grues-dinner

6 ms·

1.
by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Horizontal drilling is already part of the plan in many places - Elon Musk isn't the first person to think of it. It still costs loads to do it per mile - by the looks of it you'd have six bores with three cables each (or one or t
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
To be fair to the National Grid there - a 400kV power line is substantial: it has to have phase separations and be buried deep enough, plus space for reactive compensation from being buried. Roads also go to places with buildings and have j
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Norwich-Tilbury doesn't go near many houses at all, and certainly not 400,000 peoples' houses. Check out the route: https://norwichtotilburymap.nationalgrid.com
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
The consultation area is 120m wide, not necessarily the trenching. The working width is often far less than that: https://www.nationalgrid.com/document/340431/download In this drawing, you can see the area in the
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
UK domestic electricity is roughly equal to industrial (94 vs 82 TWh). Commercial is 62. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/688a286564785... A lot of curtailment happens at night: strong offshore wind and l
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
I also actually really like the look of wind turbines. They seems to be just the right blend of graceful, majestic and futuristic. The old 2-blade ones are a bit visually noisy as they look like they oscillate, but they're basically
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
People oppose everything. * Lattice overhead powerlines? Eyesore (should use the new T style ones), house values, wind noise, hums, WiFi interference, cancer, access roads, hazard to planes, birds * T-frame pylons: boring ( https:/&#x2
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Something like 400,000 people are opposing the Norwich-Tilbury power lines to bring wind energy to where it's used. Including a Green Party MP: https://www.dissmercury.co.uk/news/24840985.green-mp-adrian-... . And
9.
by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Employment in China is actually pretty thin right now. The labour force reduction is surely coming down the track, but it's not here yet. There may be enough time to pivot to lower-labour options with good management. With the exact ri
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
The thing is it's increasingly about the process of stringing things together, rather then the stages themselves. Obviously, not all the stages in your video are in the one video: it's from at least 7 years ago from a company that
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Lots of that design can be fairly easily automated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwzz-96WliU . And that's without all the "fancy" robotics like arms and so on that is only dropping in price and rising in us
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Previous biotech breakthroughs have made good progress in treating many illnesses, but making healthcare cheaper overall is not one of them, even if it makes a specific therapy cheaper. It would be unsurprising to me if a biotech gold-rush
13.
by grues-dinner 11mo ago
What would quantum technology actually deliver? Other than collapsing the internet when every pre-quantum algorithm is broken (nice jobs for the engineers who need to scramble to fix everything, I guess) and even more uncrackable comms for
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
"OK, Timmy. Here's what to do: Tell them there is a mysterious supernatural being watching their every move from a very tall building in New York, helped by legions of minions. If they behave nicely to you, they will be rewarded w
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
> tell them that lowly paid actor is _really_ Santa and he _really_ wants to hear what they want To be fair, that is also pretty wild to me.
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
People will do basically anything to fix junctions except install roundabouts. I wonder how many millions of days humans sit in cars and look at empty crossroads and a red light.
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
And it's a nice problem to solve with AI of many kinds because you can forward-solve the kinematic solution and check for "hallucinations": collisions, exceeding acceleration limits, etc. If your solution doesn't "p
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
"Miscommunication" is when you see mineral water on the bill when you thought it was tap water. Being that ignorant of the positions during a trade war that you started and doing it in public on Twitter is more like holding Uno ca
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Lost was a very valuable public service: it inoculated elder millennials against getting too invested into TV shows.
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
I feel like Airbnb started more on the provider side as "fuck you landlord/local government I'll sublet if I want and you won't catch me" more than a fuck you to hotels specifically. Any "fuck you hotels"
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
The problem is the GVCS is already bumping against the OSHW curse even for the smallest items: replicating one unit costs real money in materials and processing and if you fuck up, a new version costs real money too. But in the last 15 year
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Sell your industry to private equity, this is what happens. Someone who values it will take it up. Many such cases.
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
There are some attempts at things like this: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs They're usually very hard to get share because machine manufacturers can smash out cheaper things via processes like castings, mouldin
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Any consumer trinket that is made from recycled plastic is more or less pointless. At most, you get one more cycle out of that little bit of plastic. Better than nothing, sure, I guess, as long as your thing actually needed to be plastic. W
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
In any country? Yes. For example, Luxembourg (1200km² of farmland, 677,000 people). In most countries: not really. And not to the extent that meat farming does, which is land-use broadly considered to be acceptable. One cow needs from under
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
It would obviously be better in terms of per-panel efficiencies to be further south, but solar is still effective much further north than 40N. Nearly all of Europe from Madrid northward is higher latitude than that. And since Iowa has peopl
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
The figures are, if anything, an underestimate. An acre of solar is about 350-450,000 kWh/year. An F-150 Lightning does 2 miles per kWh. So that's about right. One acre of corn makes about 400 gallons of bioethanol. Even the newes
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
> Picture of ploughed fields We've cleared nature for farms for so long that the fields feel like nature that should be preserved. Not content with cutting down the forests, now even the hedgerows are in the way. Compared to what wa
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
Theoretically, with enough cheap renewable energy, synthetic hydrocarbons could fuel the war machine. It would need possibly big, vulnerable plants to refine, but so does jet fuel and diesel now. Adding that much electrical capacity is a ci
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by grues-dinner 11mo ago
That's the thing, though. Gigantic spaceships, alien panspermia, stasis pods, human-passing androids, underground alien bases, convenient maps in caves. All that disbelief can be suspended. A handpicked team of professional astronauts

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