The initial contract is plausibly just for 12V car batteries, but if Zoolnasm’s goal is 10GWh/yr, they definitely have their eyes set on larger-scale applications.

Also, if they’re actually capable of 190Wh/kg, that’s better than current-gen automotive LFP. That’s a pretty huge “if,” though.

I’m guessing (hoping) you’re joking here and having a laugh at us all taking you too seriously. But I’ve seen enough of lemmy to doubt that.

If your accelerationist ideology is unironically promoting nuclear holocaust as its self-evidently ideal endgame, you’re long overdue for your “are we the baddies” moment. Maybe (definitely) stay off social media for a bit as you re-examine how you got here and who’s lied to you along the way.

Kill Six Billion Demons.

For a spoiler-free sampling of why:

http://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/throne.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/WON10r.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/KSBD55color.jpg

https://killsixbilliondemons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/SOT32-33.jpg

The artist presumably survives on a diet consisting entirely of heavy metal and Adderall.

Nebula link, for those looking.

A stove is probably the last thing I’d try to put batteries in, but being able to make wok hei stir-fry without a propane burner is going to be uniquely appealing to some people.

Here’s the research paper the video references. They got 65% efficiency, which is pretty good, but a far cry from 90% of a lithium powertrain made this decade.

The paraffin heat exchanger is clever, but it’s a flammable coal/oil product, and phase-change thermal storage is notoriously tempermental outside a lab. The thermal-to-electrical-to-thermal recuperation cycle is likewise brilliant, but I think it misses the core appeal of pneumatic energy storage: compressed air is fundamentally low-tech.

Being low-tech means that it makes grid-scale storage accessible on continents that lack the engineering manpower or natural resources to set up domestic battery production or baseloads like nuclear and geothermal. After all, if renewables keep getting cheaper, who cares about storage conversion losses? Just build a little more peak capacity.

I’m also personally fond of the idea of using pneumatic storage for industrial centers that currently use cogen/CHP, because the waste heat could be used directly instead of having to be recuperated.

MIT’s estimate of about $73/MWh for renewable+transmission is low. It appropriately estimates amortization costs, but purchasing from a transmission operator will always come with a markup. Not much (utilities don’t usually behave like corporations), but enough to be significant.

MIT’s price for renewable+storage at $135/MWh seems high, too. Lazard calculates LCOE for wind+storage at $42-114/MWh and for solar+storage at $46-102/MWh.

I’m still a big fan of HV transmission, as it enables renewable generation to take advantage of cheap land and/or terrain advantages (high wind speed in the Midwest, concentrated solar in the South, geothermal in the West). But I think we’ll still see a lot of local utilities just get batteries and call it a day.

I always like to say everyone should have a zombie survival plan. Is there any possibility of zombies? No. But there’s a lot of overlap between prepping for the exciting, fictional disaster and boring, real-world natural disasters.

• Having a fireaxe in your trunk might not let you chop off zombie heads, but it’ll sure be useful for clearing road debris after a hurricane.
• Having a bug-out-bag with important documents and bottled water is also great for wildfire preparedness, even if that bag also has a spiky leather jacket in it.

I encourage people to have a civil war plan. Do I expect we’ll have one? Not really, it wouldn’t be a two-sided conflict. But we can expect to see domestic terrorism (see also: insurrection) and potentially police riots (the police enacting organized violence as they did in 2020). If you’re ready for a civil war, you’re ready for the more mundane breakdowns we’re more likely to see.

• Knowing first aid and how to treat a gunshot wound might not find use on a battlefield, but it could easily save someone’s life in a mass shooting or isolated hate crime.
• Having ad-hoc or peer-to-peer communications is useful during riots and power outages.
• If you can move ordinance discreetly across state lines, you’ll probably find the skillset applies to moving red state refugees as well.
• Building a network of people you trust to band together when SHTF? Brother, you just invented a mutual aid network.

So yeah, if you feel anxious about the possibility of a civil war (or zombies), channel that energy into prepping for it, and you’ll find that even if your predictions were wrong, your effort will not go to waste.

I’m trying out some FOSS games.

Mindustry. I expected Mindustry to be a Factorio clone, but it’s uniquely fast-paced and messy. I find it difficult to tell the buildings apart, though, so I may have to hunt down a graphics mod.

Beyond All Reason. I really enjoyed Planetary Annihilation, so this seems like a natural pick. I’ve barely sunk my teeth into it, but I’m impressed so far.

