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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

Posts
3
Comments
361
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Elements of Renewable Energy

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  • And gobal warming means the rivers will soon be hot enough that about half of all salmon species stroke out in them. Replaceing clean energy with fossil fuels, which is the definitional result of removing clean energy from the grid while any fossil plants remain connected, not only hurts salmon numbers today, but ensures that for hundreds upon hundreds of years into the future there can be no salmon.

    There is a reason why despite the no change to the number of dams and thouse same dams getting easier and easier for salmon to cross salmon runs have still tended to decline, and keeping methane plants that would otherwise be shut down today operating for decades to come does not help with that.

    Neglecting all the stronger hurricanes, monsoons, floods, elimination of coral reefs, forests, and habitat, we can fertilize trees and reintroduce salmon, we cannot refrigerate the rivers.

  • What a 160-year-old theory about coal predicts about our self-driving future

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  • I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

    Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

    The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

    I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.

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    Therapy Sessions Exposed by Mental Health Care Firm’s Unsecured Database

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  • Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.

  • Australia's internet watchdog says she received "death threats" and that her children were doxxed after she was targeted by Elon Musk for attempting to regulate Xitter

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  • Standard procedure to reduce copycat killings and be respectful to the families of the victims killed on stream. Imagine why people in the US might want a hypothetical livestream by the Sandy Hook shooter of them shooting a bunch of kids taken down.

  • The US Military that's entering Gaza to build a port thinks it is funny to play 'The Imperial March' from Star Wars

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  • Seemed like appropriate enough music for me, although on second thought I can’t imagine the Empire ever having to halfass a port because their nominal ally stopped them from using their infrastructure.

  • Is The United State Fighting A Proxy War?

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  • Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

  • Is The United State Fighting A Proxy War?

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  • Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.

  • Is The United State Fighting A Proxy War?

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  • I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?

  • Is The United State Fighting A Proxy War?

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  • Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.

  • Is The United State Fighting A Proxy War?

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  • I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

    Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.

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  • Yep, we’re all gonna die.

    Not because the robots planned it mind you, but just because some lobbyist sold a few Congressional members on the military needing AI enhanced weapons, and we couldn’t be behind China when it came to the LLM powered ICBM race now could we.

  • Oakland’s new school buses don’t just reduce pollution — they double as giant batteries

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  • Though it’s a car cry from perfect grid storage, as the vehicle isn’t connected during the morning and most of the evening spikes, and ideally needs to recharge overnight to be ready for the morning route so it can’t discharge at the time when grid storage is needed most in a place with plentiful solar.

  • Hydrogen Policy’s Narrow Path: Delusions And Solutions

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  • Ohh I don’t think that we could sustain current levels of aviation with biofuels, though without their use as an lead substitute in gasoline and progress in reducing natural meat production we might be able to, just that it’s a lot more likely than getting a very slow to change industry to rebuild every single airport, aircraft, and fuel transport with a more expensive and less capable alternative.

    Most of the limitation on chemical synthesis is from my understanding that it definitionally requires more energy than it produces, and as such doesn’t make much sense when that primary energy comes from fossil fuels which you could then have used instead. I also suspect that the cost while very high will be a lot lower than the amount required to basically rebuild the entirety of aviation from scratch.

  • Hydrogen Policy’s Narrow Path: Delusions And Solutions

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  • I think placing Aviation in the good to uncertain category is rather generous given the energy density requires such a large shift in airliner design in an industry that has only recently stopped requiring an experimental fuel variance to use unleaded fuel in the same model of engines that have been operating on the ground with unleaded for about half a century.

    Biofuel and chemical synthesis just offer a simpler and nearly drop in replacement, with the main limitation being it costs more so the airlines are trying to drag their feet as much as their lobbyists allow them to, and somehow I doubt a complete redesign of nearly everything in aviation is going to be less expensive than switching to biodiesel.

  • A Small Electric SUV Produces 52% Fewer Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions than a Comparable Gasoline Vehicle

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  • It’s also confusing because it’s not like there isn’t a electrical grid within a hundred miles of where one would go off roading. Us rural mountain yokel’s actually do have plenty RV parks, hotels with EV chargers, and plenty of other places with household outlets that allow overnight charging.

    There are also of course a lot of other reasons people might get an electric SUV, not least of which are that there are actual options in the market segment, no one makes electric vans with sufficient range to make it between interstate and highway fast chargers or minivans period, need to seat more than four people comfortably or seven people total, need at least some towing, need a decently sized cargo space that isn’t seat shaped, etc…

    I mean i’d love it if car manufacturers would stop shoving everyone towards high margin SUVs and Pickups, or made EVs in more than large sedan and SUV flavor, but it doesn’t feel like that’s what they’re talking about.

  • A Small Electric SUV Produces 52% Fewer Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions than a Comparable Gasoline Vehicle

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  • Depends a lot on which company, for instance while Bonneville is like 50% hydro and 6% fossil, Puget Sound Energy and Portland General Electric are currently something like 19% and 25% fossil fuel respectively in this last year and used to be far higher in the recent past.

  • the ick

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  • It’s ok because after we have already fully transitioned the grid to renewables, batteries, and pumped hydro in twenty or thirty years, we’ll then be so good at making renewable electricity that we won’t mind using a process that throws half of it away, all so that we can keep going to gas stations instead of just getting electricity delivered to our homes.

    Being able to fill up your car in 5 minutes instead of 18 during your occasional road trip is definitely going to win out over being able to fill up at home for a tenth the cost, and people will want to burn hydrogen for heating even though it would be a lot cheaper and more energy efficient to use it in even a basic diesel generator to power a heat pump, because people just love throwing their money away so that the poor oil companies can still have a growing business and it’s not like their is an easy and 98% percent efficient way to deliver power to people’s homes, that would just be ridiculous.

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  • While I’ve only used one or two types of bluetooth headphones, i’ve never hand any trouble replacing the battery with them. The cups just snap out and then you unplug the lithium cell and plug a new one it, at least in my experience, so that may just have been a thing with the model you got.

  • In these new Catskills homes, no fossil fuels are allowed | The all-electric, solar-powered homes are designed using passive house principles.

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  • Given how close heating and residential gas use emissions are to personal vehicle emissions it’s likely to come down to efficiency of the cars involved and if their solar powered or not.