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ephemeral_gibbon

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ephemeral_gibbon ,

Nah, it’s mostly because all the tech reviewers trashed phones with plastic backs saying they felt cheap. If you look at any of those reviews they always talk about the premium feel.

It also changed from aluminium to glass backs mostly for wireless charging.

Plastic backs are better, but the tech reviewers did a lot of damage there. If they’d tried to influence people and explained why particular made sense instead of trashing it we may have more plastic phones.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Yep, I was talking to my grandpa about what invention his parents thought was the most significant in their lifetime, and they had said the radio. They had lived through both world wars which had brought about many many inventions and that was the one they thought was most significant.

Up to that time news was incredibly slow and you couldn’t put what was going on on the other side of the country without a massive delay, let alone the world.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

And brown poop fans

Online vape seller has ‘no intention of stopping’ shipments to Australia, despite nationwide ban — ‘We have no intention of stopping just because of one twat in Canberra.’ (www.vice.com)

Online vape seller has ‘no intention of stopping’ shipments to Australia, despite nationwide ban — ‘We have no intention of stopping just because of one twat in Canberra.’::The New Zealand-based seller issued a notice to its Australian customers that shipments will continue regardless of the government’s vape reform.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Sort of, but honestly the vapes have created a new generation of smokers and they should have banned them much sooner (unless you have a prescription and actual plan to use them to quit smoking). They were much easier for new people to get into and we went from smoking dying out to a sizeable number of young smokers.

The tobacco companies have done very well out of vaping

ephemeral_gibbon ,

You can do that at any doneness, a cast iron heated up for 10 mins will do a perfect sear in a bleu steak

Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’ (www.theverge.com)

Apple responds to the Beeper iMessage saga: ‘We took steps to protect our users’::Beeper, like Sunbird and Texts, sought to find a way to bring iMessage to Android users. Its app, Beeper Mini, worked well. But a few days after it launched, Apple took steps to shut it down.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Also Apple has intentionally made the Android text bubble less readable, so it has a concrete impact

ephemeral_gibbon ,

They’ve chosen the green so there’s a much lower difference in contrast between the white and green when compared to the white and blue

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Or have both, and a replacement barrel needs to be stamped with a serial number as well

ephemeral_gibbon ,

How are mini that high up? It makes no sense. The BMW minis (everything from the last 20 years) are notoriously unreliable. The old ones aren’t great either but they aren’t stand out bad for the time. Cool little cars, but complete shit mechanically.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Yep, grew up on a farm in Australia with kelpies. They’re great dogs and really lovely.

However, I’ve seen them appearing in the city a bit and that’s just a terrible idea all round. They need much more space and stimulation than they can get off a farm.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

They’re a small part of what we use oil for though. Significant, but a hell of a lot smaller than fuel

ephemeral_gibbon ,

It’s not happening as much at the moment. That tends to happen as people buy houses, have family and feel comfortable. All of that is happening less for the younger generations than those that came before them so they aren’t going as conservative as they age

ephemeral_gibbon ,

It’s both. The way the first commenter used it was unambiguously “they’re a fucking shit person”. There has to be a qualifier for it to be positive.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Except worse because they mix inventory so it’s easier for sellers to get away with scams

ephemeral_gibbon ,

And that opens up opportunities for energy intensive industries like aluminium or hydrogen production to run whilst there’s an excess of energy

ephemeral_gibbon ,

The cost per MWh produced over a year, with grid + storage costs, is the number that matters. Wind and solar combined are much cheaper than nuclear there. For a source look that the most recent csiro gencost report. It’s produced by the Australian national science body and basically says that in the best case if smrs reach large scale adoption and operate at a very high capacity factor… They’re still way too expensive for the power they produce when compared to wind and solar with transmission and storage.

To get off fossil fuels faster it needs to be economic, and nuclear isn’t economic. Renewables are

ephemeral_gibbon ,

For processes like that though, nuclear would make the electricity too expensive to be economic, renewables wouldn’t.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Hydrogen works well with a renewable grids because you can take advantage of the times there is excess energy production so that power doesn’t just go to waste.

