Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy. We will need to synthesise it (or other synfuels and feedstocks), to fully transition away from fossil sources, and that 10x efficiency factor will be essential, as synthesis is highly energy-lossy.
> Ethanol is quite a useful thing to have though, as a multi-season stable store of energy.
Am I missing something? Ethanol is hydrophilic and hygroscopic. In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly. In a closed system this ends up with phase separation and the freed water causes engine corrosion.
I'm not sure we want people running a still or molecular sieve in their homes to deal with fixing long-term-stored ethanol.
Ethanol doesn't "spoil". It is a very stable molecule and miscible with water.
The main issue is that it has a strong affinity for water so it needs to be stored in containers that are sealed from the environment. The same issue exists with the ubiquitous ethanol/gasoline blends.
> In concentrations used as a fuel (e.g., E85), it acts like a desiccant and spoils quickly
Citation needed. (hint you won't find one because it isn't true). Be careful here - this myth has been repeated enough that a search will find plenty of claims that don't check out.
High concentration alcohol doesn't spoil. Even lower concentrations don't spoil, but they mix with poor quality gas that does spoil. Well when you get very low it will, but alcohol is poison to living things and so it won't spoil. (I'm not sure how ethanol stands up to UV - but we generally keep it in a tank so that isn't an issue)
Ethanol will absorb water, but it doesn't take it out of the air anymore than anything else.
It’s embarrassing for humanity that we cause an almighty ecological disaster and then one of the biggest factors in the recovery of local ecosystems is our absence.
Did you read the page? It's a long-running manual project to document interesting quotes a good portion of which are from HN, with a vague focus on philosophy of design and the modern human condition. You can run it as a fortune-like program at login: brain food upon opening a terminal is a unix tradition dating from 1979. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(Unix)
Here's a few randoms to give you a sense:
In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. - J.C.R. Licklider and R. W. Taylor (1968)
Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it. - Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
The benefit of using [a formal specification language] is that it teaches you to think rigorously, to think precisely, and the important point is the precise thinking. So what you need to avoid at all costs is any language that's all syntax and no semantics. - Leslie Lamport
The only function of what we do, of art or of anything, is to give voice to the unspoken: to give it a form that it's never been perceived in before. We can't change the evolution of history or gentrification, you can't stop it but at least you can say "look what you're losing". All we can do is give an image to an idea. - Chris Doyle
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it. - Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid
This is the rewilding narrative. It's essentially misanthropic and benefits the rich and government agencies. In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside. We should be looking at ways that cities and suburban areas can be made more friendly to wildlife (other than the likes of pigeon, mice and rats etc) Humanity's future is co-operation with nature, not creating massive safari parks for rich people and quangos. Even at somewhere like the Chernobyl exclusion zone it is obvious that nature has not fully reverted to its previous state, since it contends with human artefacts and contamination at every step.
> In response, people are supposed to be shoved into cities and out of the countryside.
Both Ukraine and Russia have plenty of rural landscape. Neither government is trying to shove people into cities against their own will. Occasionally villages try to attract younger people, but those dont really wanna.
(But in both countries, urban people rarely move to villages due to lack of employment opportunities and do move to cities to get jobs.)
Most of Russia is actually uninhabitable due to climate — cold or aridity. Outside Europe Russians are mostly found along the Trans-Siberian corridor and a few other pockets such as Norilsk, Lake Baikal and some river basins. Norilsk itself is an anomaly and is harsh even today.
Have to push back on the "people shoved into cities" narrative. It just sounds like the conspiracy theories around "15 minutes cities" all over again.
An example of rewilding on its wikipedia page is "wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses". That's literally going the "making areas more friendly to wildlife" route.
When it comes to 15-minute cities there's all these conspiracies, but then you look behind it and it's just about allowing economic liberty to build taller and allow more commercial uses like doctors, daycares, and corner stores in residential neighborhoods, and restrict free government subsidized street parking.
It's good to be viligant, okay? And if any policies come up that are shoving people into cities, feel free to protest. But until then, a lot of the policies are actually exactly the "being more friendly to wildlife" that you're asking for and not shoving people into cities.
We've already had "rewilding" here. It was called the Highland Clearances. Thousands of people kicked off their ancestral land to be replaced by sheep, grouse moors and deer.
We have the misanthropic billionaire Tetrapak heir buying swathes of countryside in the same region and wanting to kick the remaining people off it.
