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exasperation

@ exasperation @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Posts
2
Comments
637
Joined
9 mo. ago

  • Inspiring. Innovating.

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  • Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture

    I think that's a huge part of the long term solution: intentionally building overcapacity so that lower production days still produce enough energy to meet needs, but especially sunny or windy days have surplus that needs to be used. If the intermittent energy surplus meets a carbon-fixing method to consume that surplus energy, then we can have carbon capture without that energy use displacing a reduction of greenhouse emissions elsewhere.

  • Inspiring. Innovating.

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  • My question is, wouldn't the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?

    The hardest part about green energy is getting it to the time and place where it can be most useful. That's why real time solar power prices sometimes dip negative (where the producers are literally paying people to take that excess power off the grid), and sometimes in consistent and predictable ways (e.g., California's "duck curve" in spring and autumn).

    So with solar power being the cheapest form of generation, but highly dependent on weather conditions, the solution might be to build up overcapacity where production during cloudy days is enough, and then find some way to store the excess on sunny days for nighttime, and maybe using intermittent power sinks that can productively use energy only when the production is high (charging batteries, preemptively cooling or heating buildings and storing that for later, capturing carbon, performing less time-sensitive computer calculations like data analysis for science, etc.)

    If we have systems that produce too much energy, then carbon capture (including through manufacture of fuel or other chemical feedstocks) can vary by time of day to address overcapacity.

  • 2025-08-31

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  • It's a somewhat common spelling of an Irish name that is also popular in Finland. Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin and the actress who played Robb Stark's wife in the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones (setting aside the mild controversy of how her character represented a plot departure from the books), is probably the person I can think of who is most famous with that name.

  • What age gap is too big of an age gap if someone's in their early 30's?

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  • while he was a bit "immature" for his age (financially)

    Ok this is now my favorite euphemism I've seen

  • How would you propose we actually combat climate change?

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  • US carbon emissions peaked in 2007 and have been coming down since. US capita carbon emissions peaked in the 1970s and have been coming down since.

    The concern has always been with the much, much larger developing world, if they would one day become rich enough to emit carbon like North America. And as it turns out, China's push for low cost solar and low cost EVs have revolutionized the energy world for development economics. Now if you're a poor agrarian country looking to industrialize, the cheapest energy available just happens to be clean.

    It's like how the developing world mostly skipped landline infrastructure in the 2000's because cell phones became easier and cheaper to build. We're seeing the same thing play out with fossil fuel electricity generation, where most new capacity coming online, even in the third world, is solar.

  • How would you propose we actually combat climate change?

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  • I'm not a doomer, in large part because I think that economic forces will reduce greenhouse emissions significantly on their own, and despite hitting recent setbacks in policymaking that would push those reductions to happen more more quickly or with deeper cuts, that decarbonization back down to 1990 levels is still going to happen in our lifetimes.

    Here's how I think we'll get there:

    • Phasing out fossil fuel electricity generation. Solar power is just ridiculously cheap compared to any other method of generation. As we deploy grid scale storage, demand-shifting technology and pricing structures, develop redundancy with wind and advanced geothermal (and possibly fusion in the coming decades), we're going to make fossil fuel electricity generation uncompetitive on price. Maybe ratepayers and governments don't want to subsidize carbon-free energy, but why would they want to subsidize carbon emitting energy when those are no longer competitive?
    • Electrification of transportation (electric vehicles, including big stuff like trains and buses and small stuff like bikes and scooters).
    • Electrification of heat, both for indoor climate control and furnaces/boilers for water and industrial applications. Heat pumps are already cost effective for new construction in most climates, and even retrofits are approaching cost competitiveness with fossil fuel powered heaters.
    • Carbon capture as a feedstock into chemical production, including alternative fuels like sustainable aviation fuel. Once electricity is cheap enough, even only at certain times of day, energy-intensive chemical production can hit flexible output targets to absorb surplus energy supply from overproduction of solar, to store that energy for later or otherwise remove carbon from the atmosphere.

    To borrow from a Taoist concept, we shouldn't expend effort fighting the current of a river when the current itself can be utilized to accomplish our goals. In this case, the capitalist incentive structure of wanting to do stuff that makes money is now being turned towards decarbonization for cost savings or outright profit.

  • How would you propose we actually combat climate change?

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  • Yup, Iceland has such cheap geothermal and hydro energy that they just use electric furnaces to smelt aluminum.

  • 2hot2handle

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  • In this case, though, he's literally wrong. "Spontaneous" has a precise scientific definition and the astronaut is using it correctly.

  • 2hot2handle

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  • I think would've even worked in a reference to "it is Kev's turn to study statistical mechanics."

  • 2hot2handle

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  • they are really just pedantic twits that very well could have commented the same stupid thing to a man.

    Yes, but men experience this at a slightly lower rate.

