Current data suggests that America's increased border control in the early 1990s resulted in an increase of 5.8 million resident unauthorized immigrants by 2010, since undocumented migrant workers were coming and going, but then decided to come and stay due to the difficulty and danger of crossing. The numbers piled up.
More to the point, I'm suggesting that the harmless and banal are impeded by border controls, while the dangerous and destructive are merely inconvenienced. Some speculate this inconvenience turns into a tighter market for drug runners in particular, which develops better-funded and more-militant groups, increasing the damage to our Nation; although that's an unnecessary speculation at this point.
That's the problem: you go outside, dance around each night, and then when it rains 2 weeks later you claim your rain dance made it rain.
It's infeasible to monitor an entire border; and then people go under it anyway. Talk about terrorists, drug cartels, and other well-funded and heavily-organized threats goes hand-in-hand with apprehending poor women fleeing from a creditor who wants to gangrape them to death and sell their children into sex slavery while the well-funded insurgents bypass all your security.
We've done something. It did nothing, but we had to do something. Let's do it even more.
Border control is a farce. We find tunnels under houses miles from the border used to traffic people from Mexico. No tools can detect and locate tunnels--they've been begging for that for decades, and it keeps not happening despite enormous amounts of government money just sitting there ready to shove in people's pockets.
This comes up whenever people talk about Pakistan, yet not around Trump's wall. What's different about Germany's border, besides being insulated by the entire free-movement zone of the EU on a few sides, plus the Danes, the Pols, and other stable and wealthy nations?
All that b.s. to come to the exact conclusion I laid out... I said WE WILL HAVE CHEMICAL ENERGY FOR A WHILE LONGER.
Then you made a meaningless statement. We will have horse-drawn carts for a while longer; petrol cars are obviously inferior, for the moment, and gasoline isn't ready.
Gasoline will go the way of the horse-drawn carriage soon.
And your whole "most people drive" blah blah blah.. Here in CA we drive A LOT. It's a big state.
Yes, yes, I'm sure lots of people make 400-mile round trips for at least a third of their driving and they fill up the tank 2-3 times a day.
Current-generation all-electric vehicles can go as far on one full battery charge as a current-generation car can go on one full tank of gas. If you're not spending $40/day on gasoline, an EV will handle your daily driving, so long as you can plug it in for 5 hours at the end of the day.
Current-generation EVs can full-charge in under 2 hours from a high-power charge station, but that's not something you're going to have at your house; and those charge stations can put out enough power through one charger to charge the battery in under 30 minutes, just the cars don't have a charge circuit sized for that. On the plus side, you generally don't have to refill the car to make a round trip--that's what that trip to New York was about: you might need a 20-minute rest stop to top up.
The cars themselves really are ready to replace daily driving, unless California belches out more pollution itself in car exhaust fumes than China does with all its industry. What, do you people just wake up and drive for 5 hours straight, then drive another 5 hours ten minutes later? Tell your city council to approve a grocery store in your town.
You're still missing the point. The energy density of gasoline is such that a person _could_ (not would) carry enough energy, in the form of gasoline, to cross the entire continent in one go. Total weight = about 1,100 lbs.
Yes, and it would be stupid. A person would get slightly-better mileage, have greater cargo capacity, and face less of a logistics burden simply fueling up now and then.
Total weight to cross the USA using batteries would weight at least 5x that under the best scenarios
Which is also stupid. High-power charging stations will eventually roll out, just like gas stations did for petrol cars.
If you're gonna keep up with the strawmen
Who in the hell would carry gasoline around, instead of fueling up?
There are places in the United States where you are NOT going to find a recharge station.
Not right now. There was a time when cars ran on peanut oil because you generally didn't find gasoline stations. Farmers mostly pressed some of their crop for oil, used the dry mass for feed, and ran their little cars and farm trucks locally. Cross-country driving was a thing you did with horses, since there were stables and feed everywhere and not a lot of diesel or gasoline.
Charging stations require less infrastructure than gasoline stations (which get refilled by trucks coming with fuel, not by some kind of pipeline or other transmission system). If you have power, you can put up a charging station. If you don't have high-capacity power, you might put up a 40kW charging station, and folks coming that way may need to take an hour-long break or so to recharge.
It's also not unreasonable to supply a free (i.e. tax-funded) charging station along those stretch-of-nowhere places where there is no gasoline (somebody built road), but that's a whole different level of politics, philosophy, and logistics.
CHEMICAL ENERGY will be with us for a while longer because, for the moment, the range it provides is superior and the "recharge" time is also superior.
Not for unusually long. The time to refill is negligible, and we can route around all of these issues with little trouble--even for long-distance trucking (individual, parallel charging of battery packs at normal current across the batteries and the multiple chargers so they don't get super super hot, but your truck stop has a frigging substation in the back to handle the load).
The great majority of driving doesn't have these concerns, even at 10kW charging. You can charge your car overnight--you come home and plug in at all times, pulling 30 miles of range per hour of charging. With the 300-mile EVs (e.g. Chevy Bolt), the 200-mile trip from Baltimore to New York City amounts to three hours of charging during the round trip. That means if you drive to New York and intend to stay longer than a couple hours, you're good.
