> but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time.
Yeah not even close. Some cursory research and math suggests anywhere from ~200 to ~170,000 years of fuel depending on how efficiently we use it, whether or not we can successfully develop thorium fuel cycles (and how efficiently we can use *that*), and assuming NO GROWTH IN POWER USAGE over 2016 levels.
Even the rosiest of outlooks are a far cry from ~4 billion years. =Smidge=
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
Solar is considered renewable because there is an effectively unlimited supply of sunlight. Even if the sun is only expected to last another few billion years, that is a pretty solid prediction and is so far beyond the horizon it can safely be considered unlimited.
Wind and hydro are renewable because the air and water are not lost forever once they pass through the turbines.
Biofuels are renewable because once you burn them, the carbon that was released into the air can be recaptured by more plants and turned back into biofuel. Logistical issues aside, this is a closed-loop carbon cycle and thus renewable.
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone. There are some tricks to make new fuel, but there's no reasonable way to take all the waste and put it back into the system ad infinitum. Reprocessing spent fuel just removes contaminants and re-purifies the unused portion; it does not make new fuel from spent fuel. =Smidge=
> The real question is why are the fares still $2.75?
My conspiratorial thought on the matter is, because it makes it a bit more difficult to use all the funds on your MetroCard. Basically they count on people discarding the residual balance and buying a new card they can charge an extra buck for.
Unless you're buying a new card for $6.50 ($5.50 balance plus $1 fee for the new card) any other default amount doesn't divide evenly, and the 5% discount you get when buying more credit makes the math even harder. The result is you always end up with less than $2.75 on the card.
And you'd be absolutely amazed how few people know you can refill them, despite it being clearly advertised. =Smidge=
> But with climate change, drought and rising temps who's to say we won't be pushing those cooling systems past their limits in 50 years?
Worth noting that there's been a few stories about nuclear plants in Europe having to throttle back because they are unable to reject their process heat, due to warmer surface waters.
This is a very valid concern that's not really come up before, and will get more relevant as time goes by. =Smidge=
>The "ripping babies from Mama's arms" narrative is more dramatic than factual. In a majority of cases, the minors were not taken from mothers, but dubious/unverified family members, who, at a minimum, endangered them by force marching them under unsafe, risky conditions and used them as unwitting participants in a crime.
1) Seeking asylum is not a crime.
2) The journey to the US was clearly judged to be less dangerous than staying in their home country overrun by gang violence and political unrest.
3) When you say "more dramatic than factual" does that imply there is some number of dissociated families that would be deemed acceptable? Last I saw it was ~2800 people or so that were affected. How many forcibly orphaned and illegally detained children are acceptable to you?
> The result is that these kids were taken and put into the equivalent of day care and/or foster care, not super-max.
Would you take your children to a "day care center" that held kids in chain link fence enclosures with bare concrete floors? That's a dog kennel, not day care. =Smidge=
> I don't know what this means. They're enforcing the law. That means forcing people to obey it.
The difference is enforcing the law according to the law, and enforcing the law with brutality because you can get away with it. Despite what some people would like to believe, it's actually not okay for police officers to beat you senseless - there are actually laws that dictate how other laws are to be enforced. We've unfortunately gotten very bad at enforcing them, though.
> You just advocated for ICE not to enforce the law
Incorrect; There is a proper way and an improper way to enforce laws. By way of trivial (and admittedly hyperbolic) example, the proper way to enforce speed limit laws is to issue the offending driver a ticket, not to drag them out of their car and beat them within an inch of their life. Similarly, there are proper ways to detain and deport illegal immigrants, and there are improper ways.
Except it's not that straightforward. People have the legal right to seek asylum, and even if they are here illegally without seeking asylum they are still entitled to due process and basic human rights under both the US Constitution and international laws.
What we have here is not law enforcement, it's xenophobia and racism and abuse disguised as law enforcement. The ICE officers are in some ways more criminal than the people they're arresting.
> But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.
That's because such people do not actually exist. Literally nobody is seriously advocating this. Asking that families not be ripped apart and children as young as 3 years old be made to defend themselves in court without representation is not the same as advocating "open boarders."
> Why do we not support them?
For the same reason people should never have supported the Schutzstaffel. =Smidge=
> And yes, savings accounts remove money from the economy in the exact same way that some fat cat billionaire removes the money from the economy by putting it in his bank account.
Not nearly to the same degree. There are individuals whose "savings" accumulate to more than the combined savings of over half the planet.
