• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Signals emissions from ships is something the navy takes very seriously. Not only is it a risk for the usual secure environment reasons, but it can be used to identify and track a ship’s location from those nice 100+m unfurling signals intelligence satellites with sufficient precision to launch and target an medium to long range anti ship missile.

    The Houthis may not have many of those satellites, but Russia and China do, and might be willing to slip some coordinates along with an request to Iran to ship over an appropriate missile to Yemen if they want to really distract some Americans. As such it’s probably not a good time for sailors to get sloppy, though that’s probably always true.


  • Not really trying to argue, just trying to help explain the high current DC battery systems I have experience with and to someone how seems to have some conceptual understanding of what individual components do, but not how and why they are used or where the limitations come from.

    Them being confidently incorrect doesn’t help of course. :)

    That being said you haven’t really given me much to work off of as to where these misconceptions are coming from beyond a journalist confusing applications for batteries and capacitors and this really seems to be going nowhere, so bye.


  • Again, there are no capacitors car side to be produceing thermal load in the first place during dc fast charging in the first place, and that thermal load is not the primary barrier to how much current can go into the battery without degradation anyway. After all, if it was we would just upscale the cars heat pump and be charged in five minutes.

    Car charging is not coordinated to the point where they all plug in within a few seconds, and if it was a few second randomizer on when eqch timer actually starts charging would accomplish the exact same effect without hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in new grid scale capacitors and inverters.

    This is also unlikely to become a significant problem because a lot of the grid is moving to battery backed solar and wind, where the limit is price per megawatt hour and as such said batteries can provide far more current than the grid could consume. You might be limited by inverter capacity, but storage capacitors are also fundamentally a DC technology so you would need them anyway.

    This may turn out to have benefits for electronics that rely on already specialized supercapacitors, but it can by definition not have any impact on processes that are not currently limited in any way by capacitor technology like battery bulk charge current, the thing that actually limits how fast a car can fast charge.


  • Obviously nearly every electrical circuit board uses capacitors in some respect, especially for filtering and smoothing, but it is extremely rare for them to be used for bulk energy storage outside of things like adjusting power factor.

    Given we are talking about charging times, which are primarily limited by the batteries charge current vs degradation curve and not at all by the various small capacitors in the charger’s electronics, there is fundamentally no effect on charge times unless you are replacing the energy storage medium itself with supercapacitors.

    We can already supply enough dc power to charge an EV battery at its maximum designed curve via dc fast charging stations, which involve some contractors and shunts but actually don’t even involve any size of capacitors at all in the car itself on the HV side.


  • No, it doesn’t effect devices of all sizes, only devices that might use this specific bulky capacitor, all other devices will show exactly zero improvement because there is no real point to mixing capacitors in with a large battery. Being able to quickly get three minutes of charge per whole hour of battery capacity you replace with capacitors just isn’t that useful because you might as well just stay plugged in for an extra few minutes and get the same charge plus that extra hour before needing to find a charger at all.

    As for EV’s the problem is even more pointless, as being able to go a half mile the street from a charger massive enough that it can output a small power plants worth of electricity is similarly to specialized of a use case to be worth the loss of range and greater degradation of the rest of the battery.


  • The researchers who wrote the paper only mentioned possibly applying the tech to very small things like wearables and Iot applications where a large capacitor might be relevant. It’s the journalist summarizing it that makes the wild claims about phones and cars, which don’t tend to use capacitors for a bunch of reasons, not least of which is that they tend to be physically twenty times larger than a given battery of the same capacity.

    If people are able to deal with batteries anywhere near that large, then I’d imagine most of them would choose twenty times the battery life/ range over being able to charge fast enough overload a wall outlet/ small power plant.


  • If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

    Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

    Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

    Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.


  • I think you wildly misunderstood what the other commenter was trying to get at, namely that you are trying to extrapolate a gobal and relatively volatile value of a single material to the scale of the entire gobal economy. If for instance a major mine was forced to shut down then you would see a major increase in the price of gold, but no change to the economy as a whole outside of a small fraction of the aforementioned change making its contribution to the outputs of a few niche industries.

    Moreover if a commodity can work as a pure measure of inflation in the economy then we would expect the gobal price index of all commodities to provide a more accurate measure, right? Actually doing that relative to USD however actually shows minor deflation since Q3 2023, which itself saw a whopping 30% deflation between 2022 and 2023.

    Given these numbers do not seem at all indicative of my personal or observed change in the average price of goods and services across the entire economy, it would seem that commodity prices don’t have a significant direct correlation with inflation.




  • Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

    States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

    As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

    More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.



  • I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.