There are plenty of policies pushing people into cities. It is becoming dearer and dearer to run any kind of vehicle in the countryside here, while there is a near lack of public transport in most places.
The trouble with the fifteen minute city idea is that physical facilities are gone in many cases and replaced by online ones. We don't consider doctors to be "commercial usage" here yet.
There are actually vast swathes of territory with very little human population. There is an entire continent which is almost completely inhabited apart from a few bases. Same with most of the Sahara and other such deserts. Or much of the larger mountain ranges. The world's population is not evenly distributed, and is mostly coastal even today. Even Asia, the most heavily populated continent has thousands of square miles with barely anyone in it.
We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.
As far as I can tell, that's such an insane take I can't even recognize it as propaganda. The Highland Clearances had nothing to do with rewilding and everything to do with committing to better economies of scale in agriculture based on new technology... on top of (reading between the lines) a probable political imperative to deliberately wipe out the clans as organizing bodies, no different than dekulakization or killing all the bison.
AFAICT the Highlands (like much of the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK) aren't wild now, they're a sort of overgrazed brownfield site with damaged drainage patterns that have been reduced to a handful of species.
Many of my ancestors were "cleansed" from the Highlands. They were forced out of their homes with threat of violence from the landlords, and their culture and language now almost completely extinct.
That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.
Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.
The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.
This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.
Neither Windows nor macOS have it, so it's surprising to new users. If your target market (as in support contracts) is EU public servants, it's sort of understandable.
Everyone's saying progress is slow, but maybe this is just how long it takes to do massive decentralized global migrations affecting billions of people. What are we comparing against? Maybe the ICE-to-EV transition?
For example, compared to migration from 3G to 4G networks. As I understand, from the launch of 4G to complete shutdown of 3G it took around 12—14 years.
One major difference in the 3G->4G and now 4G->5G conversion was that was largely a single-party change in the end to actually implement. The client and the server hosting an application doesn't care about whether that traffic is over 3G or 4G or IP over Avian Carriers as long as the packets get there in a reasonable time. Going from IPv4 to IPv6 requires lots of very different players to all work together to make the transition, meanwhile for a carrier to go from 3G to 4G its largely on them and their direct contractors.
A reasonably fair comparison. The ISPs had a much stronger incentive to finish the migration, though, because the 3g spectrum could just get turned around and used for 4g after rollout. IPv6 doesn't really have that strong of an incentive structure now that CGNAT is a well-developed technology.
World IPv6 Day was in 2011, so 15 years since then. This is also requiring a consumer hardware and software upgrade on both the client and server (resource they're accessing). GitHub doesn't have to implement 4G support.
I don’t think Americans would enjoy the alternative of defaulting on that debt, or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
> or the counterfactual of not having raised that debt in the first place
I'm pretty sure most of us would enjoy a different timeline where we didn't sink over $1 trillion in the Iraq war or another $2 trillion on the F-35, where we didn't mindlessly increase the military budget every cycle, where Republican administrations didn't cut taxes on the wealthy every time they won the presidency in the last half century, or where the TSA and DHS weren't created.
Every item I mentioned either increased government spending or reduced its income, both of which contribute to increased deficits and debt.
You're welcome to argue whether I'm correct that americans would be better off without any of them, but it's simple math that every single one of them contributed to our current debt.
Geminispace is a very chill place. It’s definitely not a replacement for the web, but if you can handle the compromises, it feels like both the past and the future.
Remember it said rich-world respondents, not rich people. There are still poor people in rich-world countries that would find it painful to give up any part of what they have.
> the scheme will provide over seven million subscribers with unlimited downloads at just 400 kbps after their data allowances expire.
Does this mean it’s not a universal entitlement as such, because you presumably first have to pay for a plan with an allowance? (Not to mention having to pay for a device).
Yes it does, but you probably need a bit of context.
They already have free Wi-Fi in every bus stop, train stations, government buildings, etc. like clocks, thermometers, air quality sensors, etc. The free Wi-Fi is very high quality, where you can watch 4K videos without stutters in most places (1080p for other places).
This is more about basics instead of luxurious/entertainment purposes, where if they run out of data on their contracts, the companies must provide data, albeit slow, still, where government provided Wi-Fi can't reach. 400 kbps is good enough for AI text streams, so it's a policy blend for their recently trending slew of AI policies.
I should also mention that it's a compromise from the telecom companies for recent incidents.
Haven't been to SK in recent years, but assuming quality as it is Fast, how does the log in system work?