Note the Chevy Bolt, at 10kW, takes 6 hours to recharge from empty. At its capacity of 40kW, it's 1.5 hours. 600VDC level-3 charging at 120kW you're talking about half an hour to fully charge a 300-mile-range battery--but your vehicle has to support that.
Now: think of any car out there. Most have 250-300 mile range on a tank. How frequently does a person need to refuel? Once a day? Once a week? That's your normal electric vehicle usage case. Since you can refuel multiple times each day, it stands to reason most people won't have any trouble keeping the battery topped up.
Will we still have gasoline and diesel? Yes. Not in the everyday driver; people will have motorcycles from 1950 or 2018, and jet planes are going to suck fuel because you're not running that on battery. Will chemical cars be more than a fraction of new sales a decade from now? Potentially not--even as-is, most people can charge on the slow 3.3kW charger at home each night, never mind having a $2,000 Chargepoint insta
It's 1/135 of the car's normal mileage; and the total change is between 0 and 1/135. It also matters less on continuous driving, since it mainly only impacts stop-and-go traffic.
I can, with my current gasoline vehicle, drive all the way across this continent without ever pulling into a gas station, if I so desire. I can take enough gasoline with me. Be it in jerry cans or a secondary fuel tank. You can't do that with batteries.. They'd weight too much.
You can stop and pour some of your (heavy) gasoline into the fuel tank, or you can pull into the gas station next to which you've stopped and use their gasoline.
There are 160kW charge stations; nobody has put more than 60kW charge circuitry in a car yet. 160kW can fill an 85kWh battery pack in half an hour. That's 4.75 hours of driving at 60mph, and 4 at 70mph--and that's without things like recuperative cooling (using a thin panel heat engine between the hot coolant loop and the radiator to generate electricity). A 30% gain in mileage would mean 5.3 hours at 70mph or 6.2 at 60mph on a half-hour charge at 160kW.
You're supposed to take a 40-minute rest every 4 hours.
So, if you make chairs and it costs $10 in materials and $5 in labor per chair, COGS is $15. If you sell those chairs for $20, you go out of business.
Why?
Because all the other stuff in your business amounts to $8 per chair, and it costs you $23 to produce each chair. You're losing $3 per chair.
Drawing more money than COGS doesn't imply profitability. The gross profits in any fast food business are around 50%, with net profits below 8%:
selling less than 90% over COGS implies running into the red and going out of business. It's narrower for many businesses, but it's always wider than zero.
Boycotts don't work; but those people who talk about a boycott and don't bother doing it themselves? They'll talk. They'll talk about breaking AWS off from Amazon. They'll talk about Federal anti-trust investigations.
That works.
It works even if you don't have enough people to make a dent with a boycott anyway.
The only net-energy-positive process I've yet found is a differential thermal generator--a heat pump connected to a heat engine, using adiabatic recuperation and taking advantage of the fact that atmosphere isn't one uniform temperature (you belch cold air out the exhaust, and you're sucking warmer air into the intake).
The engineers don't like it. They tell me it'll work, but you'll never get much energy density: it's going to look fancy running itself while producing maybe enough excess energy to also light up an LED bulb. This is because of the heat differential: the hot side is not that much hotter than the cold side, and it takes energy to make it hot.
I have suggested that a machine which sucks in atmosphere and compresses it is a heat pump because the thermal energy in 100L of atmosphere still exists when that mass is reduced to 1L--hence why it gets frigging hot--and so you can create relatively large temperature differentials. Nobody's buying it, although they maintain it does work--in the same way one of those spinning radiometers, in that it works but it's totally useless.
Of course, the earth would be a frozen black rock without the sun pouring energy into it all the time: it's just a fancy solar generator.
Actually, batteries weigh less discharged than charged; and the difference in mileage between a full and empty tank is minimal, such that a 25mpg car can travel 300 meters further on an empty tank than a full tank (if it can magically burn the same amount of fuel as a full tank along the way, without carrying the tank of fuel itself).
Our grid isn't 100% clean energy, so there's always load to offset at the moment. You can put the solar energy right on the grid.
Even more efficient, but probably expensive;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model.
The Internet suggests that's how many people get laid in college, although I've started to think the Internet has some self-selection bias and a lack of general credibility.
Seems reasonable. I'm able to read without paying attention to the text, and instead rummage through the information in my head. I started reading fiction again after an episode of reading a book for two hours that I... don't remember; I set the book down and only had three months of new memories that were a lot more interesting than anything that happens in the real world.
I can recognize reality--more specifically, I can't not recognize reality (which has consequences)--but I have more memories of things that are clearly not from reality, and those memories are more-vivid than anything else. I've spent my entire life abusing the machine with everything from synesthesia (I carried around an iPod full of songs that sounded like impossible colors and euphoria--LSD and cocaine in MP3 format, dude!) to dipping directly into my own analytical thought process and not trying to make sense of it (nothing in there makes sense).
People think I'm a genius (they're wrong: it's a parlor trick) because I recognize things they don't and can rapidly solve some problems, and at the same time are frequently confused at how quickly I go off on tangents because I recognize that two things are similar or related in ways nobody else considers. The two are the same mechanism.
