulators and machine vision that can actually properly see and grab stuff and figure out which part of the TV it's looking at like a human worker would) that can economically take these things apart for the goodies inside for less than mining the same elements fresh.
The main issue here is a failure for society to properly bill the costs for proper storage of this stuff. Or maybe they should just for residential landfill operators to make the landfills capable of accepting CRT and other waste, since realistically that's what most people are going to do with their broken electronics.
We're talking about a very small change. Just enough to stabilize the climate.
With the atmospheric injection, it's been proposed to use sulfur dioxide, since there are naturally occurring experiments where volcano's release a bunch of that.
I've also read it's possible to make lighter than air reflective beads and inject them into the upper atmosphere (no idea what they are made out - they are probably very tiny). As long as the beads aren't toxic, and they have a consistent reflectivity, predicting the results is fairly easy. Also you don't have to do it all at once - you can inject some and measure what happens. If it turns out to be a bad thing or to cause more cooling than expected, just don't inject as much on the next dose. This is a straightforward process - what's really happening is a lot of politically correct people are against it because they are morons and they feel this would encourage the further use of fossil fuels since it removes the primary known harm.
Well it's also likely that 10 million pumping stations in the arctic are more expensive than anticipated. So it might be 3 trillion instead of 500 million
A pipe supported by gigantic aerostats is also probably going to be more than 10 billion, but 60 billion is still affordable. 3 trillion is not. You already can't really see the stars in urban areas, where most people live, and space telescopes are a thing.
Ah. That's bad. Though I've heard quoted price tags of a mere 10 billion a year or so to inject particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect light away - that sounds like a better idea. The injection stations also don't have to be in the arctic.
Sure. And if somebody has bothered to do the porting work and write a third party tool that uses a different compiler - and your project has the budget for such a tool - it's better. But it still isn't easy. You still end up reinventing many things.
Yes, but shops want "senior" Python programmers. You can't claim to be that after a few sittings.
Where do you find these shops? I look on job postings and everyone is asking for the latest buzzwords it seems.
I do embedded C programming. With this said, I don't think that improvements to the tools are impossible - sure, I have to prevent buffer overflows myself at the present time - but it doesn't have to be this way. The key thing about embedded programming is that hardware designers are lazy. They want to do the least amount of work possible. So instead of making their hardware easy to program, they like to make it in a way that is easiest to them. So every data sheet contains all kinds of special exceptions to the rules that you the programmer have to take into account. And instead of supporting some fancy, easy to program in language, they do the minimum amount of work to make a C compiler work. (it's really minimal - you only need to map a few base instructions to opcodes on the hardware and you can bootstrap the C compiler).
One major issue is while every microcontroller or DSP generally has roughly the same stuff - various ports that do the same thing, the MAC instruction, usually a von Neuman architecture, usually interrupts and DMA - you basically have to scrape the datasheet for weeks to do something you've done before on a different microcontroller.
As I understand it, the problem is that X joules of energy enter the earth from sunlight. Y amount of energy leaves. Energy balance is X-Y. Thanks to greenhouse gasses, Y is now smaller. So net energy is being gained by the earth and it is warming up. This is why the ice is melting.
If the wind powered pumps don't affect Y, I don't see how this does anything.
This is a case of the free market working correctly, though. Beekeepers who do as you say eventually go out of business because their hives die. There are enough beekeepers and they are all independent from each other that so long as some beekeepers do it correctly, they'll still be in business in 5 years. Those beekeepers would expand, since their competition would be out of business, and eventually we live in a world where the only beekeepers in business for long do it right. Business Darwinism in action.
This doesn't always work - monopolies, "too big to fail", and other effects prevent the system from working in many cases. I'm not a libertarian, but this is an example where the invisible hand works correctly.
If we can even figure out what they are, and if there are replacements, and if chemicals still in the environment don't keep killing bees or assholes breaking the laws don't keep using the chemicals after they are banned. Or if the government just refuses to ban the chemicals because the regulators are bribed by big business. Genetic engineering might just be easier.
Sure would take a lot of drones. It might be easier to genetically engineer the bees to have genes to resist whatever is killing them - insecticide or parasites - by splicing in genes from bee species that are resistant but suboptimal for pollination. Bees are basically self replicating drones that can refuel and rebuild themselves from products supplied by the very flowers they are pollinating.
But worst case scenario - if the bees all become extinct - we could use drones instead.
Huh. Never thought of it that way (regarding renewables). Basically, if you can pay for a solar farm and the cost of the energy generated is enough to pay for the monthly payments on the bond to build it, there's minimal risk. The panels and inverters are warrantied by the manufacturer. As long as licensed electricians put together the wiring, an electrical fire is unlikely and even if it happens, the metal boxes and metal conduit sheaths will contain it. Maybe some years you'll get a little less solar than you expected and some years a little more, but it'll average out. A sure thing.
You can get another order of magnitude by moving those algorithms to ASICs and FPGAs. 300 watts is within reasonable bounds for a vehicle electrical bus. I would be willing to bet that the prototype algorithms are running on less power efficient but more programmer friendly GPUs and CPUs mainly.
The 100k figure is mostly driven by the LIDAR. There are cheap LIDARS for this.
A $10k price tag plus a $1k a year license fee is achievable, and this would make self driving taxis readily feasible. Most people probably won't own the first self driving cars in widespread use.
Well, look at it another way. Every human action carries risk. Standing up from your chair after reading this, and you might get a brain aneurism and die right there. No countermeasure against a risk is perfect. So to be fair, with nuclear it's not about trying to make the risks zero, but to make the risks (translated to dollars) significantly less than the value of the energy created. Now, a 100 billion clean kind of ruins the value proposition for nuclear. In fact this one accident might push the net balance of value (compared to alternatives) for nuclear in Japan all the way into the negative. Or not.
As for "slimy PR stunt", I guess. I'm not going to dispute that the nuclear industry in japan has the same problem that the oil industry in the USA has. The wealthy companies have too much power compared to the regulators who are supposed to oversee them.
Remember, nobody has been killed directly from Fukushima, and probably only a handful of people who were wading in that dirty water in the basement picked up enough of a dose that they have a noticeably higher chance of eventual cancer. Oil industry gets people killed all the time. And the net effect of decades of the oil industry operating is devaluing real estate all over the planet. Fukushima only really contaminated the nearby town and some of the water right off the coast.
All I'm saying is, it doesn't mean nuclear was a bad decision. Remember, just now, 40 years later, are solar panels starting to not suck.
This isn't a surprise to anyone. What do you think is contaminating all that water they pump out of the basement? Why do you think you can measure a dose outside near the plant? The evidence overwhelmingly showed it was a meltdown and the fuel escaped the reactor and some has even escaped containment. The latter is the real problem - a better containment design, and they wouldn't have all this contaminated water because it wouldn't leak like it does. Nor would it have contaminated the surrounding town.