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Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

Posts
3
Comments
361
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Nvidia is now worth $102M per employee

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  • I don’t think many people would claim overall valuation has much of anything to do with the value labor brings to an organization.

    In this case I think all it indicates is just how much the company’s stock price is driven by speculation about possible demand for generative AI, and even then I’m not sure that current price per share times number of shares divided by number of employees is a clear indication of that.

  • New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

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  • Not really trying to argue, just trying to help explain the high current DC battery systems I have experience with and to someone how seems to have some conceptual understanding of what individual components do, but not how and why they are used or where the limitations come from.

    Them being confidently incorrect doesn’t help of course. :)

    That being said you haven’t really given me much to work off of as to where these misconceptions are coming from beyond a journalist confusing applications for batteries and capacitors and this really seems to be going nowhere, so bye.

  • New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

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  • Again, there are no capacitors car side to be produceing thermal load in the first place during dc fast charging in the first place, and that thermal load is not the primary barrier to how much current can go into the battery without degradation anyway. After all, if it was we would just upscale the cars heat pump and be charged in five minutes.

    Car charging is not coordinated to the point where they all plug in within a few seconds, and if it was a few second randomizer on when eqch timer actually starts charging would accomplish the exact same effect without hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in new grid scale capacitors and inverters.

    This is also unlikely to become a significant problem because a lot of the grid is moving to battery backed solar and wind, where the limit is price per megawatt hour and as such said batteries can provide far more current than the grid could consume. You might be limited by inverter capacity, but storage capacitors are also fundamentally a DC technology so you would need them anyway.

    This may turn out to have benefits for electronics that rely on already specialized supercapacitors, but it can by definition not have any impact on processes that are not currently limited in any way by capacitor technology like battery bulk charge current, the thing that actually limits how fast a car can fast charge.

  • New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

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  • Obviously nearly every electrical circuit board uses capacitors in some respect, especially for filtering and smoothing, but it is extremely rare for them to be used for bulk energy storage outside of things like adjusting power factor.

    Given we are talking about charging times, which are primarily limited by the batteries charge current vs degradation curve and not at all by the various small capacitors in the charger’s electronics, there is fundamentally no effect on charge times unless you are replacing the energy storage medium itself with supercapacitors.

    We can already supply enough dc power to charge an EV battery at its maximum designed curve via dc fast charging stations, which involve some contractors and shunts but actually don’t even involve any size of capacitors at all in the car itself on the HV side.

  • New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

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  • No, it doesn’t effect devices of all sizes, only devices that might use this specific bulky capacitor, all other devices will show exactly zero improvement because there is no real point to mixing capacitors in with a large battery. Being able to quickly get three minutes of charge per whole hour of battery capacity you replace with capacitors just isn’t that useful because you might as well just stay plugged in for an extra few minutes and get the same charge plus that extra hour before needing to find a charger at all.

    As for EV’s the problem is even more pointless, as being able to go a half mile the street from a charger massive enough that it can output a small power plants worth of electricity is similarly to specialized of a use case to be worth the loss of range and greater degradation of the rest of the battery.

  • New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds

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  • The researchers who wrote the paper only mentioned possibly applying the tech to very small things like wearables and Iot applications where a large capacitor might be relevant. It’s the journalist summarizing it that makes the wild claims about phones and cars, which don’t tend to use capacitors for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that they tend to be physically twenty times larger than a given battery of the same capacity.

    If people are able to deal with batteries anywhere near that large, then I’d imagine most of them would choose twenty times the battery life/ range over being able to charge fast enough overload a wall outlet/ small power plant.

  • Will microplastics in our testicles be an issue?

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  • If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

    Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

    Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.

  • rulegularly check their modlog to remind myself how burnt and sickly the grass is on the other side of the fence

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  • Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

  • Let Ukraine Freely Strike Russia with Western Arms – NATO Chief

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  • Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

    States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

    As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

    More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

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    Permanently Deleted

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  • I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.

