> at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.
Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)
The point is that we should be directing our energy in a direction that’s net useful for human kind which should translate into growth. Dropbox is not one of those because there are many viable alternatives.
I mean sure, but marginally better/more profitable file storage isn’t any of that, and artificially juicing the share value doesn’t actually make any difference to the real economy it just makes some people who like gambling on made up numbers happier for a bit.
Large vehicles are safer for the occupants of the vehicle, however they do increase danger for pedestrians and drivers of other vehicles in a collision. There is a reasonable argument that reducing vehicle size would save lives overall
> This is a myth. Larger vehicles are not safer for their occupants; they merely feel that way.
I'm pretty sure it's not, because physics. A tank is safer than a bike for the poilot, when there is a collision. This data is a little muddled, but follows common sense.
Large SUVs and Pickups: These vehicles have the lowest occupant fatality rates, averaging 14 deaths per million registered vehicles for SUVs compared to 48 per million for sedans. Large luxury SUVs often register statistically zero deaths in specific three-year studies.
Nope, not a myth. While the data is noisy and there are some confounding factors, the IIHS driver death rates show a clear correlation between larger size and fewer deaths.
Agreed - the good news is, in many circumstances renewable energy is cheaper for new energy capacity. As long as regulations move in the right direction, we are likely to see the global energy mix move towards renewable sources over time
Not only is the renewable energy cheaper, it also raises energy independence, which turns out to be quite relevant in today's world.
Furthermore, it also reduces the drain on the (often very fragile, for thirld world countries) foreign reserves, especially relevant when the oil prices fluctuate wildly.
If your solar panels are old and you don't have money to replace them, you get slightly less electricity. If you are out of gasoline/diesel and you have no money to buy it, you have a big, big, problem.
This is exactly why I don't think it's a huge risk to be reliant on China for solar panels. If relations between your country and China go bad, it can't be that much of an emergency when they stop exporting them to you. All the panels you already bought still work!
Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?
> Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?
The weakest link won't be the panels themselves, but the grid infrastructure, or telephony infrastructure. Unless somehow the chinese were able to embed a radiowave activated kill-switch or something. Highly doubt it!
Yes, exactly. The panel's control system is connected to the Internet and there's an app that an attacker could take advantage of to interfere with critical infrastructure at an inopportune time.
If you are doing grid-scale installation, surely you would want your own control system (perhaps also on your own network, separated from the general internet), precisely in order to protect the grid.
This is no different - either way you are buying a system that includes controls. While separating this from the internet sounds great, in practice internet control is too useful to run without. Maybe you put in a few firewall rules to protect things, but these often are lose enough that a hacker and bypass them (by looking like a legitimate access - since the people who need to access this will want to work from their cell phone)
There’s always the issue that it might be hard to find competent people that can implement a control network isolated from the internet if it has an internet connection by default.
When speaking about global energy mixes, or even nationwide energy mixes, regulations are just remixing the cost into separate buckets. Subsidizing oil for your citizens costs your country.
Trump did manage to make it more expensive for most of the world, but reversing that chaos is much, much harder.
I think right now, the vast majority of oil use is not because of corrupt officials using oil energy despite the fact that cheaper energy sources are available. Maybe that problem will eventually be a sticking point in removing all carbon-emitting energy sources, but right now the barrier is mostly production capacity and the scale of capital investment required to roll out renewables at scale. But if (as seems to be the case now) rolling out renewables is more profitable than rolling out additional fossil fuel use, the capital should become increasingly available. That's why I'm optimistic, even though of course there are a lot of challenges ahead in terms of creating a truly sustainable future.
What's curious to me is, why does this not happen to all youtubers? For example, vlogbrothers, 3b1b, numberphile, etc, all seem to continue putting out great educational content and care about producing good wholesome content despite the strong incentives to do otherwise - how does that happen?
I think different topics lend themselves to this better than others. If you're merely teaching about things, then there are endless interesting topics -- and _you're_ not the one coming up with the brilliant insights; you're just doing an excellent job conveying an already-known subject to others. Commenting on the news can work quite well, too. So long as your research and analysis maintains quality, there will be no shortage of noteworthy events to discuss.
There is no free Google product. You pay for all of them with your data, your privacy, and your attention.
Your data is worth far more to them than a $13/month subscription fee. In fact, if you do pay it, the data becomes even more valuable, because you're now guaranteed to always be logged in. You're also likely to use it more to get more "value" out of your purchase, generating even more value (for them). Finally, you've also identified yourself as the kind of person that pays for things that should be actually free.