So if I read something that's related to subject matter with which I have a great deal of familiarity, I'll immediately start connecting together existing information and analogical information: I'm not as aware of the text as I am of the massive amount of data spread throughout my brain. I start theorizing new ideas from this right away, it stores better. Whenever I hit something completely new, I stop dead: I have trouble learning things I can't immediately grasp, and usually find someone to do it for me and explain wtf is going on so I can get something seeded in there to work with.
I hate when the machine breaks like that.
Seems like most people would experience similar with reading in general: if X and Y, then Z; if you know X and Y and I point out that these together imply Z, you can rapidly validate that, connect it together, and understand it. If you have no clue wtf is going on and I have to break down what X and Y are, why they're important, how they function, and why it's sensible that they lead to Z, you're going to need to take things slow.
Of course, there are strategies for mass learning of new and complex information, such as SQW4R and multi-modal reading (subvocalization, multiple-intelligence, and structure-proposition-evaluation). Many of these slow down the process by taking extra reasoning steps, although I often subvocalize with temporal modification (I'll create a memory of a 5-second spoken sentence in 0.5 seconds, which can be hectic: for a brief few moments, I feel like multiple things have happened at once and time is not exactly linear).
I read English pretty damned fast and I don't even speed read. When I use RSVP, 600WPM is comfortable. RSVP materials suggest 300WPM is viable for a beginner, yet I could pull 800WPM with comprehension, albeit that's running a little hot.
I have some odd mental habits, so I'm relatively well-prepared for things like that.
Rote is an important learning mechanism. Memory is associative, and understanding is complex.
I never learned much by rote. When I learned math, I was learning processes, and I would see connections between those processes. I'd start reflecting everything as everything else, and could never remember...anything. I always re-derived all my formulas from other knowledge, proving again and again that the formula of a sphere was whatever it was.
When we moved onto integration in Calc 1, I immediately decided it was too much work and spent 40 minutes creating integration by parts--because I was too dumb to look forward 15 pages. My teacher said there was no such thing as a chain rule for integration, and I found the proposition preposterous.
I've forgotten most of that now.
Your reasoning center is prefrontal, but it relies on as much automatic process as it can. the more you use a process, the more you restructure the neural pathways around that process: when your prefrontal cortex says, "I need to perform process X, then put the result into process Y," your brain quickly spits out the result of process X, and then you manually stick that into process Y--which, again, just dumps the result back out into your head. Reasoning isn't as simple as just doing a lot of rote work up front.
The more stuff you know, the more you can associate. You can perform addition by simple, isometric process based around an addition table of five elements--forcefully memorize those five elements. Memorize your multiplication table, too. You'll have to practice the process of registered arithmetic, but it'll settle in eventually; it won't work unless you can produce the product of two single-digit multiplicands at prompting immediately without thinking.
I've noticed I read words by prediction: I know what words should come in the sentence, and will fill in what should be there. Word shape, length, position, and context determine what I see; sometimes I'm not even looking at the area of text I'm reading, instead inspecting the shape of the paragraph as a whole (including where white spaces occur) and "reading" the text entirely by prediction.
A not-insignificant part of this process is creating and integrating a theory-of-mind model of the writer: I'm simulating your thoughts, mannerisms, and speech patterns in my head. As consequence, I can have rather dramatic apparent personality shifts internally, although I assume most people don't notice because I tend to reflexively squelch that externally.
It's actually a minimum wage, so employees can receive wage raises for merit if Amazon so chooses.
The median wage tends to follow the minimum wage as a proportion of productivity, which means a minimum wage not kept up with productivity gains just gets you a larger, less-wealthy work force instead of making the workers wealthier. Had the minimum wage stayed at 1960s levels, the United States would likely have around 270 million population today, and a median household income of $115,000--the dollar number might be different (more or less inflation), but the purchasing power would be what $115k buys today.
Of course that brings us back to the age of the bourgeoisie and the proles: while a great many households have a mere $40k income, the middle-class lavishes in its $120k lifestyle. Of course the haute would be around the same $200k lifestyle they occupy today, and the rich above them.
I've ended up being that one guy that gets job offers because somebody I've encountered just wants me at the company because of this. Some of my employers have sat me at a desk for years knowing I had nothing to do because I solved all their problems in 6 months. They keep me around because I occasionally fix something else, or something breaks and I can fix it faster than anyone else, or they want to do something new and they stick it in front of me and ask how to engineer a better solution.
It makes for a good story, but I really don't like being the guy who has the answer to everything. The business keeps me around because I'm tangentially-useful and they occasionally get 10x my salary out of something I do. This often results in me being the only person with responsibility over a certain type or set of systems, so there's no back-up--I've protested this and they simply decide it's too expensive to hire two of me.
I've at times been the guy who wanders the building talking to people, then sits down and makes their work go away.
There's a lot of unexplained things going on which would be explainable if some magical stuff was everywhere but not perceivable. Maybe a wizard, mana, or the Ether.
If you can capture some mana in a flask and show how it can power magically-fueled devices, then we'll talk. Until then, you're just pointing out that water falls from the sky yet it only falls down, therefor there must be a river god at the top of the mountain making new water to bring rain and the unending flow.
