Zeta_Function

True, I did mention thermal effects, but it’s also something you can do in a place like Cali, Nevada, Riyadh, etc Without wasting precious water. Other options include giving up on the idea of these systems and going for giant Vanadium flow batteries or something similar.

I don’t know anything about the price of water in any of those places, can you cite some numbers?

By the way, why are you so passionate about this topic? You’ve made 17 comments on this thread, or 17% of all of the comments here as of this writing. Thst seems extreme to me. The one I’m responding to isn’t substantive, another is just a single word. Dominating a conversation with sheer volume seems extreme, and impolite.

You can do the same thing with compressed gas as well, or really anything. Gas and fluid do make the most sense in terms of directly driving generator turbines though. The only issue with gas is thst you have to deal with thermal effects from expansion and compression.

The problem from the perspective of Brandolini’s Law, is that whatever factor the internet applies to the spread information enjoys a 10:1 ratio advantage in favor of bullshit.

No it isn’t, and one of the tenants of dealing with delusional people is that you don’t engage with their delusions, don’t try to refute them.

That would be like trying to help treat someone’s cold by preventing them from sneezing.

You can call a clod a cake, right? We don’t live in a democracy, we live in an indirectly federated republic. I’m this case a very badly corrupt one, run by plutocrats for longer than any of us have been alive.

We have killer propaganda though.

You’re not wrong, but you’re not a good teacher either. Rudeness and mockery don’t add anything, and in fact take away from your ability to inform people. You’re also only half right, insofar as nobody knows is a very accurate statement. You’re wrong however, that conservation laws definitely don’t apply. We just don’t know if they do, and there are reasons to believe (you reference Noether’s theorem) why they might not. The truth is, “Nobody knows” with a period and a full stop.

It’s also worth pointing out that universal expansion has an effect only on distance scales larger than galaxies. There is no reason to believe it will pull apart smaller structures, never mind subatomic ones. It’s a popular misconception that the expanding force is great on small distance scales. On the scale of a galaxy, that force is overcome by gravity, so needless to say the Strong force won’t even notice it.

Tl;DR Metric expansion is a powerful cumulative force on giant distance scales, weak on small (below galaxies) scales. Galaxies, stellar systems, stars, and Hadrons will be just fine, thanks.

If you’re going to scold people, you could at least be right. It is also a good idea not to rely on just YouTube videos for your arguments.

Thst sounds a bit crazy, but then again those are still some of the great museums so maybe they were doing something right.

I particularly love the wording here. items Nichols defines as “a kind-of-thing” of which a museum already owned enough representative examples “to serve scientific and educational purposes.” Museums usually considered a “kind of thing” a specific item from a distinct region, species, or people—a Zuni vase for instance, or a Zande spear-head.

Oh a “Kind of Thing?” I’ll take two!

“Always” is a long time, but its definitely fair to say that barring a series of unforeseen and radical breakthroughs in a number of disciplines, fusion as a reliable source of power is nowhere near being a reality.

Today’s lazy person is tomorrow’s AI task that’s trivial and universally applied. When publishing to the net, think of your future.

There are three narratives I’ve come into contact with vis a vis SDV’s.

1.) Utopian: Any sacrifice is worth getting people out from behind the wheel. That sacrifice never seems to belong to the person espousing this view. I run into this almost exclusively from friends and acquaintances in tech, or online. It’s an extension of all utopian thinking, and like all utopian thinking is dangerous.

2.) The future is now: This argument (often yells) that SDV’s are currently safer than human drivers, so just shut up, people kill people too. When evidence to the contrary is presented they frequently reveal themselves to be utopian.

3.) Wait, what?: People who have no idea just how widespread this technology is on the roads, and range from uneasy to terrified. I mostly run across this from people I know who aren’t in tech, and rarely see this online.

When I show people in group 3 comments from groups 1 and 2, they get really really pissed.

How does something like this event happen? Pokémon Go was huge, and I’d just expect that Niantic would have hired competent organizers. 20,000 pissed off people has a huge negative word-of-mouth potential, and it’s not like they had to have this thing in the first place.

Anyone with experience in this world, how does a big company miss the boat so hard?

People at or near the top often have very different incentives from the rank and file. They want to stay afloat, or rise, and often that has little to do with their objective performance. Feedback from below is arguably one of the few things short of grossly obvious incompetence that can shake them from their perch.

And then they have to be the ones to support the whole idea of that feedback in the first place!

No one, myself included is going to give facebook the benefit of the doubt. To say that they’ve used it all up and then some would be an understatement.