A compression based dehumidifier is very inefficient. This system is pretty slick; they vaporize biomass (releasing the moisture content) and turn it to a charcoal for fertilizer, making the process carbon-negative, according to TFA.
The last part raises my eyebrows a bit-- they seem to claim they aren't releasing CO2, but it isn't clear where the actual energy input comes from (chemically). Presumably it is just a portion of the biomass that is burned.
If the average car is used 3% today, and self driving taxis take over, the real challenge will be the number of cars required will shrink by an order of magnitude or more. That leaves the legacy automakers with huge infrastructure that will be grossly under-utilized.
Even if they can make everything else work including vehicle electrification and autonomous driving, this will limit their ability to compete.
Some of my best investment ideas came from/. This was especially true in the early years. So, I will give them a little slack on this one.
Unfortunately most people have no idea how to manage their money. This has led to requirements for fiduciary oversight that adds layers of management and cost.
The mutual fund situation though is really sad, especially in most 401k’s. Most funds fail to outperform their benchmark, and the fees are way too high for the service provided. There were a few that were worth the money— Fidelity ContraFund was an obvious one back in the day. The manager of the fund expressed the problem though— as a fund gets bigger there simply aren’t as many good opportunities to really differentiate one fund from another.
The high net worth broker funds are a pretty good scam as well. I compared my brokerage account 1, 3, 5, and 10-year performance to a broker trying to get my business, and even before fees I was killing him. My only reason for talking to him was that I was having a challenge diversifying away from AAPL, which at the time was about 105% of my (leveraged) portfolio.
I have to agree. Many times people don't know how to approach a problem well enough to define how to address it in a higher level system. Making people good at Excel makes them useful for solving day-to-day problems.
Unfortunately, you also need a mechanism for teaching people when and how to create a database instead. Haven't been able to really do that yet myself... but have a few projects that really need it.
The clueless people get an etch-a-sketch. The people who get promoted are the ones that show other people how to get better with the tools that are needed to do their job.
The people that don't get promoted are the ones that never learn or grow.
Most of the help I give people in Excel is about working with values that aren't helpful that have been exported from another system. An example is we have file numbers that have a three letter series, a dash, a two number year, another dash, and a four number sequence. The user might want to be able to sort or filter by series or year. Spend five minutes with them showing them the easy and harder ways of doing that, and they have a very repeatable system for being able to use Excel for more of their work.
Other things that provide them with huge help are the subtotal and sumif/countif functions, and the idea that totals should be at the top and not the bottom. Simple structuring of data is useful no matter what tool they are using.
(It is fun to just run a line of sed/awk/grep that gives them the answer instantly, but sometimes that is just being a jerk.)
Sometimes there is more enterprise value in letting someone else spend 4 hours doing something themselves compared to doing it yourself in 10 minutes. The key is in helping that person be more effective with a tool they understand.
I work with one-off data sets with 3-10,000 rows of data all the time, and Excel is an awesome tool for working with it for the 5-30 minutes it might be relevant. Putting the information into a proper database is useless, because the "answer" is all that is ever needed after that first analysis.
Don't get me wrong though-- I do have spreadsheets I spend way too much time with, as they are exported from our accounting system, need to be massaged and analyzed, and are still relevant in a couple weeks when I repeat the process, compare, and validate data. I would love to set up a proper database for this information so the process is more expeditiously repeated. (The accounting system itself could do the work, but the purpose of my effort is to provide reasonable confidence that the accountant isn't embezzling.)
240m^3 of hydrogen gas, presumably at standard conditions is roughly 24l of gasoline equivalent, or roughly 210kWh equivalen. 1.2MW in -> 0.2MW out. Pretty miserable use of energy.
Completely different situation. If you are being paid to write a program, you are done when the program is. If you chose to automate the task you are paid to do (ideally on a non-company resource like a Raspberry Pi) then you are still in the clear. Hopefully you step up and find additional ways to add value for the company, but there is no obligation.
Nothing showed me the "bad at math" tax more than talking to a driver who was renting their car via Lyft... at $250/week with insurance. They looked at it as they just need to drive 12 hours per week and the car is free. I understand extenuating circumstances, but talk about indentured servitude...
I really appreciate the fact that it is half the price of a taxi-- it means I don't have to rent a car and drive myself nearly as often, so potentially it is better in economic terms. At 20% more though, I don't think I would be able to justify it as much though (with still tipping).
Getting professionally critiqued on your code could have value. I would think a 12-hour course on syntax, resources, and pitfalls for a language could be interesting though. One per language, maybe you have beginner levels at 12 hours and difference levels that are only 3 hours or something.
But experience doing is 90% of the game usually. Blind leading the dumb on self-study of new concepts is ineffective.