Look at climate science. They put CO2 and water vapor in a box, shine a light at it, and measure temperature changes and heat retention. You can actually put the CO2 in a bottle. You can compress it into a liquid. You can measure whether it is or isn't there, and how much of it exists. You can correlate how much is there with impacts on temperature retention because you can measure both. CO2 isn't imaginary and predicted to be real because something is different between two measurably-identical things and so something must be there; dark matter is, and somebody is predicting now that there is an alternate property about how things move which would conveniently explain things without some magical sauce we can't seem to measure. Let the scientists fight it out.
McCulloch claims his model predicts a bunch of things that don't make sense using simpler models than dark matter theory. Pay some researchers a million dollars to determine if this actually holds water.
so research is aimed at more profitable drugs (ie someone has to keep taking it rather than providing a cure)
Research isn't really targeted as well as you'd think. Atomoxetine, for example, was a promising antidepressant because it's an NET inhibitor; it turned out to not work well for depression (it works GREAT for some people). Atomoxetine works quite well for hyperactivity by selectively inhibiting NET in the prefrontal cortex, where dopamine is also transported primarily across NET instead of DAT: it's a non-stimulant ADHD drug. Without the DAT action, it won't get you high; it also won't improve the function of your attention system, so results may vary. Pitching ATX as an ADHD drug was sort of a saving throw.
These things aren't engineered; they're injected into rats and then examined in trays of cloned neurons to see what happens. Sometimes they see activity against a virus or bacteria (notably, drugs with action against grahm-positive and grahm-negative bacteria are easy to identify, since they do very specific things to a sample and you can test further on a standard set of bacteria). Sometimes they find inhibition of a Cytochrome P450 enzyme.
In psychiatry, you're not going to cure anything: drugs won't rewire your brain; they only poke at neurons. Opium doesn't cure chronic pain because the source of pain is physical while opium just inhibits the response. ADHD drugs plug up the drains for certain neurotransmitters so your brain has more floating around, but don't go in and surgically rewire anything to pump out more without more drugs. You can't do that without genetic modification.
Antivirals, on the other hand, work quite well for suppressing and removing diseases, so long as your immune system can handle those diseases and the virus doesn't incubate in a protected space. HSV and HPV are in locations not accessible to drugs, and saturation with an antiviral won't work; likewise, forcing an antiviral into the cells would also damage and destroy the cells themselves. Hepatitis-C is easier to reach and destroy. Rabies literally creates factories inside neurons.
It's convenient to think that there's some great conspiracy out there, even though researchers move around, information is hard to contain, what is discovered with modern science can be re-discovered, the next shop over will find the same thing and cut your profit machine out from under you, and the regulators have copies of everything you've ever tried and every experimental report ever written even for drugs that went nowhere fast. The most profitable avenue is to patent the drug and sell it for as much as you can, then wind it down--and hope you don't get ripped apart by price gouging laws.
So have research done by government and charity, with pharmaceutical companies only allowed to perform the physical manufacturing. You could also encourage more collaboration so research could be pooled rather than wasteful parallel research conducted by competing companies.
That's what public universities and NIH grants do already. You might notice the UK and Norway haven't discovered the cure to HIV yet, either, even though it's at the top of the list for the entire world.
I'm not so certain. Dark matter never panned out, and the information out there seems well-reasoned.
This looks like a new model, more like fringe science: might be bullshit, might be legitimate, but appears to be based in something that makes sense of things that don't make sense right now. It uses existing theories to suggest new behaviors within the framework of those theories.
By contrast, dark matter looks at the same problem--centrifugal forces should overcome the gravity of galaxies and hurl their stars out into space, but don't--and suggests that there's a magical, undiscovered form of matter which we can't measure, accounting for 85% of all mass and 25% of all energy in the universe. This creates new gravity (which we can't quite measure, apparently) so the universe doesn't break apart. We can't see it, we can't find it, we can't interact with it, but it's there because things happen that shouldn't happen.
Dark matter sounds a lot like the invisible ether medium that carries light. QI sounds like an insight about applying existing theories in ways that their frameworks suggest would work.
Now I am not a quantum physicist, so how am I to determine which of these is correct and which is coke-fueled magical thinking?
Unfortunately, large-scale CAES plants are very energy inefficient. Compressing and decompressing air introduces energy losses, resulting in an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52%, compared to 70-85% for pumped hydropower plants, and 70-90% for chemical batteries.
They claim large-scale CAES is inefficient.
Then: they heavily advocate small-scale CAES for being way more efficient than batteries.
That's not the argument, although they're not very bright: these are off-grid types of folks who don't understand things like storage overhead versus transmission overhead for overgeneration.
They've got an article about going off-grid with CAES that both assumes off-grid is a great idea and claims CAES is only 50% efficient (adiabatic systems are above 75% and predicted to mature to above 90%, even though theoretical limit is 100%).
Slashdot Mirror
Not really.
Current data suggests that America's increased border control in the early 1990s resulted in an increase of 5.8 million resident unauthorized immigrants by 2010, since undocumented migrant workers were coming and going, but then decided to come and stay due to the difficulty and danger of crossing. The numbers piled up.
