Shooting two guns at the same time does in fact look cool. That’s not a myth. Hitting two targets with two guns at the same time is really hard though.

Nowhere did I say or imply that capturing CO2 is a net positive of energy. It is in fact a huge energy sink. If you aren’t using renewables to power CO2 capture then you’re just making the problem worse.

We have to do both. If today our emissions went to zero we would still see more warming because of all that CO2 we’ve already released. First priority is to get to net zero so we can stop making the problem worse, then we have to remove all the CO2 we released. We have the technology now to do step one it’s just a matter of scaling it up. While we work on step one we need to do the research on the best way to do step two so when we get to that point we have something ready to go. Pulling CO2 out of the air is going to be inefficient no matter what just from the physics of the problem but it still needs to be done and the energy to do so has to come from renewables.

Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.

This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.

It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.

In addition to what has been said already, in many places the cost to upgrade the electrical service to the building to handle the amount of power that could be generated can be as much or more than all the other costs combined. So now the building operators are looking at millions in cost with a potentially 30 year payback period. It just doesn’t make sense at that point.

Are the predicted prices ever crazy far off from what they actually end up being like what happened in Texas last winter? Where am outage causes price to go from like 20c/khw to 2000c/khw over a one hour period?

How do you keep up with the current price? Does your thermostat have a setting where if the price is above X then turn off? Do you just come home to a freezing house and say “oh the electric is too expensive, guess I’ll grab some wood”?

Given the egotistical nature of the Goauld I wouldn’t put it past them to have a sort of “gentleman’s agreement” to keep war mostly ground based to help limit the ability of the jaffa to rebel. We never see any Goauld weaponry that can track its target for instance. Everything just shoots in a straight line until it hits something. They want “war” to be up close and messy to help control their subjects. Given that, air defense as we understand it would defeat the purpose of fighting in the first place for them.

That is already a thing and it’s called concentrated solar power. Basically aim a shit load of mirrors at a target to heat it, run some working fluid through the target and use that to make steam to turn a turbine. There are a few power plants that use it but in general it has been more finicky and disruptive to the local environment than traditional PV panels would be.

Yep, the standards for energy efficiency in homes is just barely above being non-existent. We spent decades with cheap energy so no one cared if every house leaked like a sieve. Now that’s coming back to bite us.

I have an air source heat pump for my house and a heat pump water heater. Even in the dead of winter at 0F it kept my house just as warm as always and my water was hot. Heat pumps are not “shitty alternatives” any longer. Maybe in Alaska they would struggle but anywhere else and they work just fine.

If we want to honestly improve the climate then it is REQUIRED that we become carbon negative, not just net zero. And every little bit of emission that is prevented is a lot of power that isn’t needed later on to suck that carbon back out of the air.

You can complain that big companies aren’t doing enough to cut emissions and I agree, but that doesn’t mean we should wait till they clean up their act to start working on ours.

My understanding is that valve says publishers can’t sell their games steam keys cheaper on other platforms but can charge whatever they want if steam is not the one providing the download. Network infrastructure isn’t free and if steam is the one actually facilitating the download they get to take their share.

Except if you only go by what you see online you would think it is universally reviled. That’s also confirmation bias.

I got my cybertruck because I wanted to do truck things on electric power. The attention never factored into the buying decision and once deliveries started rolling out I was nervous about the attention it was drawing for other people. Luckily all that attention has been positive for me.

Everywhere I drive it makes people smile. Plenty of adults have posed with it too. Is making people smile a bad thing nowadays?

My girlfriend follows the Facebook group for our local area and has shown me many posts from people seeing one and posting about how cool it is. And I’ve gotten only one negative reaction from someone giving me a thumbs down as they drove the other way. Haters have had plenty of opportunity to give me the bird or thumbs down but it just doesn’t happen.

I have a cyber truck and it’s amazing the disconnect between online and real life. This thread is evidence that online everyone hates it and thinks it’s the worst thing ever. In person I can’t go anywhere without someone wanting to ask me about it and gushing about how cool it is. Seriously, I constantly get thumbs up and smiles and “woah that’s so cool who made it?” The sentry mode has seen many children pose in front of it while their parents take a picture.

The attention aside it is genuinely a good truck. 6ft bed, 120v and 240v outlets in the bed for power anywhere, 11000lbs towing capacity, 6000lbs bed capacity, 300 mile range, the battery storage to power my house for a month if I don’t use A/C, a week with A/C, super fun and smooth driving, tight turn radius from the rear wheel steering, room for 5. If it looked like a normal truck but everything else was the same noone would care one way or the other.

The idea of the Dyson sphere, or actually Dyson swarm as it was originally proposed, assumes that there is no weird new physics that makes energy for free. If you have truly free energy then all bets are off for what you can do with it. If there are no new thermodynamics breaking discoveries then even with cheap fusion reactors making a Dyson swarm is the best long term way to get huge amounts of energy. With decent automation only a little better than we have now and a few centuries of time you could disassemble Mercury into space habitats with room for easily quadrillions of people. So without magic free energy why not do that?

Thanks for the write up. I was thinking about getting part one a while ago but the negative reviews scared me off. That part 2 is past it’s release date with no communication doesn’t inspire confidence.