A place where you can take a break and grab a coffee is called a cafe, not a gas station.
Also, with Chinese manufacturers increasingly pushing out batteries capable of 1000+ km, you'll be able to charge fully at home for increasingly long road trips.
We were clearly talking about the context of energy sources, where he's trying to push something he calls "clean coal". What's the positive outcome there?
> Trump's stated goal of regime change in Iran would (likely) have been a positive outcome if it has actually happened
The number of Americans still believing this is baffling and saya everything about their history education.
"The previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative for the people in those countries, but surely this time it would've been different!".
> previous 20 times we forced regime change ended up a net negative
Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea. Potentially Venezuela, mostly because we constrained our objectives.
I also don’t think it’s fair to constrain OP’s statement to “the people in those countries.” Regional impacts matter, too. An Iran that isn’t funding terrorist proxies everywhere could still be a net positive even if the average Iranian is no better off afterwards. (To be clear, I’m in no way supporting this stupid war.)
> Plenty of counter-examples, too. WWII. South Korea.
To even hint at those being in the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Congo is really desperate. Come on now. Not comparable and irrelevant.
> the same category of "regime change attempt" as Iran (2x), Chile, Iraq
…why are Japan and Germany not comparable to Iraq? We’re talking methods and outcomes, not motivations. All involved a wholesale invasion, occupation and supervised restructuring followed by disarmament.
The energy system has investment cycles counted in decades.
Looking at TWh of renewables added each year we will have grids entirely dominated by them in 10-15 years. That is lightning speed for the energy system, and we’re still speeding up.
But people still want results immediately. Which is the explanation I've seen for why nuclear isn't as big. Takes multiple times longer for a nuclear plant to come online vs coal. So some aspects are decades, others are one politician term.
This delay in nuclear means that, by now, nuclear is no longer a solution. Had we started with nuclear somewhere in the first decade of this millennium, then it would have been a good solution to climate change, and we would be in a better position.
But in our current position, nuclear is too slow, and luckily we have alternatives in wind and especially solar. Where the main advantage of solar is how quickly it’s scaling. Notably, the slowness in building nuclear also limits how fast you can improve the process of building nuclear. Whereas solar is so quick to build you can learn lessons and try innovation much faster.
Solar generation capacity is growing by 30+% a year with the cheaper grid batteries and the current world political situation the growth might even accelerate. Solar will get ahead of Natural gas by end of 2028 I predict as the next 2 years there will be huge move to renewables in Asia from gas and oil.
You can look at coal, oil, gas as form of compressed solar energy, because all of them have biological source, stored millions of year ago. It's just burning coal, oil, gas has nasty side effects.
"
Volcanic coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 252 million years ago.
By that logic, all of the Earth and the moon were once parts of stars, so tidal and geothermal are also solar.
When people say "solar energy", they are usually referring to first order solar energy, directly from photons, not second or third order solar energy after it has been trapped into other sources of potential energy.
No chance, fossil fuels are subsidized more. A large share of solar growth is from countries like Pakistan who have had some subsidies but total dollar amount of them is trivial.
Pricing fossil fuel pollution at zero is the biggest subsidy in the world bar none. Contrast this with for example nuclear power, where potential pollution risks as well as storage of its spent resources are some of the biggest costs. If they were subsidized equally to fossil fuels, the costs of those would be very low, with the public simply paying the price for any negative health effects.
Oil is directly subsidized in most oil producing countries. Go look at what fuel costs in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, vs what they could sell it for on international markets. That's a subsidy.
Jet fuel is universally exempt from tax. Try finding any other energy source that is.
> There isn't really an alternative for jet fuel, is there?
But in many cases there is an alternative to air travel, at least for short distances. I don't really understand why railways (at least in the UK) such ridiculously expensive. Return flights from London to Edinburgh start at £30, train tickets between the same cities start at £100. A return ticket from a station in 50 miles from London is more than £65 (peak times).