Worse than all of this, when you use Google (or any of these malware/spyware companies), thanks to network effects, you don't just pay for it with your freedom, you pay for it with some of everyone else's too.
Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.
It would be better if there was a better value proposition, instead of “pay to get what we removed”.
It’s not as though free users listening with the app in the background is somehow an additional marginal expense as opposed to them listening with the app in the foreground.
It actually is a marginal expense. There are two main reasons.
For music videos there are different licensing terms for listening vs music videos. So if they don't appease the licenser than their contract will be less favourable.
And of course ads will pay less for people who aren't looking (although his is technically lost revenue, not an expense).
This is a good point - having your code broken up into standalone units that can fit into working memory has real benefits to the coder. I think especially with the rise of coding agents (which, like it or not, are here to stay and are likely going to increase in use over time), sections of code that can fit in a context window cleanly will be much more amenable to manipulation by LLMs and require less human oversight to modify, which may be super useful for companies that want to move faster than the speed of human programming will allow.
Interesting, it seems that the actual surface material of walls and/or furniture makes a large difference in how long VOCs stick around, due to differences in surface area at the microscopic scale.
I have a couple HEPA filters in my house that hopefully keep particulate exposure down. Does this mean that I have to run them longer? That I need more of them continuously running to keep exposure to VOCs low?
As pointed out in another comment HEPA filters don't work well for VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), which are gaseous in nature. They're intended to filter particulate matter.
For VOCs you need activated charcoal/carbon filters usually and replace them from time to time.
The GP comment is talking about active ventilation though, through an ERV/HRV system. Also the article states this:
> The lifetime of these compounds indoors can be extended via partitioning to the surface reservoir as modulated by ACR. Higher ACR, which may be achieved by opening windows or through mechanical ventilation, leads to shorter t_half_surf because once indoor compounds partition from the surface reservoir to the gas phase as controlled by gas diffusion across the boundary layer, they would be removed from indoor air more quickly before repartitioning to the surface reservoir.
So they do state active ventilation can help, as you reduce the vapor pressure of VOCs allowing them to partition back into the gaseous env, where they can be promptly ejected. How much exactly is hard to ascertain from their graph since I don't have the exact data they used in the plots. But from squinting at it, it seems 1 OOM change in ACR gives you close to 1 OOM change in the VOC half life, which seems substantial to me.
So adding an active ventilation system might be a good idea for this particular concern. Of course it will add to your energy bill.
True, but simply using a low volume exhaust like a bathroom fan can give you a phenomenally greater effect than zero.
And that's for the entire house, zero is such a small number.
Then when you run it 24/7 it's 24 times as effective compared to a single hour. That's an impressive multiple itself, on top of bumping the baseline above zero to begin with.
This can really add up to a lot more ventilation than commonly assumed from some of the crummiest fans.
If you can't tell the difference when you walk in, between zero and running one of these all day before you get there, you're gonna need a bigger fan.
But you may be surprised and you never know until you try.
But when stuck inside the porous surfaces isn't the problem mostly when they become airborne again?
Most of us don't eat wooden furniture -- granted my toddler didn't get the memo :)
Thus, continuous ventilation (while not perfect) is hopefully still a decent alternative. Probably better than active charcoal filter.
Granted I should probably out a charcoal filter on the ventilation intake to reduce pollutants coming in from nearby traffic.
(All depending on your level of paranoia)
If the porous surfaces are saturated then you'll basically be maximizing the vapor pressure of these gases in the air you breathe. Check out my sibling comment, extrapolating just from the data in the article an active ventilation system should help.
EDIT: And yes, charcoal filters aren't as effective if they're not part of your critical airflow/ventilation path. :D
This kinda makes sense. Water vapor diffuses out through the building materials so why wouldn't VOCs diffuse into those materials?
What you're looking for are not HEPA filters but organic vapor filtering. If you were shopping for a respirator it would be easy but organic vapor extractors I think are a lot more expensive than HEPA filters. I looked in to it when I was doing a couple of oil based coatings for a home renovation project.
A lot of air purifiers are advertised as HEPA but really contain a filter stack consisting of a pre-filter, a HEPA filter and an activated carbon filter. Those would presumably help against VOCs, assuming you change the filter frequently enough
Compare those air ‘purifiers’ with the activated charcoal setups they use on cannabis grow operations, and you’ll get a sense of what volume of charcoal and air circulation is necessary to combat those small particulates. Purifiers help in theory but are nowhere near effective or active enough to combat off gassing or VOC dispersals in practice.