And chances are if you're a working schlub with a modest savings account, that account is with a local bank which means there's are least some benefit to the local economy as the bank lends that money to others. Even if that benefit isn't as effective, it still exists.
So unless and until someone can explain to me how having a few hundred million dollars in a tax haven island account benefits the US economy, this argument can be safely ignored. =Smidge=
> This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem... =Smidge=
Well one of the arguments in favor of UBI is it provides the financial stability/assurance to take risks.
If you're guaranteed to have at least enough money to make rent and keep yourself fed, maybe you can spend some time looking for a better job, or go back to school/get a new skill to move into a different profession, or rally for better pay and working conditions with less fear of getting fired over it (and being able to quit, which puts at least some weight in your position as an employee).
Or maybe you could take a chance at quitting your current job and starting a new business, since it's easier to afford to taking that risk. =Smidge=
> Yeah, that's what happens when the base value drops, but does that mean 10k less bitcoin were moved, or the USD value just dropped?
Well considering I can go out and spend my USD to buy products and services at roughly the same price as they were last year (not counting typical fluctuations and the impacts of cheeto-brained tariffs), I'm going to say that the value of the US dollar has not changed significantly over this timeframe.
Specifically, those idiots spending time and resources developing a vehicle with niche appeal and limited utility. It might've been hyper efficient but it had the worst qualities of a car combined with the worst qualities of a motorcycle but the benefits of neither. =Smidge=
But the increasing demand can only be accounted for by new AC installations. Anything old would be existing and already part of the load prior to the increase in demand that's prompting new powerplant construction.
Unless you're implying that there are warehouses full of 10+ year old AC units they're clearing out for all those new installations... =Smidge=
Out of all the Teslas (any model!) you can find that are on fire, how many of them were involved in some horrific crash?
Nearly all of them. Getting a Tesla (or any EV) to catch fire generally requires some effort.
Meanwhile, there is a car fire roughly every 3 minutes in the US alone (based on data from NFPA: 174,000 reported incidents in 2015). 72% of these fires are caused by a malfunction of some kind. I guess having a flammable liquids in close proximity to boiling hot metal and gasses can be a hazardous situation! =Smidge=
Did we get this energy from solar panel or wind turbine excess energy, where we turn on the devices only when the price of energy craters due to oversupply, or is this intended to run 24/7/365? Or do they (as many processes do) use electricity generated from fossil fuels to run the machines?
They currently use renewable energy.
But the point you're making here is irrelevant; If this moves from the current experimental/proof-of-concept to commercial production, you'd still use renewable energy to run it 24/7 because the product itself has value as a fuel and chemical feedstock that displaces fossil fuel.
Pulling CO2 from the air is not a solution, but producing hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral and renewable is a very, very important piece of the puzzle. =Smidge=
Methane is roughly 70 times worse than CO2 in terms of the greenhouse effect. Not only is the gas itself about 30 times better than absorbing heat, but it decomposes into CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is worse for trapping heat than CO2 released at ground level.
So if they pull CO2 out of the air, make it into methane, then just vent it.. that's significantly worse than doing nothing.
Ah, I see. Glad it's cleared up that you didn't actually have a point to make, and were just shoehorning in an opportunity to strut your intellectual superiority.
Perhaps you should save your pedantry for when it actually makes a difference. =Smidge=
> It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
So Quantum Mechanics is a theory, then? Because we've moved a step beyond "intense scrutiny and testing" and we're well into practical real-world applications.
Slashdot Mirror
> but we actually have enough uranium in the Earth to last the same amount of time.
Yeah not even close. Some cursory research and math suggests anywhere from ~200 to ~170,000 years of fuel depending on how efficiently we use it, whether or not we can successfully develop thorium fuel cycles (and how efficiently we can use *that*), and assuming NO GROWTH IN POWER USAGE over 2016 levels.
Even the rosiest of outlooks are a far cry from ~4 billion years.
=Smidge=
> Arguably, breeder reactors do renew the fuel.
They convert one resource ("fertile material") into fuel, but since that fertile material is itself not renewable the entire process isn't renewable.
Solar is considered renewable because there is an effectively unlimited supply of sunlight. Even if the sun is only expected to last another few billion years, that is a pretty solid prediction and is so far beyond the horizon it can safely be considered unlimited.
Wind and hydro are renewable because the air and water are not lost forever once they pass through the turbines.
Biofuels are renewable because once you burn them, the carbon that was released into the air can be recaptured by more plants and turned back into biofuel. Logistical issues aside, this is a closed-loop carbon cycle and thus renewable.