We do need to be careful because hydrogen is often sold as a pipe dream by gas companies to convince us to use gas (e.g. “this new gas turbine power plant can be converted to hydrogen”, even though that’d be a workload less efficient than fuel cells).

As for its use in transport, it looks like battery electric vehicles have won that battle for personal vehicles. Both have their advantages but in practice there are few enough fuel stations for hydrogen and enough chargers that that’s not going to flip.

However, batteries are entirely unsuitable to long distance, high load transport like trucks. Ideally they’d be replaced by rail, but that’s not happening anytime soon in many places so hydrogen likely will be the solution there.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Because we could use the money spent on nuclear to build more renewables and supporting infra (storage and transmission) than if we also built nuclear. The renewables will snap be finished and replacing the fossil fuels a lot sooner than the 10-15 years for a nuclear reactor.

If you look up studies into it you need a lot less storage than you’d expect to run a fully renewable grid, as the scale of the grid stabilises it to weather fluctuations. Winter also is a problem that can be overcome. That gencost report is a decent starting point, there are plenty of other studies into it though. The low cost of storage is also especially true if you’re looking at the first 99% of the grid.

Maybe those studies are wrong and nuclear would be economic for that last 1%. However, if we can get to 99% years earlier by just building renewables then discover that it’s harder than expected to get to 100 (somewhat unlikely, especially as more storage tech is developed), we can build nuclear then. The net carbon from getting off the majority of fossil fuels years earlier will probably make it the better decision anyway.

Also just noting that my views are based on what I’ve read about Australia so you should also find peoperly researched cost analysis for your country. Also for renewables to work well in smaller countries they’ll need to develop more interconnects their neighbours etc.

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality (www.reuters.com)

Tesla braces for its first trial involving Autopilot fatality::Tesla Inc is set to defend itself for the first time at trial against allegations that failure of its Autopilot driver assistant feature led to death, in what will likely be a major test of Chief Executive Elon Musk’s assertions about the technology.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

The way musk marketed it was as a “self driving” feature, not a driving assist. Yes with all current smart assists you need to be carefully watching what it’s doing, but that’s not what it was made out to be. Because of that I’d still say tesla is responsible.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

That’d be the fsd stats, not autopilot

ephemeral_gibbon ,

No I was referring to autopilot, just look at the name of it. It’s I know it’s not capable of self driving (and neither is the even more absurd name of “full self driving”) but to your average person it intentionally sounds as if the car is driving itself instead of it being a driving assist.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Probably because there have been a lot more make chess players in general historically. It’s still a long way from an even split today and was probably even more imbalanced.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

That could well be a poor translation of shady

First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia (www.nbcnews.com)

First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Coal isn’t the cheapest though. For new build power renewables + storage are. That is to say, the incremental cost of running a coal plant isn’t that massive, but cost to build + fuel one amortised over the lifetime is more than renewables + storage.

So yes, you can enforce “adequate regulation” and nuclear will still be the most expensive.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Why do you think we need nuclear to transition fully off petroleum? Renewables with storage are cheaper today for new build power, let alone in another 20 years. They continue to get cheaper and more efficient quite rapidly.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

If you mean renewables by that, it’s hardly hypothetical or unproven. I’m in Australia and south Australia and Tasmania (two of our states) have fully renewable grids, Tasmania for the past 7 years. South Australia does still occasionally pull from an interconnect but most of the time they’re exporting a bunch of power.

Renewables with storage are cheaper and faster to build than nuclear and that’s from real world costs. Nuclear would be fine if it wasn’t so stupidly expensive.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

The cost of the power it generates in 50 years aren’t lower than the day it opens. If you amortise the cost of the plant over its life nuclear is stupid expensive per watt produced. It’s expensive enough that renewables + storage is cheaper. Renewables + storage is also a lot quicker to build than nuclear.