Yeah. If Woz wants a favorable legacy he had better get his shit together on this. In reality though, I would think a split/internship program would be more effective to give people more effective coding experience.
How do you do this if you want to keep your large shareholders in the game? They would be forced to halt trading in the stock once they have the information, which is untenable for a large fund.
He should have had better advice prior to doing anything, but that does get tricky... especially when you run things kind of by the seat of your pants...
No, the desire is to get it resolved so it isn't an issue anymore. It is too much of a distraction for the company (and especially the stock). Curious if it is a better deal than was made previously.
Have used DDG for years as my primary search engine on my desktop, but unfortunately I don’t think the results are nearly as effective as Google.
The most basic issue is that meaningful information is never displayed directly in the results. If I search for EURUSD on Google, I get the actual exchange rate. On DDG, I have to click a spammy link to get it. I also have better luck with highly technical searches in Google. But, for 80% of the stuff it is good enough.
Negative pricing is generally caused by transmission limitations rather than broader generation limitations. If you can't get (say) a reasonable percentage of North Sea wind to London, it is quite likely that you will go negative in pricing for some other areas. It doesn't help when the transmission lines are shared with baseload plants that can't quickly respond to load changes.
You need to subsidize new technology in order to move forward. The fact that a number of these price guarantees (subsidies) don't adequately address market needs is a separate issue. Force the wind folks to have some on-site energy storage for grid interconnection and you solve the problem (at an increased cost).
Actually some heavy industries love wind power-- they get paid to use energy at times. Wind is a great component of a diversified energy grid, especially when the turbines are geographically dispersed. He challenge for wind is its low capacity factor, which means you need to cover ~35% of its rating with either more (geographically dispersed) wind turbines, or another source of dispatchable power.
When you do it with wind, you run the risk that you end up with over-capacity, and you make the other power sources more expensive because you artificially reduce their capacity factor from ~90% to ~10-20%.
Pretty much... I have been in all four counties at least 4 days in the past three months, and never really noticed it especially bad... aside from the feedlot in Ontario. Mostly in the morning, so it would usually be less then, but not especially bad.
I live by the ocean though, so I am not getting it consistently bad; this could skew my perception.
Slashdot Mirror
A compression based dehumidifier is very inefficient. This system is pretty slick; they vaporize biomass (releasing the moisture content) and turn it to a charcoal for fertilizer, making the process carbon-negative, according to TFA.
The last part raises my eyebrows a bit-- they seem to claim they aren't releasing CO2, but it isn't clear where the actual energy input comes from (chemically). Presumably it is just a portion of the biomass that is burned.
If the average car is used 3% today, and self driving taxis take over, the real challenge will be the number of cars required will shrink by an order of magnitude or more. That leaves the legacy automakers with huge infrastructure that will be grossly under-utilized.
Even if they can make everything else work including vehicle electrification and autonomous driving, this will limit their ability to compete.
Yup. We need people like Musk. He might need a better PR person though...
Also happy to invest in Musk.
Contained or uncontained failure though?
Some of my best investment ideas came from /. This was especially true in the early years. So, I will give them a little slack on this one.
Unfortunately most people have no idea how to manage their money. This has led to requirements for fiduciary oversight that adds layers of management and cost.
The mutual fund situation though is really sad, especially in most 401k’s. Most funds fail to outperform their benchmark, and the fees are way too high for the service provided. There were a few that were worth the money— Fidelity ContraFund was an obvious one back in the day. The manager of the fund expressed the problem though— as a fund gets bigger there simply aren’t as many good opportunities to really differentiate one fund from another.
The high net worth broker funds are a pretty good scam as well. I compared my brokerage account 1, 3, 5, and 10-year performance to a broker trying to get my business, and even before fees I was killing him. My only reason for talking to him was that I was having a challenge diversifying away from AAPL, which at the time was about 105% of my (leveraged) portfolio.
Not a chance. If Uber was still a material portion of their business then it would t work.
But, if Microsoft started their own ride sharing app for their employees only, that could be fair game.
Midterm elections, or quarterly reports... so complicated!
I have to agree. Many times people don't know how to approach a problem well enough to define how to address it in a higher level system. Making people good at Excel makes them useful for solving day-to-day problems.
Unfortunately, you also need a mechanism for teaching people when and how to create a database instead. Haven't been able to really do that yet myself... but have a few projects that really need it.
The clueless people get an etch-a-sketch. The people who get promoted are the ones that show other people how to get better with the tools that are needed to do their job.
The people that don't get promoted are the ones that never learn or grow.
Most of the help I give people in Excel is about working with values that aren't helpful that have been exported from another system. An example is we have file numbers that have a three letter series, a dash, a two number year, another dash, and a four number sequence. The user might want to be able to sort or filter by series or year. Spend five minutes with them showing them the easy and harder ways of doing that, and they have a very repeatable system for being able to use Excel for more of their work.