    So if an astronaut man were to get, say, 10 of these comments, while an astronaut woman gets 15 of these comments, it's fair to infer that about 5 out of the 15 comments wouldn't have been made to a man. Problem is that you can't exactly tell which 5 they are. But you know it's happening.

    Of course, if the ratio is actually closer to 50 versus 10 comments like this, then you've got a pretty good sense that 80% of the pedantic overexplainers-to-an-expert are doing it because the original poster is a woman.

    And one thing you find for these types of examples with a woman who has clear, unmistakable, objective indicators of expertise (literal astronaut) in the topic at hand is that the ratio is much higher for women than men, in a way that might not have been obvious for lesser credentials (like a high school science teacher). But yet, it still happens.

    It's a name for a phenomenon that has existed for a long time. It's a concise way to describe that phenomenon, and I still think it's a good word to have in the vocabulary.

  • 2hot2handle

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  • This post literally has the watermark of the account that creates/posts these. Other people or bots are reposting them, sure, but they're coming from some kind of aggregation account that has this particular style of recreating Twitter threads in a space that fits into the Instagram preference for square images.

  • What is "human husbandry" called

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  • Most organizations just call it Human Resources, or HR for short.

  • How do you look upon the future in regards of climat change? How do you imagine your life in the coming distopie?

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  • Honestly? I'm not ready to give into some kind of fatalistic view that each 0.1°C difference isn't worth fighting for.

    There are a few areas where we might see huge improvement in a short amount of time. With car electrification, we saw electric cars go from something like 0% of the global market to 20% of new cars in just 10 years. Meanwhile, the decarbonization of electric grids is happening at a rapid pace, too, with solar and wind representing a huge percentage of newly installed capacity.

    And some game changing technologies are right around the corner. Grid scale battery storage is turning into a significant part of managing daily demand, and might soon become an important part of managing seasonal demand. Dispatchable advanced geothermal (using the oil and gas's fracking/horizontal drilling techniques to dig new hydrothermal sources) is right around the corner. And it's not exactly imminent, but researchers are making advances in fusion power.

    If energy becomes cheap enough, carbon capture for net zero fuels becomes economical, too. That opens the floodgates for trucking, maritime, and aviation uses. Excess power generation at certain times of day can be used for the less time sensitive energy consumption: treating water, manufacturing certain chemicals, charging batteries, heating and cooling some kind of thermal storage system, etc.

    Plus, cynically, indoor heating is a much larger driver of fossil fuel consumption than indoor cooling, so a warming planet kinda reduces overall emissions from indoor climate control.

    And the thing with all of these factors I'm naming is that these don't rely on governments to enforce sacrifices by industry or commerce. The pricing has already fallen in line so that the cleanest option is the cheapest option. Policy can nudge things, but actually engineering improvement through price signals is going to create much bigger change: you don't need the government to shut down a coal plant when the power plant simply can't produce electricity cheap enough to turn a profit.

  • All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.

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  • Yeah but an MBA is also a post graduate degree. A huge chunk of MBAs have undergrad degrees in something like STEM or humanities.

  • All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.

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  • 10000 times so they preemptively used 4 digits in their username

    Wait it hasn't been shown that this is a decimal system, it might be up to 65,536 in hexadecimal

  • All while the skeletal, crumbling, dusty bones of an econ major pulls business backwards into hell.

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  • I think this is true of most civil engineering majors I know. After getting their degrees, very few actually ended up working in civil engineering because the money was better in software or other tech.

  • Minimum dating standards

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  • The part everyone seems to be missing is: I don't need help conversing, I need to know the locations of like groups of nature loving book readers that actively want to chat and how to find their schedule.

    You say this, but you're also in this thread rejecting advice about how to find people because you don't want to talk to people that you find that way, and telling a story about how you've apparently not followed through with someone who asked you on a date. It sounds like you're self sabotaging by refusing to try.

    Edit: and to be clear, my main point in this line of comments is that people with active friendships tend to have a much easier time finding available potential partners. That's an active part of the search strategy.

  • Minimum dating standards

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  • "Friends" beyond the superficial level that is basically natural requires us to not be busy ass 30-somethings.

    Generally speaking, for people who don't even have the time or energy to foster friendships and superficial relationships that are already in their life, it's gonna be hard to find, evaluate, and build potential romantic relationships.

    That's what meetups and hobby-based activities are for. They're supposed to be fulfilling enough for the activity alone, with the added social benefit of new friends added on. If you'd be willing to do that for the possibility of meeting new romantic partners but not the possibility of meeting new friends, that's gonna be a pretty tough sell even to the potential romantic partners, that you're not really there to make friends.

  • Shaka, when the walls fell.

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  • I suspect the strictness isn't with the procurement process where a contracting officer defines very specific criteria in compliance with acquisition regulations and submits the process to competitive bids. The strictness is in the mission parameters where NASA's ownership of the thing has already been established, but the NASA employees in a strict hierarchical decisionmaking process need to justify why a thing that NASA already owns should be included in the packing list on a mission.