  • The more important question however, is if the short term loss in biodiversity is offset by the long term gain in both biodiversity and all the other benefits that come with not burning more coal and natural gas.

    They highlight south america as an area that is seeing the largest declines and which is highly dependent on hydro power, but the only other options that area has are either to cut down the rainforest for solar, tie the entire national grid to a few offshore wind farms, pump a massive portion of their limited GDP into a rich western nation and go into dept for a nuclear program, or most likely to actually happen, build lots of new natural gas plants and buy fuel from all those new LNG exports terminals the US just built. Given a hydro reservoir is also the cheapest way to bulk store renewables for night/calm days, it actually ends up being a double cut to renewables generation as a whole.

    Talior made fish ladders plus effective reserch and monitoring obviously helps eliminate most of the barriers created by a dam, but are an additional cost with little direct benefit to the local community and as such tend to be the first to go when people start to ask why the government has money to study some fish’s comfort but not for the town to get drinkable tap water or subsidize small AC units so the poor don’t die in the next climate change induced heat wave. Also harder to get the IMF to let your nation go into debt for.

    Obviously every method generating electricity is going to have its sacrifices, unless you are like Australia and most of your country is desert with large lithium reserves, but I feel like this sort of conversion is best served by ‘and that’s why the West should be giving poor countries tailor made fish ladders to preserve our shared climate’ and not ‘and that’s why we can’t let poor nations build the same dams the rich countries used to build their industry and provide rural electrification a century ago. Indeed we need to go farther and replace these new dams with a vauge something(Hint: that vague something is fossil fuels).’

    It is worth keeping in mind that lot of migratory fish are not expected to be able to survive the warmer rivers of the next few decades or will be right on the edge, so 2C vs 2.2C vs 2.4 is probably going to be the deciding factor and as such the oil and gas prices pants those dams took offline do matter.

    Electricity is also only one of the three main reasons you build dams, with the other primary one in the rainforest being flood control. People tend to live near water, and when that water rises because of a climate change induced storm it tends to be bad for the people.

    Also, while I’m certain the actual study accounts for it, the article uses loss of freshwater fish populations as a whole without acknowledging that a significant factor of that is climate change making rivers warmer, and that warmer water stresses fish, so it comes across as pretty disingenuous.


  • Firstly, you’ll have to refresh my memory on where I praised Australia’s carbon tax.

    More to the point however, a carbon tax does at least provide some direct financial incentive for the price to go up and for the body tracking companies emissions to proactively look into dodgers, while a company selling carbon credits is directly incentivized to both lower the price and to overstate the actually sequestrated carbon (if any). As such a tax is far more likely to rise in the long term compared to the stated price of maybe sequestrating carbon or limiting emissions elsewhere, and without giving the illusion that a company isn’t responsible for putting carbon into the atmosphere so long as it pays another company to say they took care of it.

    Add on to that the government is in a far better place to use that money for catalyzing emissions reductions/social good and that of course you ideally want to keep money within the local economy/prioritize domestic reduction rather than the profit margin for a carbon credit scheme and I feel that you get far more benefits with a direct tax than with cap and trade.

    Finally, ideologically I just don’t particularly like private rents and tolls on common goods, in this case dumping rights to the atmosphere we share.



  • Arsenic, mercury, gallium, tellurium, and cadmium are all heavy metal waste products produced in quantity for semiconductor manufacturing, are commonly landfilled, pose extreme risk to human health if they ever managed to leach out of the landfill and into a aquifer, and being heavy metals have no non-nuclear method of decay. Given the primary risk of high grade nuclear is also that it is made up of toxic hevey metals that might be dangerous if lost to the local aquifer, it seems fair to compare the two.

    Semiconductor manufacturing also makes heavy use of PFAS materials, which while less directly dangerous to human health still do end up measurably entering and contamating the environment through plant wastewater streams. Once in the environment, these also tend to last for between six hundred to a thousand years before being broken down or sequestered.

    I don’t think my society will last a hundreds of thousands of years, but i’m pretty sure a society of people in the area will, and if not, then it isn’t a problem because evidently there is evidently no one around to harm. Structures like landfill barriers are not likely to last that long on their own, and as such it falls on people to renew and maintain them for as long as there are people around anyway. Hence why it is imperative that the local government knows about and monitors the site.

    All of this is true regardless of which specific heavy metal or acid is stored at the site, though given the small quantity of nuclear waste makes up of similarly harmful industrial wastes it is going to be easier to manage on that face alone.

    Obviously humanity hasn’t made anything that lasted tens of thousands of years, we weren’t building anything significant tens of thousands of years ago. We do however have plenty of local governments and buildings that have lasted thousands of years, and which are probably not going anywhere anytime soon.