> There isn't really an alternative for jet fuel, is there? Synfuel still has pollution problem and represents like 0.1% of total jet fuel used.
There isn't an alternative for water, electricity and food. Easy to find places where the former two are taxed, the latter is taxed effectively everywhere.
Jet fuel has alternatives, as noted above SAF / Synfuel which is increasingly being blended into fossil fuel sourced trad "jet fuel" / kerosene (with a twist).
> Synfuel still has pollution problem and represents like 0.1% of total jet fuel used.
is a fairly lightweight critique of a product development path scarcely five years in:
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is an alternative fuel made from non-petroleum feedstocks that reduces air pollution from air transportation. SAF can be blended at different levels with limits between 10% and 50%, depending on the feedstock and how the fuel is produced. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), over 360,000 commercial flights have used SAF at 46 different airports largely concentrated in the United States and Europe.
Worldwide, aviation accounts for 2% of all carbon dioxide (CO2) and 12% of all CO2 from transportation. ICAO's Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) caps net CO2 from aviation at 2020 levels through 2035. The international aviation industry sets goals for SAF usage globally. SAF presents the best near-term opportunity to meet these goals.
The Sustainable Aviation Fuel Grand Challenge, announced in 2021, brings together multiple federal agencies for the purpose of expanding domestic consumption to 3 billion gallons in 2030 and 35 billion gallons in 2050 while achieving at least a 50% reduction in lifecycle emissions.
So, have some patience and remember the goal here is to reduce the use of fossil fuel as much as possible .. if Synfuel evolves into something that reduces fossil fuel usage by 50% in the aviation sector, that's a win on the path to ideally eventual elimination altogether.
The US oil subsidy currently is projected to increase the Pentagon budget from one trillion to one and half. I bet one could build a lot of solar panels for 500 billion dollars, and you can use them more than once, too.
In the "unpaid cost of climate change and air pollution as a result of burning fossil fuels" etc. sense, not in a cash given to fossil fuel folk sense.
Nobody else has anything remotely like Starship. If they pull it off, and it's looking like they will, they will extend their dominance for another decade if not more.
Yes, Starship development has been slow and occasionally explodey, but they've successfully demonstrated all the fundamentals and it's "just" iteration from here. (They haven't gone into full orbit, but that's by choice, not lack of capability.)
> If they pull it off, and it's looking like they will,
I really wonder about this psychological effect where non technical people champion people like Musk so hard without any basis for doing so. Is is some sort of wanting to belong to some ideology that makes you just make shit up in your head about how Starship is a success, despite many indicators of it clearly being a stupid idea born from Musks ketomine episodes?
For the record, Starships engines are the equivalent of taking a Toyota Corolla and making it run on nitrous continously on the verge of self destructing. You may be able to do technology demonstrations here and there, but making it work reliably for actual missions is much much harder.
"Starships engines", also known as Raptors, are among the most extensively tested rocket engines in the world.
More than 600 of them (across all variants) have been produced and tested on McGregor test stands and in flight, with relatively few explosions, and for some of that test stand explosions, we do not know if those were deliberate overload tests.
Raptor is about the least problematic of all the crucial Starship components. They had a lot more problems with ullage and the gorilla in the room is the heat shield. It must be very reliable and at the same time quick to check and fix. The time to fix the heat shield will be the critical component of the total turnaround time.
Personally, I don't believe in 1 hour turnaround. 1-2 days just might be plausible.
Is that why you see several engines not functioning during flight tests?
The issue is that the controllers have to maintain a crazy unstable balance of the mixture to keep these things running due to the dual preburn cycle and cryogenic storage, that any unforeseen circumstance can lead to failure.
In the days of Falcon, where Space X was attracting people willing to disrupt the industry, I would have been in the "its possible" camp. Nowdays, with everything going on, I would place a large chunk of money on the fact that they will never get it to be reliable enough. They haven't even gotten it to orbit yet, despite the massive experience they have.
First its "engines are reliable", then its "well actually they are not, but the starship can function with a few out"
The Elon simps never cease to amaze me.
