Thanks for the analysis and insight!

I found at least one of the posts, and you’re right, that’s not really what impressed them. It just stuck with me because I’m a hardware girl.

I’d believe it because I remember the same being true for TikTok.

I don’t have the links on me right now, but I remember clearly that when tiktok was new, engineers trying to figure out what data it collected found that the app could recognize when it was being observed, and would “rewite” itself to evade detection.

They noted that they’d never seen this outside of sophisticated malware, and doubted that a social media company had the resources to write such a program.

In hot weather, I use silica gel neck wraps, which slowly release water to keep you cool (if soggy). I really want to try making an equivalent out of sodium sulphate gel and see how it compares.

That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?

Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

Yeah, this matches my experience.

A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn’t exactly great to begin with.

Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not batteries.

Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn’t fix this particular problem.

China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

It’s no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that’s been tilted by slavery. You don’t outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.

Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.

A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.

When a smaller nation aligns itself with a larger empire or coalition, it will gravitate towards that collective’s philosophy. Sometime’s it’s imposed through political or military pressure, or “encouraged” through subversion, but it can just as easily happen through the natural influence of a larger and more prolific culture.

Historically, there have been more socialist and/or communist states associated with the USSR than not. Especially when measured by population.

Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing […] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.

I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.

I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.

When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).

Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.

Youtube videos often gloss over the details for the sake of uninhibited futurism.

Large-scale hydrogen electrolysis has a cost of around 55kWh/kg, and when you combust the H2 directly you get about 39kWh/kg back. Without compression/transport, using H2 as a heating fuel is 71% efficient.

H2 is usually compressed for transport. Compression of 1 kg of H2 to 700 bar costs about 5kWh of additional electricity. I’ll spare you the calcs, but truck transport is under 1kWh/kg H2. This reduces our efficiency to 39kWh/61kWh or 64%.

Converting H2 to ammonia takes the place of the compressor and truck. 2 mols of ammonia burn for 162kcal, less than the 204kcal you’d get from 3 mols of H2. The Haber-Bosch process reduces output to 31kWh per kg of H2 put in. This reduces out efficiency to 31kWh/55kWh or 56%.

With currently-proven cracking technology, it costs around 23kcal/mol of ammonia, reducing overall efficiency to about 55%. It is more effective to burn ammonia directly than to convert it into H2 and burn the H2.

Using ammonia as a transport medium removes a bunch of technical problems, but it introduces new ones. It’s corrosive, it’s toxic, it burns eyes/lungs/skin, and it wastes more energy than you’d think.

I will say this about Biden: the dude’s downright sneaky. It seems to be his administration’s main strategy to publicly walk back a major agenda point, let right-wingers celebrate, and then after the media hype (and potential for right-wing backlash) dies out, quietly split it up into smaller programs that get pushed further than the original agenda ever could.

• He blocked the rail strike, but then went back and ensured the unions got their sick leave anyway.
• He approved historic oil projects, but then went back and curtailed more oil production than he ever approved.
• He let Senator Manchin gut EV tax credits, but then spread that money out in the IRA and IIJA with green infrastructure funding so comprehensive that it has international attention.
• He’s been criticized for being soft on China’s military (by the right) and emissions (by the left), but the CHIPS Act and FABS Act and ban(s) on chip and tooling exports have all but eliminated China’s greatest source of geopolitical leverage: their nascent monopoly on electronics.
• The SCOTUS struck down student loan forgiveness, but Biden went back and forgave more, this time splitting it into multiple smaller programs that are harder to stop.

So yeah, it seems on-brand that the Biden administration would push for LNG exports after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and then go back later and curtail them instead.

Hard disagree.

This week, I’m designing a circuit which would traditionally use relays, but I’m considering IGBTs instead. IGBTs weren’t designed for my industry, but they’re so cheap (thanks to quadcopters) that I can just overspec them and get the job done despite the lack of optimization.

Grid scale energy storage was already being researched before the EV boom – remember when people stopped talking about vanadium-flow? EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.

In the USA, out of every economic sector, transportation creates the most GHG emissions [EPA1], and the majority of that is from passenger vehicles [EPA2]. Significant portions of the industrial sector’s emissions come from refining automotive fuel [EPA3]. US total GHG emissions are down around 20% from their peak in 2005, but almost all of that has come from the electrical power sector [CBO1][CBO2]. Vehicular pollution has dramatic direct health impact on top of GHG emissions [HSPH].

Transport emissions are the long pole in the tent for the US. Solutions to that will be the focal point of US climate strategy for the next decade. Barring the demolition of the majority of US housing to re-establish walkability, our two best solutions are EVs and public transit.

EVs cut lifecycle emissions by about 55-60%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][ICCT][BNEF][CB][MIT][IEA]

Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions by… about 55-60%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]

Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles (and to a lesser degree, microcars). Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of raw resources and energy. EVs need batteries that are carbon-intensive under current practices, but rail needs large quantities of steel which is equally carbon-intensive under current practices.

There are a ton of factors I can barely touch on here, so here’s a rapid-fire overview. Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities [ST], but that’s objectively different from sustainability. The US has such low average ridership/occupancy that our busses have more emissions per passenger mile than our cars [AFDC1][AFDC2], and that was before the pandemic – it’s even worse now [NCBI]. Low ridership can be partly attributed to the incompatibility of American suburbs with public transit – which could be a major roadblock because 2/3rds of Americans own detatched homes [FRED], representing $52t [PRN] in middle-class wealth that they will likely defend with voting power. Climate solutions will need to maneuver around this voting bloc. I personally think individual EVs and intercity rail are complementary technologies – the more cheap (short-ranged) EVs are out there, the more people will lean on public transit for long trips. Heavy rail gets way better efficiency per vehicle mile than light rail or commuter rail and I have no clue why [APTA][ORNL], but I’m not as impressed by light rail as I expected to be. Since public transit and personal transport leverage different raw resources and face different challenges to adoption, we will achieve the most rapid decarbonization if we do both at the same time.

TL;DR

This is a huge, huge question, and anything short of a dissertation would fail to answer it objectively. My best answer is that the most effective solutions to climate change are diverse, engaging multiple technologies in parallel. EVs are a piece of the puzzle, but not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Toyota’s been promising that solid state batteries are just around the corner for about 13 years now. They keep bumping the goalposts back every few years.

Mass transit is the only way that is sustainable

EVs cut lifecycle emissions to about 45%. [UCS][ANL][MIT][IEA]

Public transit cuts lifecycle emissions to… about 45%. [IEA][AFDC][USDOT]

Neither is a magic bullet. Both get their asses kicked by bicyles. Both get better with increased passengers per vehicle. Both can be fueled with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both can be manufactured with renewable energy for additional reduction. Both take surprisingly equivalent amounts of steel, aluminum, and glass.

Public transit offers unique advantages from an urbanist perspective and the liveability of cities, but that’s objectively different from sustainability.

Exactly. Hertz vocally blames higher repair costs and long repair times for the Teslas that make up the bulk of their EV fleet. Other EV manufacturers don’t share those problems.