> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
I think this is why The Wire captivated me. I'd been raised on a steady diet of hero's journey stories and then suddenly I ran into David Simon's buzzsaw of contravening those expectations.
In those years I'd just I started my working life and unfortunately the parallels were uncannily accurate.
Requirements about surcharge notifications and displaying all-up prices are nice, but the gap here will still be about enforcement and not regulation. The core problem for dollar-store shoppers in the US is about getting the retailers to honor the sticker price, not whether the sticker price shows all state and local taxes.
Is the Australian shopper protected simply by a stronger culture of adherence amongst retailers or is it because regulators inspect more often and take stronger action against failures?
> Repeated baking shows a steady decline in migration and emissions, suggesting depletion of siloxanes in the products over time.
I wonder what the fall-off curve looks like for siloxane transfer out of the bakeware. If e.g. 70% of it comes out in the first 15 baking cycles, there could be a reasonable path to massively reducing exposure from this source. Just cook a few sacrificial recipes on new bakeware and throw them out uneaten.
it's also important to know your audience. If they've spent their career reading technical papers or dense prose, that's one thing.
If they've largely grown up in the social media era and click away from reels/shorts that don't have animated captions, you'd design a very different deck.
I've been using the Viture XR Pro glasses and they're fine for occasional PC use but I don't like them enough to use a daily driver for work.
It's great for gaming and movies as you say, and also for adopting a better posture when using a laptop in a cramped space like a train or airline seat. But even with the individual focus wheels for each eye, it doesn't feel sharp enough at 1080p to replace a 24" or 27" screen on a standard desk layout.
If I had the option of one 24" 1080p monitor on my desk or XR glasses to use for 8-10 hours of thoughtful work, I would choose the monitor.
Regarding eye strain or fatigue, I don't notice any. The fact that the projected display appears to be 3-4m away probably helps a lot with that.
> Expensive high-efficiency chemistries for carbon capture will cede to simpler, energy-hungrier chemistries, the ultimate reductio ad absurdum being something like soda lime
I haven't looked into the topic much at all but that does resonate. It reminds of the way solar farms are becoming less fine-tuned (e.g., no sun-tracking tilt motors anymore) as panel costs drops through the floor.
In terms of impact, it doesn't sound major, I agree. But it's still work that will need to be done. As industry and transport become more electrified, and electric generation gets decarbonized, impacts like high-multiple GHG gases will become a bigger and bigger share of CO2e still happening.
Atmospheric CO2 is already too high to avert terrible long-term impacts of global climate change. Unless we manage to make massive cost reductions for atmospheric CO2 sequestration, weaning entirely off of fossil fuels will not be sufficient to avoid climate change impacts if we still add long-lived GHG molecules to the atmosphere. (SF6 has an atmospheric lifetime on the order of 1000s of years.)
Think of it like the tide going out in a rocky bay. As the water level recedes, rock pillars that used to be too deep underwater to worry about now are close enough to the surface to cause you trouble. On the other side of the same coin, putting in the work to clear them helps give you as big a space to operate in as you had before.
> The work may be niche, but the impact could be high. About 1 percent of SF6 leaks from electrical equipment. In 2018, that translated to 8,200 tonnes of SF6 emitted globally, accounting for about 1 percent of the global-warming value that year.
This figure is for the electricity sector only, not overall global emissions. Still, considering the sheer volume of CO2 puffing up from power stations, it's impressive that the normal operation of SF6 breakers accounts for an integer percentage of their GHG impact.
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Global emissions were 53 Gt CO2 equivalent in 2023 [0]. 38% of CO2 emissions are attributed to the electricity sector in 2023. [1] This figure seems to be strictly CO2, not including other GHG, and I can't quickly find a sector-by-sector breakdown for that year. Per IPCC reports in 2022, electricity production and heating accounted for 34% of global GHG in 2019 [2], so for back-of-the-envelope math, it's reasonable.
Per the article, the GHG impact of SF6 is 25k CO2, so 8.2k tons SF6 emitted annually is 205 million tons CO2e. This is 0.39% of 53 Gt CO2e (the global value), or nearly exactly 1% of the electricity sector's 38% share.
If you skip forward to 16m 33s you'll be treated to a lively streak of invective from the passenger of a car whose driver has just confirmed that feeding EICAR to a parking system prevents it from letting any vehicle past the barrier.
The catch here is the cost of the buildings you'd need to destroy in order to build the surface portion of the windcatcher. The deep underground lines run under heavily populated areas of London.
To build enough windcatchers to move the needle on tunnel temps, you'd need to buy many plots in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Good share. fascinating rabbit hole to fall down. Interesting to read about other vessels which had been lost or abandoned in the same area and many months later washed up ashore rather than sinking.
I'd like to know more about the near-miss. Was it close to either port or was it during the open-ocean portion of the voyage?
The "Loose Ends" section of Teplow's write-up mentions that he didn't bring along a radar detector. Then or now, would a radar detector significantly increase a solo sailor's situational awareness?
I agree that the current nuclear proposal seems intended principally to extend the life of the coal and gas plants. It's likely born from a cynical attitude of 'who cares about how much the nuclear plants will cost when/if they do get built, just kick the carbon-neutrality can down the road another decade and let the next generation of politicians deal with it.'
I do wonder if there'll ever be a desire to build nuclear plants for baseload firming, though. What amount of excess capacity has to be built in to an all-renewables + storage grid to give the the same reliability as the current grid? Could nuclear power ever be cheap enough to compete on ROI with the marginal providers, the last ~5 gigawatts of wind or solar needed?
Will be interesting to see how Australia goes. They have extensive rooftop solar already, and one of the major parties in the current election is proposing to build nuclear power plants rather than go farther with renewables.
FWIW I think the nuclear plan as proposed would be a flop, but given that there are currently zero nuclear power plants there and Australia has a strong track record of opposing nuclear power, it's interesting to note that the idea has even been brought up without becoming instant electoral poison.
The supercavitating supersonic submarine is a nice endpoint for the evasion discussion but I can't help thinking about the wake that would leave.
Yes it can depart the firing area quickly but if one wanted to find it again for counterfire, surely the point where the absurd wake turbulence ends is a suitable search datum.
More that they don't have it in the right places, or they don't have the ability to shift it temporally to when it's not so abundant.
Per the article they are forecast to add 300 GW of renewables each year, which is admirable. But they also started construction on just under 100 GW of new coal power plants last year, and granted approvals for yet more in the future. [0]
You could quibble at the margins (some of it will be replacing EOL coal plants, some of it is intended as firming capacity only, etc.). But in the big picture, it indicates that where the Chinese economy needs more energy supplied, renewables aren't yet suitable to fill a large portion of that need.
I think this is why The Wire captivated me. I'd been raised on a steady diet of hero's journey stories and then suddenly I ran into David Simon's buzzsaw of contravening those expectations.
In those years I'd just I started my working life and unfortunately the parallels were uncannily accurate.