Frequent replacement is critical, my understanding is the activated carbon filters typically provided have very limited capacity. More so when compared to the lifetime of the hepa.
Thats why ecological buildings use lime and clay for plastering indoor walls. They can absorb a lot of things (water, fumes) and thereby regulate air quality and humidity.
The paper posits this is a problem. Large amounts of VOCs are absorbed by these complex structures. Then the structures with the embedded VOCs flake off and are absorbed by breathing, dermal contact and ingestion. Particularly by small children. This is literally their point.
I’d think you’d want the VOCs to be captured by something, rather than floating around in the air where you could breathe them in. Combined with a HEPA filter in the air circulation system, this should be a good solution.
Absorption is usually not a one-way street, though: Surfaces absorb gasses when the concentration in the air is higher than that on the surface boundary, but often also release them back into the air otherwise (which is why you can e.g. smell cigarette smoke in clothes – if they only captured it, there would be nothing for you to smell).
The only difference are some materials like charcoal, which does permanently bind many substances (but as a result can also saturate).
No idea which kind lime and clay are (i.e. "absorb and permanently bind with limited capacity" or "act as a buffer both ways").
> Combined with a HEPA filter in the air circulation system
Actually not that many types of things will bind to the carbon permanently, mostly it's the affinity for such a wide variety of contaminants to the carbon, combined with the porosity of the carbon structure which can have a very impressive amount of surface area to come in contact with the fluid being filtered. Whether filtering air or water. It hangs onto contaminants tightly.
Because carbon is such an effective adsorbent for contaminants, the partitioning coefficient for contaminants to remain in the solvent being filtered is lowered quite dramatically compared to so many other kinds of affordable alternative filtration media.
Most times people do need to afford to discard the carbon eventually, but it doesn't even really absorb contaminants like it's supposed to unless it is activated carbon to a good degree.
Activation only means that is it porous enough to begin with so it has enough surface area to be effective, then it is heated with adequate air exchange to about 250 Celsius for as many hours as it takes for virtually all of the VOC's or moisture it may have accumulated to be baked out. Then sealed up tightly, otherwise it can sit around for ages and gradually become saturated passively with any contaminants or humidity admitted through leaks to the ambient environment.
Sometimes, you can reactivate almost indefinitely to keep reusing the same carbon, and it works with VOCs because by their volatile nature they are basically baked back out easily and virtually completely each time. Different amounts of time if using different temperatures though, if equipped.
The stronger the activation, the more tightly with higher capacity the carbon wants to absorb things it encounters that are dissimilar to the fluid being filtered.
I assume they absorb VOC until you tear down the chalk or clay plaster.
With clay the indoor problem is more about radioactivity, but it's best in terms of humidity control. Chalk creates an alkaline environment on the surface which makes it inhabitable for mold (however the wooden furniture you put in front of it can still get mold if the indoor air humidity is too high).
Does that work if it's painted over? Or can you mix colorants in as with (exterior) stucco? (Maybe this is considered a kind of stucco? I just had to look it up: wikipedia says "The basic composition of stucco is lime, water, and sand".)
Nope, I dont think it works when painted over. Some vendors recommend colors which are very open for diffusion such as chalk colors, but every other "common" color based on acryl/latex/etc basically seals it from the air and destroys it over long term.
For clay I know you can add color pigments to the clay itself, most likely you can do the same with stucco for some limited amount of colors. But painting over it with modern products mostly destroys the diffusion properties.
Many people put plastics or other sealing products on top of a clay or lime-based wall and it's a shame.
I would assume if you paint it over with a latex based paint at least it would massively affect absorption. For oil based paints I have no idea though.
Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...
I think, all things being equal, higher home prices should lead to higher rents, since at the margin people on the verge of buying a home would be more likely to choose to keep renting when prices are higher, thus increasing demand for rental units.
Anyone can use coupons. Even if they don't want to spend the time to do it, they could. Same with store brand products made by the name brand manufacturer the choice is up to the consumer.
Uber's price discrimination is opaque. Even if they aren't doing dastardly things with it, people don't like feeling ripped off. We have no way of knowing when we are.
But most big box stores have moved to digital coupons that are indeed customized based on their creepy individualized spy dossier on you. At our grocery store, my partner and I get different coupons or even different deals for the same items.
Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)
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