>- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't)
No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV.
This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".
Let's consider the numbers... A decent modern combined cycle gas turbine can achieve 60% efficiency, so let's take 50% to be conservative. Transmission losses are generally better than 15%, so that leaves a combined efficiency of 42.5%. A pessimistic charge/discharge efficiency for lithium ion would be 80% and I'd expect the charger to be 90% efficient, which gives us a total (pessimistic) efficiency of 31%.
An internal combustion engine has an optimistic efficiency of about 30%.
So, even if we ignore all the losses in fuel distribution for ICE cars and ignore regenerative effects in electric cars and the ability to incrementally decarbonise the grid, electric still has a slight advantage.
Those are incredibly pessimistic numbers for power plants and optimistic numbers for ICE. On average 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States is wasted your other numbers are similarly inaccurate.
ICE engines are only ~30% efficient under optimal conditions, idling still consumes fuel and engines idle a lot in normal driving including coasting down a large hill, slowing down, stoplights etc. Similarly turning on and heavy acceleration etc is extremely inefficient. This is where the primary benefit comes for hybrid cars not regenerative breaking.
Also, comparing gasoline to electricity ignores all the energy required to make gasoline. Oil refineries both use serious amounts of energy and release massive quantities of CO2 directly.
You forgot to include the other liter of fuel spent extracting, refining, and shipping the first one. Hence 2x. Also coal has double the emissions of oil per kWh so on an energy basis it's 1/4th
Pointing out you're equivocating lifecycle emissions with tailpipe in response to an assertion about energy is just pointing out you haven't reached the goalposts even after moving them.
A tesla 3 (top selling ev) uses about 170Wh/km. From a very low efficiency coal plant including transmission and charging losses (you don't get to double count discharge loss) this would be about 0.6kWh (thermal) or about 170g of CO2e. From a natgas plant it is 90g.
A CX-5 (top selling car) is a bit lighter and gets about 8L/100km. This is about 1 kWh or 2kWh including drilling/refining or roughly 250g of CO2e.
You could correctly argue that teslas are replacing smaller, lighter cars with bigger heavier ones, and that the smaller ones they displace have marginally lower CO2 emissions in spite of using double the energy because oil is lower CO2 than coal, but that's about as far as you can push it. If that was your argument then the solution is LEVs, transit, and bike lanes which is what the environmentalists you're straw manning want instead of most cars.
In EPA tests the tesla from the wall uses about 260Wh/km. Real world reports say range is from 80% to 110% of claimed, so we'll bump it up to 300Wh/km
Our Mazda gets 8L/100km claimed (over 9 real world https://www.fuelly.com/car/mazda/cx-5) or 665Wh/km. A Civic is about the same real world if you wanted to compare that.
If we burn that exact same gasolene (probably the most energy intensive fuel to extract) in a 58% efficient CCGT and use the 6% transmission loss of the US grid we get 330Wh.
If you stop taking all of your rounding in the direction that favours the ICE you get around 240Wh for the EV vs 400Wh for the ICE. An Ioniq is slightly more efficient again.
Even a fully fossil fueled grid requires less energy for the most popular EV than the most popular ICE car no matter which way you slice it. As soon as you use gas or coal or relax the assumptions where you drive the EV hard with the heater on and the ICE carefully with both on the highway you get more than double per energy input.
Elements and chemicals are very different things. Silicon is the #2 most common element on earth and if you smash a bunch of solar panels, they turn into sand when they get wet. Or if you just wait.
Even pure silicon metal is totally benign, even in large amounts. Certainly safer than iron, which can kill you in relatively small amounts if it's in a bioavailable form. Silicon is already literally everywhere, in every form it will reasonably be transformed into.
Even the boron and phosphorus that make up a tiny percent of cells are extremely benign. The biggest issues are the tin fingers and solder, and probably the lead that is often present. But lead is also far from necessary. And unfortunately, the human race is going to be dealing with lead dust for a while already, just from how it used to be in gasoline.
1) This is the technical answer: Cyanide binds fairly strongly to one of the molecular machines involved in cellular respiration, inactivating it.
The result of that inactivation is that your cell begins to have issues producing ATP, even when it has nutrients available. Without going too far into detail, ATP is essentially the cellular unit of energy that your cells run on. Without being able to make more, your cell will eventually run out of ATP and it will die. Enough cells die? You'll die.
2) The more important point here is that not only is your intuition uninformed, but you appear to be incredulous as well. Ask yourself why you react to unintuitive results in areas you're not familiar with in the way that you do.
This thread is a perfect example of why normal people don't take obvious repercussions.
The covid tangent is largely bullshit. You will get it regardless of what precausiosn you take.