  • Arizona Senate Republicans Pass Bill to Prevent Climate Action

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  • As we all know, the Catholic Church is a famously anti-God institution, what with all their talk about combating climate change and not destroying the planet God left for us./s

  • California Gov Gavin Newsom pounces as Republicans come to Big Oil’s defense: The potential Democratic presidential contender called Republican attorneys general “wholly owned subsidiaries of Big Oil”

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  • To be fair and provide a decent answer your rhetorical question, a lot of people in general and his constituents in particular believe that a lot of his actions, especially his vetoing of a whole host of progressive laws passed by the California legislature, has been driven by an desire to succeed Biden by wishing to appear moderate following the decades long Democratic political strategy of being just to the left of the Republicans as to appear to moderates.

    This has gennerally frustrated a lot of his constituents, who feel that by vetoing anything that might not appeal to theoretical swing state voters the governor is putting his own political ambitions ahead of his duty to the state and the work of the rest of the party to draft and pass these laws in the first place.

    All of this context means he is seen as already focusing primarily on trying to win over swing states by his own constituents, and as such it’s worth noting to a national audience that this guy really, really wants to be president of the US and him making comments that might alienate moderates is a noteworthy event as well as providing any reason at all for them to care what he says.

    Unrequested brilliant take over.

  • The surge in hydroelectric dams is driving massive biodiversity loss

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  • The more important question however, is if the short term loss in biodiversity is offset by the long term gain in both biodiversity and all the other benefits that come with not burning more coal and natural gas.

    They highlight south america as an area that is seeing the largest declines and which is highly dependent on hydro power, but the only other options that area has are either to cut down the rainforest for solar, tie the entire national grid to a few offshore wind farms, pump a massive portion of their limited GDP into a rich western nation and go into dept for a nuclear program, or most likely to actually happen, build lots of new natural gas plants and buy fuel from all those new LNG exports terminals the US just built. Given a hydro reservoir is also the cheapest way to bulk store renewables for night/calm days, it actually ends up being a double cut to renewables generation as a whole.

    Talior made fish ladders plus effective reserch and monitoring obviously helps eliminate most of the barriers created by a dam, but are an additional cost with little direct benefit to the local community and as such tend to be the first to go when people start to ask why the government has money to study some fish’s comfort but not for the town to get drinkable tap water or subsidize small AC units so the poor don’t die in the next climate change induced heat wave. Also harder to get the IMF to let your nation go into debt for.

    Obviously every method generating electricity is going to have its sacrifices, unless you are like Australia and most of your country is desert with large lithium reserves, but I feel like this sort of conversion is best served by ‘and that’s why the West should be giving poor countries tailor made fish ladders to preserve our shared climate’ and not ‘and that’s why we can’t let poor nations build the same dams the rich countries used to build their industry and provide rural electrification a century ago. Indeed we need to go farther and replace these new dams with a vauge something(Hint: that vague something is fossil fuels).’

    It is worth keeping in mind that lot of migratory fish are not expected to be able to survive the warmer rivers of the next few decades or will be right on the edge, so 2C vs 2.2C vs 2.4 is probably going to be the deciding factor and as such the oil and gas prices pants those dams took offline do matter.

    Electricity is also only one of the three main reasons you build dams, with the other primary one in the rainforest being flood control. People tend to live near water, and when that water rises because of a climate change induced storm it tends to be bad for the people.

    Also, while I’m certain the actual study accounts for it, the article uses loss of freshwater fish populations as a whole without acknowledging that a significant factor of that is climate change making rivers warmer, and that warmer water stresses fish, so it comes across as pretty disingenuous.

  • UN, Amnesty International and Indigenous Peoples Denounce Carbon Markets and IMF's Whale Offsets - Global Justice Ecology Project

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  • Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.

    More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.

    Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.

    Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.

  • UN, Amnesty International and Indigenous Peoples Denounce Carbon Markets and IMF's Whale Offsets - Global Justice Ecology Project

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  • To be fair, carbon markets and carbon taxes are two very different things. One gives you an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for your emissions by giving a pittance to a paper reduction, and the other gets promptly repealed once in danger of being finalized because oil and gas companies raise prices and then claim it’s due to said taxes despite said taxes never actually taking effect, see Australia.

    I agree that the oil company support for carbon taxes are because they think they’ll either never get implemented and are easy to remove once put in place due to public outcry, but I suspect a carbon market is something that they want implemented because it allows for business as useful.