Fashion accessories. For most fashion (not workwear), the expensive stuff is made from the same material and in the same factories as the cheap stuff, they just market it harder.

Body wash. It’s watered-down soap. Just buy a bar of soap.

Amazon Prime. Amazon used to be space-age Sears. Now it’s just Aliexpress. Fake reviews and bribery are rampant, dangerously nonfunctional products get top recommendations, used and broken products get resold as new while untouched returns get thrown into landfills, Amazon Basics violates IP, and they’re putting ads in Prime Video now.

Microwaves and space heaters. The boxes may try to convince you otherwise, but the amount of heat these devices can deliver is bottlenecked by the power outlet. Every 1100W microwave is just as effective as the others. If you’re paying more, it’s for looks and for features you’ll never use like popcorn mode.

Electronics, for most people. Most people won’t get more use out of a new $1500 phone than a last-gen model from the same manufacturer for $500. Do you really want a $200 smart coffee maker, or a $20 dumb coffee maker with a $10 plug-in timer?

Software. Obligatory FOSS plug. I don’t blame people for sticking to what’s familiar, but if you have the time and energy to spare tinkering, most software out there has a good free or open-source equivalent these days. At least for personal use. In my use case, LibreOffice beats Microsoft Word, Photopea beats Photoshop, and Google Sheets beats Excel.

Mercedes is an outlier. Try comparing Toyota with Lexus, Nissan with Infiniti, Chevy with Cadillac, or Ford with Lincoln. In all of these instances, the luxury marques have equivalent or better reliability than their economy counterparts.

Of course, whether or not the reliability and features are worth the cost is a different question entirely. (I generally lean towards no.)

It mostly depends on speed. Need to go 500km at 70kph? Easy. Most EVs can do that. 500km at 120kph? Not so much. If you need the latter, I’d recommend looking at PHEVs.

(Temperature also plays a role, but it’s less significant than speed, especially with all the heat pumps these days.)

Anderson v Griswold (this case) is a civil lawsuit that started Oct 30 in CO district court under judge Sarah B. Wallace. This case involved opposing arguments over whether or not Trump engaged 8n insurrection. There was no jury.

Judge Wallace ruled (and CO supreme court later upheld) that Trump engaged in insurrection. The standard for burden of proof in this ruling was “clear and convincing,” (see supreme court ruling) which is somewhere between “beyond a reasonable doubt” (the standard for criminal cases) and a “preponderance of the evidence” (>50% chance of the accused being responsible). Clear and convincing evidence is typically used in discrimination and fraud lawsuits.

Trump’s latest comments about “vermin,” “retribution,” “day-one dictator,” and “poisoning the blood” have hit Associated Press, NPR, Reuters, and BBC, who have responded matter-of-factly by comparing to it to the rhetoric of Nazis and Mussolini. Mein Kampf got name-dropped more than once.

I am also seeing coverage from CNN, ABC, USNews, USAToday, and NBCNews.

Now, which media you consider mainstream, and what kind of coverage you consider adequate can change the answer. I don’t know what they’re saying on TV, for example. But when even Forbes runs a front-page article which compares Trump’s rhetoric to Hitler’s in the first paragraph, I’d say there’s no lack of mainstream coverage, and they’re not dancing around the issue anymore.

You’re not alone there. America’s fragile social safety nets and minimal workers’ rights mean we’re all one bad day away from being in your position.

• Chemo can cost $50k, and FMLA exists (somehow) but only covers 3 months. A cancer diagnosis could easily wipe out six figures of savings.
• Most employers require prompt attendance, so a car crash that leaves you dependent on America’s crumbling public transit systems will likely lead to losing your job.
• The GOP is trying to kill off Social Security, so if you ever want to retire, you might have to save twice as much as what’s traditionally advised.
• With climate change being what it is, losing your house to a hurricane or wildfire is a much bigger threat than it used to be.
• Economic swings, downsizing, and “k-shaped recoveries” can make jobs vanish or become unsustainable without warning.

Even for the top 10%, saving for these contingencies typically precludes a wealthy lifestyle, particularly for younger people with fewer savings. There’s now an entire demographic of (mostly millenial) Americans with traditionally high-paying jobs who still live at or below middle-class aspirations due to saving: HENRY, or High Earner, Not Rich Yet.

This.

Last month, I installed Mint, which is my first ever Linux install. I chose it because people said it would be the most hassle-free.

