• 0 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 28th, 2023

help-circle

  • It’s more about the how and why.

    How: CCS pumps liquefied or pressurized gas into an exhausted oil or saline reservoir. These reservoirs didn’t hold pressurized gas before, so it’s difficult (if not impossible) to prove they won’t leak. In the Decatur case, about 8 kilotons of CO2 and saltwater either found or created a crack in the reservoir, exactly as critics predicted. Locals are worried about groundwater contamination.

    Why: CCS is largely unregulated in the US, and the companies interested in it are ones with awful environmental track records – ADM is no exception there. To claim the 45Q tax credit, they only need to store the CO2 for 3 years. Why would they care about preventing leaks if they already got their payout? Doing shoddy work is in their best interest.

    Does this event prove that underground CCS is literally impossible? Of course not. But feasibility isn’t a pass/fail test, it’s judged by factors like cost and risk. This event proves the approach isn’t foolproof and the companies aren’t trustworthy. So it’s high time we stop acting like they are.



  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is one of my favorite games of all time. It’s the last isometric Zelda game, and they made it a swan song. The main quest it pretty short, but it’s the sort of cozy game where doing the sidequests just feels right.

    In the game, you shrink down to the size of a mouse to traverse rafters and explore tiny temples and float on lillypads. It’s the sort of thing that would be no big deal in a 3D game, but is wildly ambitious in 2D. Not only do they pull it off, but they fill the environments with lush, lived-in detail that springs to life when you shrink down and look at it up close. The art style still sticks with me after 20 years.

    Also, forget all the “hey, listen” stuff, your sidekick Ezlo just sasses you the entire time. It’s great.



  • Disagree. Every state will characterize the violence it receives differently than the violence it enacts. Even a well-intended egalitarian state can never equivocate acts of violence against its officers with those done by its officers, because if the state fails to produce an immune response against one attack, it will soon find itself overwhelmed by more. The state has to treat vigilante justice and especially attacks against its officers as illegitimate on principle, or else it will cease to be.

    States claim a monopoly on legitimate violence, and I’d even say that’s what makes a state a state. If a given geographic region has a hundred different entities that can enact violence without each others’ permission, you don’t have a state, you have a hundred states.

    You cannot ask officers of the state to equivocate violence by and against the state. That’s not their job. That judgement is our job.

    (You can also argue that the state shouldn’t exist, but that’s a different and far more interesting discussion than the one the article poses.)


  • But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

    It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

    The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.




  • Maybe THIS will get the Dems to ditch the filibuster and pack the court. Of course, that would require the Democratic party as a whole to show some fight, something they refuse to do for some reason.

    To pack the court, Democrats need to secure:

    • A House + Senate majority (something they haven’t had since 2009-2011)
    • A wide enough majority in both that no small caucus could hold the vote hostage for a personal agenda (something they haven’t had since Jimmy Carter)
    • A president with a platform built on disruptive change rather than stability (which they haven’t had since FDR)
    • A plan to keep Republicans out of office permanently so that they can never wield this new power in retaliation (even Lincoln messed up on that one)

    They need more than just a git-r-dun attitude. Remaking the SCOTUS (rather than waiting it out) means throwing the old government away and starting over.







  • 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.




  • 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.