The point is that in a large number of venues we have CO2 levels that are actively detrimental to your ability to think. This is a problem that we need better ventilation to solve. That bedrooms had the poorest air quality is something I wasn't expecting and will likely buy my own sensor to measure.
One thing I've noticed more and more is that I've been trained to _not_ click links in a page but search for the same thing in google. Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website and little else. Checking the last 10 pages I have opened the majority of them from reputable sites either don't have links or don't have useful links.
It's kind of bizarre that the main selling feature of HTML is basically lost today.
I think you touch on a valid point about changes in the way content is presented online, but I also think you're really underselling just how utterly transformative the Web has been.
Like, you say you don't click links because you use Google instead... but Google search returns links. It could not even function without links. Keyword search is even one of the listed goals in the proposal, because prior to the Web, there was no singular place to find and retrieve information like that:
> At CERN, a variety of data is already available: reports, experiment data, personnel data, electronic mail address lists, computer documentation, experiment documentation, and many other sets of data are spinning around on computer discs continuously. It is however impossible to "jump" from one set to another in an automatic way [...] Usually, you will have to use a different lookup-method on a different computer with a different user interface. Once you have located information, it is hard to keep a link to it or to make a private note about it that you will later be able to find quickly.
That's how utterly different the world was without the Web. You couldn't open ten pages from different sources in one application and then Google for something in a new tab. Every single way of accessing information would've been its own distinct application, without much overlap or interoperability between them. Any attempt to build a search engine like Google or a content aggregator like HN would've been stymied by the sheer variety of formats and standards for presenting information.
This proposal was more CERN-focussed than I had imagined. That said, my search came up negative on each of 'math', 'formula' and 'equation'.
Was this a strategic omission to make the project more tractable? I would not be surprised had the proposal been directed to a non-science community, but at CERN?
I think it was just too early in the project for that. Images were still considered a nice-to-have and (as far as I can tell) HTML hadn't even been proposed yet. It mentions the potential for a markup language, but it also says that they don't want to force users to adopt any particular markup language and mentions word processed documents as a potential node format. Perhaps the assumption was that specialized formatting requirements would be handled by specialized document formats, with markup pages acting as glue for listing and navigating between those formats (similar to how most browsers now have built-in PDF readers).
I keep reading this but can't quite parse it. What do you mean by "Hyperlinks are now the navigation bar inside a website and little else"? Do you mean "URLs are shown in browser navigation bars but people do not click hyperlinks in websites"?
So the observation here is that Tim Berners Lee's original vision was all these documents that would be linking to each other, across different hosts. But today's websites are mostly silos that only link inwards. Have I got that right?
IMO Google has been slowly condensing/removing the address bar in Chrome so people think Google Search == web, and I think your anecdote shows that it's working.
Thanks that's a good tip, seems to be a good addon for firefox. Annoyingly looks like that addon also has some scope creep (default domain blocking, why, I have ad blockers for that?)
Replying to say that I just noticed this today, and decided it was a negative tendency. I was reading a history article on The Athletic and was wondering about some things. Only after mulling a bit, I noticed they were links to some good youtube videos.
That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.
Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China...
But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture".
Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trade network, and you grow different crops further out and bring them not to the river / coast but to me to feed me. That probably will be more efficient but just look at the network of trust and possible disasters required - only very stable politics would allow anything like that - and that stability was rare. China probably had more of that for more of the past 2000 years than anywhere else - and that may be the cause of the invention of the bureaucrat!
Navigable for a barge and navigable for a canoe are two very different things.
The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently. They also had the Nile which isn't _in_ Egypt, but _is_ Egypt.
> The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently
I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?
Also, wouldn’t those rivers only help supply from other border areas, not from the much larger inner parts of the empire?
I would think those rivers just are natural boundaries because they provide some protection against invading enemies.
>I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?
Brett says that moving grain by road would double the cost for every 100 miles. He has quite a few articles on premodern farming, and may have given a different figure in other articles.
Roman roads were high tech for the era and those were still pretty bumpy. A modern road is much more efficient. Bouncing over uneven terrain not only damages the products and veg it also causes wear and tear on the cart, the animals, and the driver.
Also doubling isn’t a bad thing for the first couple of multiples. Each doubling increases the supply by a factor of four on open terrain. It’s no accident that big cities are at the confluence of trade routes. Up in the mountains creates a funnel that raises the average cost and lowers the reliability of everything too much. It’s like you’ve blockaded yourself.
Travelling by horse and cart can't be much faster than 30 miles per day. So even if you're only 30 miles away, you have a day to get there, a day at the market, and a day to get back. That's 3 days you're not working on the farm. You and the horse that pulls the cart, which of course also needs feeding, and whose day-job is ploughing.
