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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • ilinamorato@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    4 days ago

    Ok, I see misinformation like this on like every social media site now. I didn’t know it had made it to Lemmy.

    So, you know that conversion of energy causes energy loss, right? So how is it that converting that energy four times (original source > electricity > hydrogen > electricity > motion) sounds more efficient to you than converting that energy twice (original source > electricity > motion)?

    Especially when you consider that electricity already has a network of well-established, proven, global distribution infrastructure whose transfer loss has been obsessively optimized over the last century, while hydrogen emphatically does not?

    From the point of view of pure physics, it makes more sense to charge up a bunch of batteries and put them on a truck than to put a bunch of fuel cells onto that same truck. And remember, you can make those batteries more convenient by sending the electricity through the grid instead.

    Charging times are quickly decreasing. They’ll eventually reach a reasonable parity with gas tank fills, but they’ll have become the dominant transportation energy source long before that. The current state of battery technology is the worst that it will ever be, and multiple industries are working together to make them better. Hydrogen pretty much only has wide applications to one industry.

    Would all of this have been true if both technologies were starting from zero? Probably not. But electricity has a hundred year head start over hydrogen in the consumer space, and a lot of money is still being put into it. Plus, it’s obviously going to be the eventual winner because physics, so why bother with the transitional source when what we would transition to is already a more mature technology?

    The war is long over, and anyone who pretends otherwise is just ignoring the laws of physics.

    Edit: I recognize that I’m papering over the transfer loss of electricity > battery > electricity. That’s because the transfer loss of charging a battery is <10%, while the transfer loss of generating hydrogen is >20%.




  • They’re exclusively targeting people who don’t know how much their property is worth. Usually people in transitioning neighborhoods who bought their home 40 years ago for $10k, who don’t know that their property alone is worth $200k today and will happily take $80k cash from some rando on the phone because they think the 800% return is a great deal.

    I’ve lived in neighborhoods like that for a while. The phone calls we receive are insane; in our old house, which we knew was worth $300k because we had just had it appraised to put it on the market, the guy on the phone offered us $65k sight unseen. I was like, “if you even took the twelve seconds to look at this property on Street View you’d know why that is a laughable idea.”



  • There’s too much money in renewables for rich people. The tariffs may or may not happen, but the renewable switch is a runaway train, and almost entirely in the country.

    On the electricity futures market, wind producers regularly sell their power for negative prices (paying transmission companies to take their power) because it’s so cheap for them to make, with such negligible overhead; since the government subsidies are based on the mWh they produce, they can sell it at a loss and still make money. But even if those subsidies go away, renewables can still easily undercut every other producer on the grid.

    That’s just one example. The same tipping point is approaching fast all over just about every industry. Obama and Biden got the renewable energy industry over the hump of research and infrastructure outlay, so now Tr*mp gets to take the credit for their work while it all falls into place; and because the rich people are benefiting from it financially, they’re going to protect the industry.













  • So first, you need to know that the definition of “genocide” is larger than you probably think.

    The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The acts in question include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

    Emphasis mine.

    Second, hastily-built private prisons constructed for the purpose of keeping a group that has committed no crime in one place long enough to “dispose of” them? They also have a technical term: a concentration camp. If they’re also performing work, they’re a labor camp.

    So what Trump wants to do with Latiné folks is a form of genocide.

    Third, there are multiple levels of supporting a genocide, from being a member of the society that created the out-group, all the way up through pulling people from that out-group from their homes. Somewhere in the middle of that list is “voluntarily providing aid to those committing the genocide.”

    Fourth, each level of support bears a different culpability, and each individual within the levels bears a different culpability based on their knowledge and understanding of what’s happening, their intentional decision to participate or not, and the amount of protest they raise at the treatment of the out-group.

    So, knowing all of this, where would you put such a decision?