More to the point, I'm suggesting that the harmless and banal are impeded by border controls, while the dangerous and destructive are merely inconvenienced. Some speculate this inconvenience turns into a tighter market for drug runners in particular, which develops better-funded and more-militant groups, increasing the damage to our Nation; although that's an unnecessary speculation at this point.
That's the problem: you go outside, dance around each night, and then when it rains 2 weeks later you claim your rain dance made it rain.
It's infeasible to monitor an entire border; and then people go under it anyway. Talk about terrorists, drug cartels, and other well-funded and heavily-organized threats goes hand-in-hand with apprehending poor women fleeing from a creditor who wants to gangrape them to death and sell their children into sex slavery while the well-funded insurgents bypass all your security.
We've done something. It did nothing, but we had to do something. Let's do it even more.
Border control is a farce. We find tunnels under houses miles from the border used to traffic people from Mexico. No tools can detect and locate tunnels--they've been begging for that for decades, and it keeps not happening despite enormous amounts of government money just sitting there ready to shove in people's pockets.
This comes up whenever people talk about Pakistan, yet not around Trump's wall. What's different about Germany's border, besides being insulated by the entire free-movement zone of the EU on a few sides, plus the Danes, the Pols, and other stable and wealthy nations?
All that b.s. to come to the exact conclusion I laid out... I said WE WILL HAVE CHEMICAL ENERGY FOR A WHILE LONGER.
Then you made a meaningless statement. We will have horse-drawn carts for a while longer; petrol cars are obviously inferior, for the moment, and gasoline isn't ready.
Gasoline will go the way of the horse-drawn carriage soon.
And your whole "most people drive" blah blah blah.. Here in CA we drive A LOT. It's a big state.
Yes, yes, I'm sure lots of people make 400-mile round trips for at least a third of their driving and they fill up the tank 2-3 times a day.
Current-generation all-electric vehicles can go as far on one full battery charge as a current-generation car can go on one full tank of gas. If you're not spending $40/day on gasoline, an EV will handle your daily driving, so long as you can plug it in for 5 hours at the end of the day.
Current-generation EVs can full-charge in under 2 hours from a high-power charge station, but that's not something you're going to have at your house; and those charge stations can put out enough power through one charger to charge the battery in under 30 minutes, just the cars don't have a charge circuit sized for that. On the plus side, you generally don't have to refill the car to make a round trip--that's what that trip to New York was about: you might need a 20-minute rest stop to top up.
The cars themselves really are ready to replace daily driving, unless California belches out more pollution itself in car exhaust fumes than China does with all its industry. What, do you people just wake up and drive for 5 hours straight, then drive another 5 hours ten minutes later? Tell your city council to approve a grocery store in your town.
You're still missing the point. The energy density of gasoline is such that a person _could_ (not would) carry enough energy, in the form of gasoline, to cross the entire continent in one go. Total weight = about 1,100 lbs.
Yes, and it would be stupid. A person would get slightly-better mileage, have greater cargo capacity, and face less of a logistics burden simply fueling up now and then.
Total weight to cross the USA using batteries would weight at least 5x that under the best scenarios
Which is also stupid. High-power charging stations will eventually roll out, just like gas stations did for petrol cars.
If you're gonna keep up with the strawmen
Who in the hell would carry gasoline around, instead of fueling up?
There are places in the United States where you are NOT going to find a recharge station.
Not right now. There was a time when cars ran on peanut oil because you generally didn't find gasoline stations. Farmers mostly pressed some of their crop for oil, used the dry mass for feed, and ran their little cars and farm trucks locally. Cross-country driving was a thing you did with horses, since there were stables and feed everywhere and not a lot of diesel or gasoline.
Charging stations require less infrastructure than gasoline stations (which get refilled by trucks coming with fuel, not by some kind of pipeline or other transmission system). If you have power, you can put up a charging station. If you don't have high-capacity power, you might put up a 40kW charging station, and folks coming that way may need to take an hour-long break or so to recharge.
It's also not unreasonable to supply a free (i.e. tax-funded) charging station along those stretch-of-nowhere places where there is no gasoline (somebody built road), but that's a whole different level of politics, philosophy, and logistics.
CHEMICAL ENERGY will be with us for a while longer because, for the moment, the range it provides is superior and the "recharge" time is also superior.
Not for unusually long. The time to refill is negligible, and we can route around all of these issues with little trouble--even for long-distance trucking (individual, parallel charging of battery packs at normal current across the batteries and the multiple chargers so they don't get super super hot, but your truck stop has a frigging substation in the back to handle the load).
The great majority of driving doesn't have these concerns, even at 10kW charging. You can charge your car overnight--you come home and plug in at all times, pulling 30 miles of range per hour of charging. With the 300-mile EVs (e.g. Chevy Bolt), the 200-mile trip from Baltimore to New York City amounts to three hours of charging during the round trip. That means if you drive to New York and intend to stay longer than a couple hours, you're good.
Note the Chevy Bolt, at 10kW, takes 6 hours to recharge from empty. At its capacity of 40kW, it's 1.5 hours. 600VDC level-3 charging at 120kW you're talking about half an hour to fully charge a 300-mile-range battery--but your vehicle has to support that.