The bugs currently plaguing me include:

• Steam’s UI scaling is off, to the extent that I practically need a magnifying glass to read it.
• Bluetooth has now decided that it no longer wants to automatically connect to my speaker.
• Discord won’t share audio during screen sharing anymore.

But the big one, the one that made me stop and think, was the keyboard. Right out of the box, my function keys (brightness, airplane mode, etc) would not work. This turned out to be because the laptop was not recognizing its keyboard as a libinput device, but treating it as a HID sensor hub instead. To fix it, I had to:

• Find similar problems on the forums and recognize which were applicable to my case.
• Learn what the terminal was and how to copy code into it.
• Learn that the terminal can be opened from different folders, which alters the meaning of the commands.
• Learn the file system, including making how to make hidden files visible.
• Figure out that a bunch of steps in the forum were just creating a text file, and that any text editor would do.
• Figure out there were typos and missing steps in the forum solutions.
• Learn what a kernel is, figure out mine was out of date, and update it.
• Do it all over again a month later when for some reason my function keys stopped working again.

For me, this was not a big deal. It did take me two evenings to solve, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy. But for someone with low technical literacy (such as my mom, who barely grasps the concept of ad blockers in Google Chrome), every one of these bullet points would be a monumental accomplishment.

The FOSS crowd can be a bit insular, and they seem to regularly forget that about 95% of the people out there have such low technical literacy that they struggle to do anything more involved than turn on a lightbulb.

“Help, I can’t afford rent!” -> “Buy a house, stupid.”

“Help, this software is buggy and unintuitive!” -> “Try using buggier and more unintuitive software, stupid.”

Seems like a solid metaphor to me.

The absolute easiest way would be to 3D print the whole thing, leaving slots for steel rods to reinforce the frame.

The cooler way would be to just 3D print the rim and make the back and front plates out of laser-cut aluminum. There are laser-cutting services if you don’t have one of your own.

If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, you might consider brass. Unlike aluminum, brass can be folded or hammered into shape, so the front and sides of the tablet could be made from one folded and soldered/brazed sheet, with ports and vents cut with hand tools. I wouldn’t call this easier though – you’ll need some practice to keep it from looking sloppy.

I’d recommend taking some inspiration from cyberdeck builds and other custom electronics enclosures. https://youtu.be/qzEd50uzdF0?si=6Bk1-QPlVcoNRcVO https://youtu.be/DrqdHVeBkp4?si=1sqfqUsp66He2bS5

Tailpipe emissions? No. Round-trip emissions? Yes.

Biofuel sucks CO2 from the atmosphere while the plants or algae grow, then releases it again when the fuel is burned. It’s net-zero in the literal sense. They only have a GHG footprint if fossil fuels are used during the processing. In the US for example, during the processing of corn into ethanol, they burn natural gas for heat because it’s convenient and cheap. So the GHG footprint of American corn ethanol is approximately the same as gasoline.

Make no mistake, this is a publicity stunt and you shouldn’t expect Virgin Atlantic to follow through. But SAF is feasible.

Cost: Currently, according to Argus Media, SAF is around $6.69/gal compared to $2.85/gal for jet fuel. Jet fuel accounts for between 15% and 20% of airline operating costs per US BTS reports. So using SAF would increase operating costs by 22-35%. Given that airfare fluctuates around 20% depending on whether or not it’s a tuesday, that’s actually not bad at all. (Also, I think the airlines could fully absorb that price increase if it weren’t for the deadweight of shareholders, stock value manipulation, and executive bonuses.)

Scaling: Despite how hard America tries, there’s only so much used fry oil. Biofuel needs farmland, and there isn’t enough farmland to serve the automotive sector. Given typical yields, we would need about 373m acres of biofuel farmland, which is every last inch of unused farmable land the US has. But aviation is a different story. According to the EIA, the US uses 8.81 million barrels of gasoline a day, 2.98 mb/d of diesel, but only 1.5mb/d of jet fuel. That’s an order of magnitude less fuel, and an order of magnitude less farmland.

Sustainability: This one’s trickier. Biofuel doesn’t need to be produced using fossil fuels, but usually is. The US’s 893m acres of farmland produce only 10.6% of our GHG emissions. I think the biggest concerns would be increased water, pesticide, and herbicide usage. I am also not sure of the impacts on other nations with different geography or agricultural potential. I am not well-equipped to quantify those impacts.