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone. There are some tricks to make new fuel, but there's no reasonable way to take all the waste and put it back into the system ad infinitum. Reprocessing spent fuel just removes contaminants and re-purifies the unused portion; it does not make new fuel from spent fuel.
=Smidge=
> NIMBYism is destroying America.
NUMBYism
Not
Under
My
Back
Yard
=Smidge=
> The real question is why are the fares still $2.75?
My conspiratorial thought on the matter is, because it makes it a bit more difficult to use all the funds on your MetroCard. Basically they count on people discarding the residual balance and buying a new card they can charge an extra buck for.
Unless you're buying a new card for $6.50 ($5.50 balance plus $1 fee for the new card) any other default amount doesn't divide evenly, and the 5% discount you get when buying more credit makes the math even harder. The result is you always end up with less than $2.75 on the card.
And you'd be absolutely amazed how few people know you can refill them, despite it being clearly advertised.
=Smidge=
> But with climate change, drought and rising temps who's to say we won't be pushing those cooling systems past their limits in 50 years?
Worth noting that there's been a few stories about nuclear plants in Europe having to throttle back because they are unable to reject their process heat, due to warmer surface waters.
This is a very valid concern that's not really come up before, and will get more relevant as time goes by.
=Smidge=
>The "ripping babies from Mama's arms" narrative is more dramatic than factual. In a majority of cases, the minors were not taken from mothers, but dubious/unverified family members, who, at a minimum, endangered them by force marching them under unsafe, risky conditions and used them as unwitting participants in a crime.
1) Seeking asylum is not a crime.
2) The journey to the US was clearly judged to be less dangerous than staying in their home country overrun by gang violence and political unrest.
3) When you say "more dramatic than factual" does that imply there is some number of dissociated families that would be deemed acceptable? Last I saw it was ~2800 people or so that were affected. How many forcibly orphaned and illegally detained children are acceptable to you?
> The result is that these kids were taken and put into the equivalent of day care and/or foster care, not super-max.
Would you take your children to a "day care center" that held kids in chain link fence enclosures with bare concrete floors? That's a dog kennel, not day care.
=Smidge=
> You don't seek asylum at the border, but at the consulate of your home country.
False. To obtain asylum through the affirmative asylum process you must be physically present in the United States.
> I don't know what this means. They're enforcing the law. That means forcing people to obey it.
The difference is enforcing the law according to the law, and enforcing the law with brutality because you can get away with it. Despite what some people would like to believe, it's actually not okay for police officers to beat you senseless - there are actually laws that dictate how other laws are to be enforced. We've unfortunately gotten very bad at enforcing them, though.
> You just advocated for ICE not to enforce the law
Incorrect; There is a proper way and an improper way to enforce laws. By way of trivial (and admittedly hyperbolic) example, the proper way to enforce speed limit laws is to issue the offending driver a ticket, not to drag them out of their car and beat them within an inch of their life. Similarly, there are proper ways to detain and deport illegal immigrants, and there are improper ways.
=Smidge=
> Poverty and economic hardship are not valid reasons for asylum.
Correct, and as far as I know, nobody has ever cited those reasons.
Violence and persecution are, however; and that's the reason so many people are trying to escape central America.
=Smidge=
> That is the current law.
Except it's not that straightforward. People have the legal right to seek asylum, and even if they are here illegally without seeking asylum they are still entitled to due process and basic human rights under both the US Constitution and international laws.
What we have here is not law enforcement, it's xenophobia and racism and abuse disguised as law enforcement. The ICE officers are in some ways more criminal than the people they're arresting.
> But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.
That's because such people do not actually exist. Literally nobody is seriously advocating this. Asking that families not be ripped apart and children as young as 3 years old be made to defend themselves in court without representation is not the same as advocating "open boarders."
> Why do we not support them?
For the same reason people should never have supported the Schutzstaffel.
=Smidge=
It condenses money out of thin air!
=Smidge=
> And yes, savings accounts remove money from the economy in the exact same way that some fat cat billionaire removes the money from the economy by putting it in his bank account.
Not nearly to the same degree. There are individuals whose "savings" accumulate to more than the combined savings of over half the planet.
And chances are if you're a working schlub with a modest savings account, that account is with a local bank which means there's are least some benefit to the local economy as the bank lends that money to others. Even if that benefit isn't as effective, it still exists.
So unless and until someone can explain to me how having a few hundred million dollars in a tax haven island account benefits the US economy, this argument can be safely ignored.