Now: think of any car out there. Most have 250-300 mile range on a tank. How frequently does a person need to refuel? Once a day? Once a week? That's your normal electric vehicle usage case. Since you can refuel multiple times each day, it stands to reason most people won't have any trouble keeping the battery topped up.
Will we still have gasoline and diesel? Yes. Not in the everyday driver; people will have motorcycles from 1950 or 2018, and jet planes are going to suck fuel because you're not running that on battery. Will chemical cars be more than a fraction of new sales a decade from now? Potentially not--even as-is, most people can charge on the slow 3.3kW charger at home each night, never mind having a $2,000 Chargepoint insta
300 meters is 300 meters
It's 1/135 of the car's normal mileage; and the total change is between 0 and 1/135. It also matters less on continuous driving, since it mainly only impacts stop-and-go traffic.
I can, with my current gasoline vehicle, drive all the way across this continent without ever pulling into a gas station, if I so desire. I can take enough gasoline with me. Be it in jerry cans or a secondary fuel tank. You can't do that with batteries.. They'd weight too much.
You can stop and pour some of your (heavy) gasoline into the fuel tank, or you can pull into the gas station next to which you've stopped and use their gasoline.
There are 160kW charge stations; nobody has put more than 60kW charge circuitry in a car yet. 160kW can fill an 85kWh battery pack in half an hour. That's 4.75 hours of driving at 60mph, and 4 at 70mph--and that's without things like recuperative cooling (using a thin panel heat engine between the hot coolant loop and the radiator to generate electricity). A 30% gain in mileage would mean 5.3 hours at 70mph or 6.2 at 60mph on a half-hour charge at 160kW.
You're supposed to take a 40-minute rest every 4 hours.
So, if you make chairs and it costs $10 in materials and $5 in labor per chair, COGS is $15. If you sell those chairs for $20, you go out of business.
Why?
Because all the other stuff in your business amounts to $8 per chair, and it costs you $23 to produce each chair. You're losing $3 per chair.
Drawing more money than COGS doesn't imply profitability. The gross profits in any fast food business are around 50%, with net profits below 8%: selling less than 90% over COGS implies running into the red and going out of business. It's narrower for many businesses, but it's always wider than zero.
I'm rational enough to use and prefer Amazon for everything except hosting (Digital Ocean ftw). Hasn't stopped me from pointing out that they make over 100% of their profits from AWS: their businesses run below profitability and they shore them up with cloud computing services.
That's predatory pricing.
Boycotts don't work; but those people who talk about a boycott and don't bother doing it themselves? They'll talk. They'll talk about breaking AWS off from Amazon. They'll talk about Federal anti-trust investigations.
That works.
It works even if you don't have enough people to make a dent with a boycott anyway.
The only net-energy-positive process I've yet found is a differential thermal generator--a heat pump connected to a heat engine, using adiabatic recuperation and taking advantage of the fact that atmosphere isn't one uniform temperature (you belch cold air out the exhaust, and you're sucking warmer air into the intake).
The engineers don't like it. They tell me it'll work, but you'll never get much energy density: it's going to look fancy running itself while producing maybe enough excess energy to also light up an LED bulb. This is because of the heat differential: the hot side is not that much hotter than the cold side, and it takes energy to make it hot.
I have suggested that a machine which sucks in atmosphere and compresses it is a heat pump because the thermal energy in 100L of atmosphere still exists when that mass is reduced to 1L--hence why it gets frigging hot--and so you can create relatively large temperature differentials. Nobody's buying it, although they maintain it does work--in the same way one of those spinning radiometers, in that it works but it's totally useless.
Of course, the earth would be a frozen black rock without the sun pouring energy into it all the time: it's just a fancy solar generator.
Actually, batteries weigh less discharged than charged; and the difference in mileage between a full and empty tank is minimal, such that a 25mpg car can travel 300 meters further on an empty tank than a full tank (if it can magically burn the same amount of fuel as a full tank along the way, without carrying the tank of fuel itself).
Our grid isn't 100% clean energy, so there's always load to offset at the moment. You can put the solar energy right on the grid.
Even more efficient, but probably expensive ;D is: having someone else read aloud to you. You try to follow and make your mental model.
The Internet suggests that's how many people get laid in college, although I've started to think the Internet has some self-selection bias and a lack of general credibility.
Seems reasonable. I'm able to read without paying attention to the text, and instead rummage through the information in my head. I started reading fiction again after an episode of reading a book for two hours that I ... don't remember; I set the book down and only had three months of new memories that were a lot more interesting than anything that happens in the real world.
I can recognize reality--more specifically, I can't not recognize reality (which has consequences)--but I have more memories of things that are clearly not from reality, and those memories are more-vivid than anything else. I've spent my entire life abusing the machine with everything from synesthesia (I carried around an iPod full of songs that sounded like impossible colors and euphoria--LSD and cocaine in MP3 format, dude!) to dipping directly into my own analytical thought process and not trying to make sense of it (nothing in there makes sense).
People think I'm a genius (they're wrong: it's a parlor trick) because I recognize things they don't and can rapidly solve some problems, and at the same time are frequently confused at how quickly I go off on tangents because I recognize that two things are similar or related in ways nobody else considers. The two are the same mechanism.