My main problem is not speed with modern public WiFi, especially in recent years enterprise WiFI 6 and coming WiFi 7 have gotten much better with signals and receptions. But simply just to use it.
It is at least 3 - 5 steps to have it log in. And the login only works 95% of the time.
Do we have something where a single click of a button and within 100ms we are in? Or even better without even doing anything? I have yet to seen one in real world.
Here in SK it’s actually pretty straightforward. Places like subways, buses/bus stops either use secured WPA/WPA2/WPA3 Wi-Fi with a shared password or open Wi-Fi where you just tap once to connect.
In most countries you can either sign up for contracts with regular data allowance, or buy pay-as-you go phones which require topups.
It sounds like if you bought a pay-as-you-go sim card in Korea that it would immediately give you the slower unlimited connection without needing to pay for allowance first.
I think despite needing money, it can still be considered a right, IDs cost money but you have the right to have them, and I'm pretty sure it means it could extend to government paying for it eventually (depending on your social class I guess).
The provided rights are called positive rights, and the not infringe rights are called negative rights. Freedom of speech is a negative right and a right to legal counsel is a positive right.
Thanks, yes I didn't really think about that distinction. I would say that "positive rights" is a fairly modern concept, for example the right to legal counsel was not originally a positive right, that was something that was determined by a series of court decisions in the mid-20th century. Most rights are still in the "negative" sense, i.e. things that cannot be prohibited or limited, or only narrowly so.
But in this case, a "right" to mobile data is just an entitlement that the people/governemnt decided to provide. The article isn't loading for me but I'm assuming this was not a constitutional change establishing this new specific right.
> I would say that "positive rights" is a fairly modern concept
Not really. “To no one will we sell, deny, or delay right or justice” in the Magna Carta has long been interpreted as much a positive right requiring the Crown to actually provide for justice rather than just a negative law to refrain from abusing it. There's also several clauses requiing royal justices to hold assizes in the counties and set procedures for hearing disputes which is a duty to maintain legal machinery. Heirs, widows, and wards were promised specific legal treatment, such as a widow’s immediate right to her marriage portion and inheritance, and limits on abuse by (non-state) guardians which are affirmative entitlements within feudal law.
Even Rome had the grain dole (the bread of “bread and circuses”).
Ah, so it's like the right to own jewelry (historically, there have been places where only nobility could legal own and wear it): you have the right to buy them, no one would stop you or take them away from you, but you still need enough money to buy it.
I imagine the same applies to the rights to live, to have access to water, and to receive medicine help (which is IIRC is why the Soviets claimed they refused to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: they argued for their version of the declaration that would actually bind the stated to make sure those goods/rights are actually universally provided; incidentally — and it's one of the examples they've actually used — that would mean that e.g. printing political leaflets for distribution, falling under free speech and political distribution, would also have to be paid for by someone. As you may imagine, most of the other countries weren't particularly fond of the idea that they'd end up themselves financing the printing and distribution of Communist propaganda).
The USA has affordable broadband schemes (I think current setup the gov pays $9.25/mo towards your connection) and IIRC pretty much every broadband provider has a plan at exactly this cost to provide the minimum legal definition of "broadband".
"The Affordable Connectivity Program stopped accepting new consumer applications and enrollments on February 7, 2024....On January 11, 2024, due to a lack of additional funding from Congress" [1]
I think SK did the right thing. Access to information is important even at 400kbps which is pretty darn fast considering some people grew up running 56kbps and never complained.
That was before websites were 40MB or more of garbage though so keep that in perspective. Also broadband here is supposedly 100mbps and giving more people access should drive cheaper Internet but also being America we have ISP monopoly by choice per city so I'm not sure any of the economics pans out.
Imagine how wonderful it’d be if the US had fiber to the home that would trickle at 1-10mb/s even with no subscription- but you could subscribe with any provider for more.
Kinda surprising so many in the thread have no clue the US has the lifeline program and there's a few providers that will sell 'free' basic lines. It even became a meme when Obama was president: https://www.wikihow.com/Get-an-Obama-Phone
yeah 400 kbps is almost the easy part. you still need a line, a handset, and apps that still run on the cheapest phone around. hard to call that universal in practice.
they gave you a slow lane on their network, whether you can get onto their network is your issue. Phones aren't particularly expensive, I bought mine used for $60 and I've found plenty of working smartphones literally on the curbs. Should they buy you a car and a house too?
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