These kinds of insights for old-school roleplaying (OSR) games. Hard to farm out of books, but very insightful having stumbled upon it. And it's not just needing to be true in an absolute, historical sense, but a useful mechanic to save for later.
A course that goes over how everything we think is bad today is good in a world stuck in the Malthusian trap. Working harder today to have a better life tomorrow just means your children working harder tomorrow to have the same life you have today.
The option he didn't talk about at all was how in such a world sexism could keep average living standards quite high so long as all women of reproductive age were kept in near starvation so they could barely carry children to term. But there's only so much unthinkableness you can expect from someone living in the current day lecturing at a university.
Thank-you. I see it is part of Professor Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. And that is part of a series of 49 books, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.
My (limited) understanding of the book is that basically during the 19C in Britain, poor uneducated (and unproductive) people died off leaving space for the middle class to grow. Which leads to the conclusion that killing the ooor leads to economic growth. As a thesis it may be short of ... something.
I may have misunderstood the tweet of the review of the article based on the book.
Anyway, my general conclusion is that however hard it is to understand history, understanding economic history is twice as opaque
Rather the opposite actually. During the 19th century for reasons that have nothing to do with demography the British learned how to use the poor who would have died to do productive work instead. Then for reasons that have everything to do with child mortality people stopped having 7 children per woman _before_ contraception became widely available. This is the reason why France is smaller than Germany today. Their child mortality decreased faster than Germany's.
Yeah your approach is the more usual commonly accepted idea - poor people stopped dying moved to cities got educated became a productive middle class.
The above quoted book tried to argue that the poor dying continued and the middle classes of victorian briton had more kids and hence took over - a sort of poorly argued eugenics wrapped in the usual "it's culture innit" argument.
However Like I say I have only read enough of the book to decide it's in my reading list only after I discover immortality.
It's not an argument it's a fact that the rich had more surviving children than the poor. Repeat for 5 generations and you have completely replaced the original population with the offspring of the top 10%. That's a century. The middle ages lasted 8 centuries.
That a simple mathematical fact like that is considered eugenics is reality denial on par with the flat earth society.
The 19th century was special because people figured out how to use coal to do the work done by muscle in the middle ages. The previous centuries had seen a continued decline in capital costs. E.g. mediaeval interest rates were routinely 15% and more for secured loans.
I think covid is when the internet jumped the shark for Joe Average.
You would get banned from twitter, facebook, reddit, instagram etc for saying what was official policy until _yesterday_. The sheer insanity of that policy left the terminally online in charge everywhere and the quality of every website suffered. If I look back to reddit posts which google still brings up more than half the people are banned. These are people who wrote thousand word replies to technical problems and were pillars of the community. The only ones left are the mentally ill unemployed since they are the only ones who have time to keep track of what is allowed there.
HN was headed down the same hole until that hilarious post by PG about heretics that got flagged for 8 hours. I imagine at that point it hit everyone in charge here that the people making the most noise were not their friends.
We broke a weird little markup language into something it was never meant to be because the last tower of crap got too high and collapsed on itself.
Now a webpage is html+css+javascript+a dozen frameworks. People are sick of it and want something better. Well HTML2 is better. Just HTML2, nothing else.
A billion users, each tweeting once an hour with 140 characters. That's 38.147 Megabytes/s. My laptop could handle that raw volume. Increase it by an order of magnitude for all the network nonsense and it can still run on my 4 year old desktop.
Twitter is not some hypertech company, it shouldn't need more than a hundred engineers to run. I imagine that's the bet Musk is making too.
What a terribly dishonest and overly-simplistic way of modeling of a distributed system much less a simple web service.
found the engineer who, in their own words, “couldn’t code their way out of paper bag.”
In the same vein, look at how Plenty of Fish has a huge customer base, and runs on very skimpy hardware. Back in 2006 it had 45M visitors a month, served up over 1B page views a month, all running off three database servers and two load balanced webservers. Guess how many employees? One, Markus Frind[1].
Twitter has about 10x that monthly visitor number just in mDAU. And pof has scaled 100x! (To 100 employees — that seems pretty insane relative the traffic they have going by this weird metric of “amount of data served should roughly equal the number of employees by some ratio”). Comparison also seems a bit lacking given the difference in magnitude also the engineering problems involved (e.g. moderation, botting etc.) Guessing also that creating a dating site is not an exercise in needing a lot of skilled engineering work given it’s been a solved set of problems since the late 90s. Hey Verizon has 132,000 employees — I guess they should only need a fraction of that right since consumer cellular has 2,400?
It’s pretty laughable you believe your own “math.”
I guess even serving an actual front end doesn’t factor into your calculations. Hey go build something and you might find out what it actually takes to build/maintain a system of any real consequence instead of doing leet code exercises and smelling your own brain farts.
No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV.
This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".