pencilguin

5 ms·

1.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Wind farms are a thing because a wind turbine can only be so big: for more power, you put up more of them. They are so cheap because all the costs are transparent, there is noplace to bury wholly-legal graft. A big farm amortizes fixed proj
2.
by pencilguin 4y ago
...which involves drilling.
3.
by pencilguin 4y ago
None of these dams ever produced more than the tiniest fraction of even just the commercial value of the fisheries they destroyed. They totally didn't care.
4.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The value extracted from the dams was never more than a tiny fraction of just the commercial value of the fishery each eliminated, wholly leaving aside the matter of causing extinctions. California's system with dams near peaks of th
5.
by pencilguin 4y ago
And, a compiler that knows custom SIMD optimizations for every algorithm anyone might ever need, and can recognize when you have coded one of them so it can substitute its SIMD version.
6.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.
7.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Not just back to +1.5C, but to where you would have been by that time. Meanwhile, the whole ocean ecosystem has collapsed as acidification continued on up. The primary protein source of a billion+ people has vanished. They do not starve qui
8.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Gaslighting unwelcome. It would be disastrous if a program in any way like this went ahead, because it would be seen as a substitute for fixing the root problem, would steal funding from the latter, and would do nothing to stop the ocean ac
9.
by pencilguin 4y ago
I tried a Beyond Meat burger. It tasted so much like the real thing that I did not finish it. It had that rusty-nail sharpness I have not missed at all. I have been vegetarian for ~30 years. Pork and ham are the only meat I have missed. Kno
10.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Just one? There are numerous mainland Chinese and Russian certificate authorities listed. I always have to go through and disable them. How did they get in there in the first place, and what keeps them there?
11.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Instead of siting polar panels in the desert, it would be overwhelmingly more efficient use of resources to float the solar panels on the canals and reservoirs involved, cutting evaporation and bio-fouling while keeping the panels cool for
12.
by pencilguin 4y ago
There is no idea so bad that nobody will embrace it.
13.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer. The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. T
14.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate. However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many
15.
by pencilguin 4y ago
I am corrected.
16.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Right. Of course everybody cribbed from everybody else. You can't draw any meaningful conclusions from stuff like this. Citing Irish tales from 2200+ years after the supposed event do not help credibility.
17.
by pencilguin 4y ago
California has got reliable power from geo for quite a few decades, as has Iceland. Iceland is not awash in geysers. Geo costs more than renewables, but that was not at issue. It is anyway cheaper than nukes, in places where it is used.
18.
by pencilguin 4y ago
You seem sincerely misled. If you consult more reliable sources, you can cut past the propaganda machine, on this and on other topics. There has always been plenty of money available to people willing to seek to mislead you in this way. It
19.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Geochemists say uranium concentrates in the crust, for chemical reasons -- which is, in fact, where we find it.
20.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Nature used up the best ore billions of years ago. We did get radiation-resistant microbes in exchange.
21.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Geothermal works fine, in numerous places worldwide today, as may be seen simply by looking . It just costs more than wind and solar. Same as nukes. Unlike nukes, geo was once competitive without heavy subsidy, in places.
22.
by pencilguin 4y ago
The jump from lab demonstration to commercial viability is exactly the place where almost every tech trick fails. So there is no need to pay this thing any attention. Geothermal under ideal conditions is not competitive. Steam turbines
23.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Wind and solar will get massive capacity overbuild. Cheaply. When the time is right, storage will, too, and not before.
24.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Likewise, fission: costs too much to bother. Fusion already powers the planet. We just need to build out the solar panels and wind turbines to collect as much of it as we care to find uses for.
25.
by pencilguin 4y ago
It is not possible. It is not even a millionth of the way to possible. It is, instead, cheap concern trolling. Worry instead about money diverted, from building out wind and solar that actually address looming climate disaster, to chase w
26.
by pencilguin 4y ago
It does not, in fact. But it is hard to keep your drill bit enough harder than the rock to cut it.
27.
by pencilguin 4y ago
More commonly, unknown knowns : "It ain't what you don't know that gets you, it's the things you think you know that just ain't so." Usually credited to Josh Billings. It is, e.g., what turned the Iraq invasio
28.
by pencilguin 4y ago
This thing bobs to the top of HN every few weeks. 1. No, there is absolutely no hint of any danger of extracting too much heat, no matter what random problem you make up. Really. 2. A 10km deep hole gets you 1/600th of the way to the c
29.
by pencilguin 4y ago
Your conclusion in (1) does not follow. You don't know how long the price of (e.g.) NRGV will be irrationally inflated, so you cannot afford to bet on when it will collapse. Your conclusion in (2) does not follow. Jane Street works on
30.
by pencilguin 4y ago
That makes no sense. Why would anybody agree to a penalty for something they have no control over?

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