So if I read something that's related to subject matter with which I have a great deal of familiarity, I'll immediately start connecting together existing information and analogical information: I'm not as aware of the text as I am of the massive amount of data spread throughout my brain. I start theorizing new ideas from this right away, it stores better. Whenever I hit something completely new, I stop dead: I have trouble learning things I can't immediately grasp, and usually find someone to do it for me and explain wtf is going on so I can get something seeded in there to work with.
I hate when the machine breaks like that.
Seems like most people would experience similar with reading in general: if X and Y, then Z; if you know X and Y and I point out that these together imply Z, you can rapidly validate that, connect it together, and understand it. If you have no clue wtf is going on and I have to break down what X and Y are, why they're important, how they function, and why it's sensible that they lead to Z, you're going to need to take things slow.
Of course, there are strategies for mass learning of new and complex information, such as SQW4R and multi-modal reading (subvocalization, multiple-intelligence, and structure-proposition-evaluation). Many of these slow down the process by taking extra reasoning steps, although I often subvocalize with temporal modification (I'll create a memory of a 5-second spoken sentence in 0.5 seconds, which can be hectic: for a brief few moments, I feel like multiple things have happened at once and time is not exactly linear).
Learning is fascinating.
I read English pretty damned fast and I don't even speed read. When I use RSVP, 600WPM is comfortable. RSVP materials suggest 300WPM is viable for a beginner, yet I could pull 800WPM with comprehension, albeit that's running a little hot.
I have some odd mental habits, so I'm relatively well-prepared for things like that.
Rote is an important learning mechanism. Memory is associative, and understanding is complex.
I never learned much by rote. When I learned math, I was learning processes, and I would see connections between those processes. I'd start reflecting everything as everything else, and could never remember...anything. I always re-derived all my formulas from other knowledge, proving again and again that the formula of a sphere was whatever it was.
When we moved onto integration in Calc 1, I immediately decided it was too much work and spent 40 minutes creating integration by parts--because I was too dumb to look forward 15 pages. My teacher said there was no such thing as a chain rule for integration, and I found the proposition preposterous.
I've forgotten most of that now.
Your reasoning center is prefrontal, but it relies on as much automatic process as it can. the more you use a process, the more you restructure the neural pathways around that process: when your prefrontal cortex says, "I need to perform process X, then put the result into process Y," your brain quickly spits out the result of process X, and then you manually stick that into process Y--which, again, just dumps the result back out into your head. Reasoning isn't as simple as just doing a lot of rote work up front.
The more stuff you know, the more you can associate. You can perform addition by simple, isometric process based around an addition table of five elements--forcefully memorize those five elements. Memorize your multiplication table, too. You'll have to practice the process of registered arithmetic, but it'll settle in eventually; it won't work unless you can produce the product of two single-digit multiplicands at prompting immediately without thinking.
I've noticed I read words by prediction: I know what words should come in the sentence, and will fill in what should be there. Word shape, length, position, and context determine what I see; sometimes I'm not even looking at the area of text I'm reading, instead inspecting the shape of the paragraph as a whole (including where white spaces occur) and "reading" the text entirely by prediction.
A not-insignificant part of this process is creating and integrating a theory-of-mind model of the writer: I'm simulating your thoughts, mannerisms, and speech patterns in my head. As consequence, I can have rather dramatic apparent personality shifts internally, although I assume most people don't notice because I tend to reflexively squelch that externally.
You win 100 Internets.
These people don't know about chicken sexers.
It's actually a minimum wage, so employees can receive wage raises for merit if Amazon so chooses.
The median wage tends to follow the minimum wage as a proportion of productivity, which means a minimum wage not kept up with productivity gains just gets you a larger, less-wealthy work force instead of making the workers wealthier. Had the minimum wage stayed at 1960s levels, the United States would likely have around 270 million population today, and a median household income of $115,000--the dollar number might be different (more or less inflation), but the purchasing power would be what $115k buys today.
Of course that brings us back to the age of the bourgeoisie and the proles: while a great many households have a mere $40k income, the middle-class lavishes in its $120k lifestyle. Of course the haute would be around the same $200k lifestyle they occupy today, and the rich above them.
I've ended up being that one guy that gets job offers because somebody I've encountered just wants me at the company because of this. Some of my employers have sat me at a desk for years knowing I had nothing to do because I solved all their problems in 6 months. They keep me around because I occasionally fix something else, or something breaks and I can fix it faster than anyone else, or they want to do something new and they stick it in front of me and ask how to engineer a better solution.
It makes for a good story, but I really don't like being the guy who has the answer to everything. The business keeps me around because I'm tangentially-useful and they occasionally get 10x my salary out of something I do. This often results in me being the only person with responsibility over a certain type or set of systems, so there's no back-up--I've protested this and they simply decide it's too expensive to hire two of me.
I've at times been the guy who wanders the building talking to people, then sits down and makes their work go away.
There's a lot of unexplained things going on which would be explainable if some magical stuff was everywhere but not perceivable. Maybe a wizard, mana, or the Ether.