Other things that provide them with huge help are the subtotal and sumif/countif functions, and the idea that totals should be at the top and not the bottom. Simple structuring of data is useful no matter what tool they are using.
(It is fun to just run a line of sed/awk/grep that gives them the answer instantly, but sometimes that is just being a jerk.)
Sometimes there is more enterprise value in letting someone else spend 4 hours doing something themselves compared to doing it yourself in 10 minutes. The key is in helping that person be more effective with a tool they understand.
I work with one-off data sets with 3-10,000 rows of data all the time, and Excel is an awesome tool for working with it for the 5-30 minutes it might be relevant. Putting the information into a proper database is useless, because the "answer" is all that is ever needed after that first analysis.
Don't get me wrong though-- I do have spreadsheets I spend way too much time with, as they are exported from our accounting system, need to be massaged and analyzed, and are still relevant in a couple weeks when I repeat the process, compare, and validate data. I would love to set up a proper database for this information so the process is more expeditiously repeated. (The accounting system itself could do the work, but the purpose of my effort is to provide reasonable confidence that the accountant isn't embezzling.)
240m^3 of hydrogen gas, presumably at standard conditions is roughly 24l of gasoline equivalent, or roughly 210kWh equivalen. 1.2MW in -> 0.2MW out. Pretty miserable use of energy.
Completely different situation. If you are being paid to write a program, you are done when the program is. If you chose to automate the task you are paid to do (ideally on a non-company resource like a Raspberry Pi) then you are still in the clear. Hopefully you step up and find additional ways to add value for the company, but there is no obligation.
Nothing showed me the "bad at math" tax more than talking to a driver who was renting their car via Lyft... at $250/week with insurance. They looked at it as they just need to drive 12 hours per week and the car is free. I understand extenuating circumstances, but talk about indentured servitude...
I really appreciate the fact that it is half the price of a taxi-- it means I don't have to rent a car and drive myself nearly as often, so potentially it is better in economic terms. At 20% more though, I don't think I would be able to justify it as much though (with still tipping).
Getting professionally critiqued on your code could have value. I would think a 12-hour course on syntax, resources, and pitfalls for a language could be interesting though. One per language, maybe you have beginner levels at 12 hours and difference levels that are only 3 hours or something.
But experience doing is 90% of the game usually. Blind leading the dumb on self-study of new concepts is ineffective.
Yeah. If Woz wants a favorable legacy he had better get his shit together on this. In reality though, I would think a split/internship program would be more effective to give people more effective coding experience.
But I am not a coder...
There is also 4. Diversification of sources.
In reality though, things work best with a mix of all of the strategies.
How do you do this if you want to keep your large shareholders in the game? They would be forced to halt trading in the stock once they have the information, which is untenable for a large fund.
He should have had better advice prior to doing anything, but that does get tricky... especially when you run things kind of by the seat of your pants...
No, the desire is to get it resolved so it isn't an issue anymore. It is too much of a distraction for the company (and especially the stock). Curious if it is a better deal than was made previously.
I will have to check. I am aggressive with NoScript in Firefox, so that might be my issue.
Have used DDG for years as my primary search engine on my desktop, but unfortunately I don’t think the results are nearly as effective as Google.
The most basic issue is that meaningful information is never displayed directly in the results. If I search for EURUSD on Google, I get the actual exchange rate. On DDG, I have to click a spammy link to get it. I also have better luck with highly technical searches in Google. But, for 80% of the stuff it is good enough.
Negative pricing is generally caused by transmission limitations rather than broader generation limitations. If you can't get (say) a reasonable percentage of North Sea wind to London, it is quite likely that you will go negative in pricing for some other areas. It doesn't help when the transmission lines are shared with baseload plants that can't quickly respond to load changes.
You need to subsidize new technology in order to move forward. The fact that a number of these price guarantees (subsidies) don't adequately address market needs is a separate issue. Force the wind folks to have some on-site energy storage for grid interconnection and you solve the problem (at an increased cost).
Actually some heavy industries love wind power-- they get paid to use energy at times. Wind is a great component of a diversified energy grid, especially when the turbines are geographically dispersed. He challenge for wind is its low capacity factor, which means you need to cover ~35% of its rating with either more (geographically dispersed) wind turbines, or another source of dispatchable power.
When you do it with wind, you run the risk that you end up with over-capacity, and you make the other power sources more expensive because you artificially reduce their capacity factor from ~90% to ~10-20%.
Pretty much... I have been in all four counties at least 4 days in the past three months, and never really noticed it especially bad... aside from the feedlot in Ontario. Mostly in the morning, so it would usually be less then, but not especially bad.
I live by the ocean though, so I am not getting it consistently bad; this could skew my perception.