=Smidge=
> This left-wing screen (which is not news, let alone news for nerds) ignores that companies don't "extract" value from a market.
Except that's exactly what they do: It's called "Profit." Profit is the extracted value in excess of the materials and labor the thing they sold cost. The fact that you are willing to pay in excess of what something is materially worth because its convenient doesn't mean it's not extracting value from you. Just the opposite, in fact.
Note this is not necessarily a bad thing; That profit can be applied to other things, and so the extracted value ultimately recycled back into the economy. It's when people take that extracted value and remove it from the economy that we have a problem...
=Smidge=
Well one of the arguments in favor of UBI is it provides the financial stability/assurance to take risks.
If you're guaranteed to have at least enough money to make rent and keep yourself fed, maybe you can spend some time looking for a better job, or go back to school/get a new skill to move into a different profession, or rally for better pay and working conditions with less fear of getting fired over it (and being able to quit, which puts at least some weight in your position as an employee).
Or maybe you could take a chance at quitting your current job and starting a new business, since it's easier to afford to taking that risk.
=Smidge=
> Yeah, that's what happens when the base value drops, but does that mean 10k less bitcoin were moved, or the USD value just dropped?
Well considering I can go out and spend my USD to buy products and services at roughly the same price as they were last year (not counting typical fluctuations and the impacts of cheeto-brained tariffs), I'm going to say that the value of the US dollar has not changed significantly over this timeframe.
Your concern is noted, though.
=Smidge=
That's quite a feat considering they closed up shop in 2011.
=Smidge=
> all due to the idiots on the board.
Specifically, those idiots spending time and resources developing a vehicle with niche appeal and limited utility. It might've been hyper efficient but it had the worst qualities of a car combined with the worst qualities of a motorcycle but the benefits of neither.
=Smidge=
But the increasing demand can only be accounted for by new AC installations. Anything old would be existing and already part of the load prior to the increase in demand that's prompting new powerplant construction.
Unless you're implying that there are warehouses full of 10+ year old AC units they're clearing out for all those new installations...
=Smidge=
Out of all the Teslas (any model!) you can find that are on fire, how many of them were involved in some horrific crash?
Nearly all of them. Getting a Tesla (or any EV) to catch fire generally requires some effort.
Meanwhile, there is a car fire roughly every 3 minutes in the US alone (based on data from NFPA: 174,000 reported incidents in 2015). 72% of these fires are caused by a malfunction of some kind. I guess having a flammable liquids in close proximity to boiling hot metal and gasses can be a hazardous situation!
=Smidge=
> Hydrogen = 1.75 kWh/liter
You're off by a factor of about 600 there, buddy. You don't get that kind of energy density until you've compressed it to several hundred atmospheres.
Plus, 240 cubic meters of hydrogen at STP only weighs about 21kg, so I don't know why you said "20T" which implies tons?
=Smidge=
Did we get this energy from solar panel or wind turbine excess energy, where we turn on the devices only when the price of energy craters due to oversupply, or is this intended to run 24/7/365? Or do they (as many processes do) use electricity generated from fossil fuels to run the machines?
They currently use renewable energy.
But the point you're making here is irrelevant; If this moves from the current experimental/proof-of-concept to commercial production, you'd still use renewable energy to run it 24/7 because the product itself has value as a fuel and chemical feedstock that displaces fossil fuel.
Pulling CO2 from the air is not a solution, but producing hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral and renewable is a very, very important piece of the puzzle.
=Smidge=
Methane is roughly 70 times worse than CO2 in terms of the greenhouse effect. Not only is the gas itself about 30 times better than absorbing heat, but it decomposes into CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is worse for trapping heat than CO2 released at ground level.
So if they pull CO2 out of the air, make it into methane, then just vent it.. that's significantly worse than doing nothing.
Luckily that's not what they're doing.
=Smidge=
Ah, I see. Glad it's cleared up that you didn't actually have a point to make, and were just shoehorning in an opportunity to strut your intellectual superiority.
Perhaps you should save your pedantry for when it actually makes a difference.
=Smidge=
> It's a consensus label for a proposed model that seems to hold up to prolonged, intense scrutiny and testing.
So Quantum Mechanics is a theory, then? Because we've moved a step beyond "intense scrutiny and testing" and we're well into practical real-world applications.
=Smidge=
It seems that they're both about as stable as their favorite cryptocurrency. Kind of poetic, really...
=Smidge=
> Instead, they sent the cavalry.
Without knowing exactly what's going on, there's no way to know if this response is appropriate or unreasonable.
=Smidge=