If you can capture some mana in a flask and show how it can power magically-fueled devices, then we'll talk. Until then, you're just pointing out that water falls from the sky yet it only falls down, therefor there must be a river god at the top of the mountain making new water to bring rain and the unending flow.
Look at climate science. They put CO2 and water vapor in a box, shine a light at it, and measure temperature changes and heat retention. You can actually put the CO2 in a bottle. You can compress it into a liquid. You can measure whether it is or isn't there, and how much of it exists. You can correlate how much is there with impacts on temperature retention because you can measure both. CO2 isn't imaginary and predicted to be real because something is different between two measurably-identical things and so something must be there; dark matter is, and somebody is predicting now that there is an alternate property about how things move which would conveniently explain things without some magical sauce we can't seem to measure. Let the scientists fight it out.
McCulloch claims his model predicts a bunch of things that don't make sense using simpler models than dark matter theory. Pay some researchers a million dollars to determine if this actually holds water.
So is the existence of Jehovah, Odin, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
so research is aimed at more profitable drugs (ie someone has to keep taking it rather than providing a cure)
Research isn't really targeted as well as you'd think. Atomoxetine, for example, was a promising antidepressant because it's an NET inhibitor; it turned out to not work well for depression (it works GREAT for some people). Atomoxetine works quite well for hyperactivity by selectively inhibiting NET in the prefrontal cortex, where dopamine is also transported primarily across NET instead of DAT: it's a non-stimulant ADHD drug. Without the DAT action, it won't get you high; it also won't improve the function of your attention system, so results may vary. Pitching ATX as an ADHD drug was sort of a saving throw.
These things aren't engineered; they're injected into rats and then examined in trays of cloned neurons to see what happens. Sometimes they see activity against a virus or bacteria (notably, drugs with action against grahm-positive and grahm-negative bacteria are easy to identify, since they do very specific things to a sample and you can test further on a standard set of bacteria). Sometimes they find inhibition of a Cytochrome P450 enzyme.
In psychiatry, you're not going to cure anything: drugs won't rewire your brain; they only poke at neurons. Opium doesn't cure chronic pain because the source of pain is physical while opium just inhibits the response. ADHD drugs plug up the drains for certain neurotransmitters so your brain has more floating around, but don't go in and surgically rewire anything to pump out more without more drugs. You can't do that without genetic modification.
Antivirals, on the other hand, work quite well for suppressing and removing diseases, so long as your immune system can handle those diseases and the virus doesn't incubate in a protected space. HSV and HPV are in locations not accessible to drugs, and saturation with an antiviral won't work; likewise, forcing an antiviral into the cells would also damage and destroy the cells themselves. Hepatitis-C is easier to reach and destroy. Rabies literally creates factories inside neurons.
It's convenient to think that there's some great conspiracy out there, even though researchers move around, information is hard to contain, what is discovered with modern science can be re-discovered, the next shop over will find the same thing and cut your profit machine out from under you, and the regulators have copies of everything you've ever tried and every experimental report ever written even for drugs that went nowhere fast. The most profitable avenue is to patent the drug and sell it for as much as you can, then wind it down--and hope you don't get ripped apart by price gouging laws.
So have research done by government and charity, with pharmaceutical companies only allowed to perform the physical manufacturing. You could also encourage more collaboration so research could be pooled rather than wasteful parallel research conducted by competing companies.
That's what public universities and NIH grants do already. You might notice the UK and Norway haven't discovered the cure to HIV yet, either, even though it's at the top of the list for the entire world.
I'm not so certain. Dark matter never panned out, and the information out there seems well-reasoned.
This looks like a new model, more like fringe science: might be bullshit, might be legitimate, but appears to be based in something that makes sense of things that don't make sense right now. It uses existing theories to suggest new behaviors within the framework of those theories.
By contrast, dark matter looks at the same problem--centrifugal forces should overcome the gravity of galaxies and hurl their stars out into space, but don't--and suggests that there's a magical, undiscovered form of matter which we can't measure, accounting for 85% of all mass and 25% of all energy in the universe. This creates new gravity (which we can't quite measure, apparently) so the universe doesn't break apart. We can't see it, we can't find it, we can't interact with it, but it's there because things happen that shouldn't happen.
Dark matter sounds a lot like the invisible ether medium that carries light. QI sounds like an insight about applying existing theories in ways that their frameworks suggest would work.
Now I am not a quantum physicist, so how am I to determine which of these is correct and which is coke-fueled magical thinking?
Yeah but here's the quote:
Unfortunately, large-scale CAES plants are very energy inefficient. Compressing and decompressing air introduces energy losses, resulting in an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52%, compared to 70-85% for pumped hydropower plants, and 70-90% for chemical batteries.
They claim large-scale CAES is inefficient.
Then: they heavily advocate small-scale CAES for being way more efficient than batteries.
That's not the argument, although they're not very bright: these are off-grid types of folks who don't understand things like storage overhead versus transmission overhead for overgeneration.
They've got an article about going off-grid with CAES that both assumes off-grid is a great idea and claims CAES is only 50% efficient (adiabatic systems are above 75% and predicted to mature to above 90%, even though theoretical limit is 100%).
These are preppers.