  • Ireland and Spain have followed Norway in announcing their recognition of a Palestinian state

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  • Functionally, probably? Given most states are sovereign instead of being divided up into zones by security checkpoints managed by a foreign power and which requires citizenship in said foreign power to cross. Between how much influence Isreal has in the government of the West Bank archipelago and the requirement that Palestinians possess a lower tier of Israeli citizenship in order to move from town to town, I don’t think a strong case can be made that the Isrealis have allowed the Palestinians have sovereignty over their own territory.

    As such the Palestinian people of the West Bank have been and unfortunately practically remain part of the Israeli state, albeit a horribly discriminated and abused part of it with very good reason to splinter off into their own state. If Isreal had actually followed the UN mandate in the first place there might be a stronger argument that the West Bank and Gaza have always had a sovereign Palestinian government, but they functionally annexed them instead, and as such the West Bank and Gaza are now hopefully splintering off from the government they have been largely barred from participating in on racial grounds.

  • Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors

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  • Arsenic, mercury, gallium, tellurium, and cadmium are all heavy metal waste products produced in quantity for semiconductor manufacturing, are commonly landfilled, pose extreme risk to human health if they ever managed to leach out of the landfill and into a aquifer, and being heavy metals have no non-nuclear method of decay. Given the primary risk of high grade nuclear is also that it is made up of toxic hevey metals that might be dangerous if lost to the local aquifer, it seems fair to compare the two.

    Semiconductor manufacturing also makes heavy use of PFAS materials, which while less directly dangerous to human health still do end up measurably entering and contamating the environment through plant wastewater streams. Once in the environment, these also tend to last for between six hundred to a thousand years before being broken down or sequestered.

    I don’t think my society will last a hundreds of thousands of years, but i’m pretty sure a society of people in the area will, and if not, then it isn’t a problem because evidently there is evidently no one around to harm. Structures like landfill barriers are not likely to last that long on their own, and as such it falls on people to renew and maintain them for as long as there are people around anyway. Hence why it is imperative that the local government knows about and monitors the site.

    All of this is true regardless of which specific heavy metal or acid is stored at the site, though given the small quantity of nuclear waste makes up of similarly harmful industrial wastes it is going to be easier to manage on that face alone.

    Obviously humanity hasn’t made anything that lasted tens of thousands of years, we weren’t building anything significant tens of thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of local governments and buildings that have lasted thousands of years, and which are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.

  • Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors

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  • Except that is hardly unique to nuclear waste. A wide variety of industrial processes produce high grade chemical waste, especially electronics like computers, solar panels, and inverters. This is just as deadly as any nuclear waste, and if stumbled upon will kill just as quickly in a hundred years, a thousand years, million years, or a billion years.

    There is however a well established solution to this problem, and that is making sure the government knows what and where it is as well as that someone it monitoring and securing the site. The actual chemical makeup of the stuff that kills you doesn’t actually matter all that much compared to makeing sure it stays where it’s supposed to be.

  • Europe's Spending Billions on Green Hydrogen. It's a Risky Gamble

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  • Why are you expecting that hydrogen to be made into electricity? While there are silly ideas like using it in small scale applications like cars or buses, most hydrogen is used to produce things like fertilizer or steel, and while there are newly developed processes that are less reliant on hydrogen, we are unlikely to be able to scale them up drom lab sized for decades.

    Being able to replace this hydrogen with stuff made from solar power rather than methane steam reformation would present a major reduction in emissions, and at the rate we are building out renewables it is far more likely that we will have the necessary renewables long before we have scaled up the alternative processes.

  • History says tariffs rarely work, but U.S. President Biden’s 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs could defy the trend, researcher says

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  • While I think in this case they won’t have an effect because no Amarican company is even trying to compete in the space, I feel like claiming “history says tarrifs rarely work” is pretty misleading. The high tarrifs caused by the US generating nearly all federal income by tarrifs in the 17 and 18 hundreds are after all widely credited with being the reason the northern US went from being a minor agricultural nation dependent entirely on european industrial goods to becoming one of the largest industrialized nations so quickly.

    Indeed that was why the WTO blocking third world nations from putting tarrifs on western goods was so heavily criticized by the left a few decades ago, before China proved you could do it without said tarrifs so long as your competitors were greedy enough to outsource their industry to you.