Even after the uptick in cost of renewables in the last year (which was dramatic) they’re still the cheapest new build power (even accounting for the integration costs). As an example here’s the most recent annual csiro report on energy costs by type. It doesn’t include full scale nuclear today because it’s known to be unviable, but even 2030 projections on “if smrs are commonly deployed at scale” they’re predicted to be a lot more expensive than renewables with integration costs.

www.csiro.au/en/research/…/gencost

ephemeral_gibbon ,

The footprint of solar is significant, but still nothing compared to agriculture. E.g. The area used to grow corn to make ethanol in the US is ~ 3x what you’d need to fully power the US on solar.

~96000000 acres used for corn, ~40% of that is used for ethanol. That makes 38.3e6 acres. First estimate I found for area of solar panels to fully power the US on solar alone was 14.08e6. That makes corn for ethanol 2.7 times the area of solar panels if all that was used was solar.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Oh I think we should shut down coal as soon as possible. But if energy prices can go down by having the cheaper energy production of renewables instead of up because of nuclear the transition can happen faster.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Ah sorry, my mistake. I messed up there.

The battery in SA is really just for grid stabilisation, not long term storage. Batteries are not really a good soln for longer duration storage. You need surprisingly little storage though when they’ve modelled fully renewable grids which is why the projected costs aren’t stupidly expensive.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Ah sorry, my mistake on that one. Despite how many wind turbines working at once it may take, the power from the is cheaper by a long shot than nuclear.

The reason I don’t think nuclear is the main solution is just cost + build time. It’s horrendously expensive. Much more so than the cost of renewables with proper grid integration (transmission, storage etc.) that has been modelled.

Maybe in a while the small nuclear reactors may come close, but currently the full sized reactors are too expensive and smr’s aren’t really a thing yet because of cost.

If power prices can come down instead of go up it’s going to be a lot easier to convince everyone to transition away from fossil fuels, and from modelling that’s been done (e.g. by csiro) that can be the reality

ephemeral_gibbon ,

But what I’m saying is that the land used by solar isn’t all that significant, and it’s also costed into the price of solar farms. To power the US purely off solar would require significantly less land than is currently used for ethanol production alone. I’d say the environmental good of solar (cheap, renewable power) significantly outweighs the cost of it.

For the transition off fossil fuels to happen quickly it needs to be economic, and solar is a big part of making it economic. Nuclear is just too expensive

ephemeral_gibbon ,

The lifetime cost of of nuclear (build, running + clean-up) divided by the amount of electricity created is incredibly high. This report from csiro doesn’t include large scale nuclear but does include projected costs for small modular reactors +solar and wind. Generally large reactors come out behind smr especially in future projections.

www.csiro.au/en/research/…/gencost

Note the “wind and solar pv combined” “variable with integration costs” which is the cost accounting for storage, transmission etc. It’s not that high (at least up to the 90% of the grid modelled for 2030). The best end of the nuclear estimate is double the cost of that. The reasons that the storage costs etc. Are not as high as you may intuitively expect are explained in that report.

Maybe there is a place for nuclear in that last 10%, but not in less than that. Also as far as rolling it out quickly, look at how long this last nuclear plant took to build from planning to construction being complete.

I think that it is possible to manage the cleanup of nuclear and to make it safe, but it’s all just very expensive. To make everyone happy with the transition off fossil fuels it needs to be cost competitive and renewables are, nuclear isn’t.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

That’s stupid sweet but not supersaturated though. Saturated would be ~200g per 100g of water.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Ute is also body on frame (in aus at least) but I would still call the oversized emotional support vehicles trucks instead of utes. That being said, most single cab utes have a bigger bed than a truck like an f150.

ephemeral_gibbon ,

Why chromium based? I use Firefox and it’s very rare I come across a website that has an issue with it

ephemeral_gibbon ,

If it’s for the bookmarks, you can export that, possibly also for the password manager (although that’s riskier). As far as history etc, does that really matter? What other settings would you need to bring across

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