An engine should not go out by itself. Some catastrophic event can take out an engine, and then if you design your rocket to fly with a few out, thats fine. But if the engines just are so unstable that they fizzle out, thats a huge risk because that means any non planned event can cause more engines to fizzle out, leading to loss of vehicle.
Airliners have twin engines, and are designed to be able to fly one one. Why? Because engines fail now and then. Every flight critical part on an airliner has a redundant workaround, sometimes two.
Redundancy is a cost-effective way to successfully deal with unreliable parts.
When I go dirt bike riding in the wilderness, I only ride with a buddy. I wear protective gear. I carry a phone, water, and a minimal survival kit. I also text a photo of the trail map to a friend before hitting the trail.
By far the most common reason for engines to go out is when they don't have enough fuel, and that is mostly caused by faults in ullage, which is what I mentioned in my GP comment to be a significant problem. Once you spent most of your fuel, relighting the engines is not easy.
Ullage is a plumbing matter, though. External to the engine itself and its intrinsic (un)reliability.
On the ascent burn, where fuel is plentiful, Raptor flameouts have become way less frequent over time. The # of engines failing on the Super Heavy during the ascent burn is 0/33, 1/33 and 0/33 during the last three IFTs. Not bad for a test vehicle.
The Saturn V's had a big problem with "pogoing" which they never solved. The Soviet moon rocket apparently was abandoned because of unstable coupling among the grid of engines that powered it.
SpaceX must have a handle on these problems, I haven't heard anything about it.
Bringing together the money and people to make this stuff happen is the basis. That’s the most impressive part. Debatably the only truly impressive part.
There’s no ideology. You can watch a really big rocket take off every month or two and watch a smaller rocket take off every couple days. I’m sure there are better designs out there… on drawing boards.
Musk thinks that if you crash things enough until it works first time, the problem is solved. Which is fine for something like Falcon. As loads get bigger and heavier, and you start running into margins of performance (for example, raptor engines are required to generate the thrust to lift it). And then, just cause it works the first time, that doesn't mean there is enough margin on the system to not fail due to an external unforseen event for which the narrow margins can't account for.
> Israel routes most trade through Mediterranean ports at Haifa and Ashdod, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
There is no "bypassing", Israel has never shipped anything through the Strait of Hormuz in the first place. The country borders the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, not the Persian Gulf.
The entire article is predicated on the premise that it would be bad if Iran lobbed missiles at ICL's bromide facilities, but it's not in Iran's own interests either to cripple semiconductor production, and given the distance and inaccuracy of their missiles, they'd struggle even if they tried. (It's too far for drones.)
You seem to be using vanilla (or one might say "area-weighted" population density numbers. The article specifically says that they are using population-weighted population density numbers for comparison:
> Population weighted density refers to the density multiplied by the actual number of people living in each area, and more closely reflects the density that people experience.
One indication of this is that they give a different value for London's population density (9.2k / km^2) than you do.
the "city merging" thing also happens in the US! particularly with school districts. this is why many gigantor middle/high schools exist; they serve HUGE coverage areas with many cities that are too small/rural to have their own school districts.
The bus from Cars 3 says “You about to feel the wrath of the Lower Belleville County Unified School District!” - and it works because almost all school districts people are familiar with in the USA have names similar to that, with the combinations and crossings of county and city.
Two-letter codes are assigned to anybody on request, but three-digit codes are assigned only to full IATA members.
The three-digit code is used primarily for ticketing (it's the first three digits of a ticket number), and as an airline you only really need it if you're going to do complex interop things like ticketing another airline's flights. Most low cost carriers like Ryanair are not IATA members, and even Southwest only joined last year.
These days Zainichi Koreans are granted citizenship pretty much automatically if they request it. But some choose not to, mostly because they prefer to retain Korean citizenship instead (Japan does not allow dual citizenship).
Yes, previously they were forced to choose Japanese names to naturalize, but this has not been the case for a long time.
