Trump had 4 years to free Assange but did nothing. He will say anything to get elected. It's surprising how people don't see it. In Texas we call that 'All hat, no cattle.'
>When the cost of drilling oil and converting to gasoline outweighs the cost of manufacturing hydrogen, the current oil giants will pivot.
It is actually cheaper and greener to burn fossil fuels to make electricity for EVs, and just capture the CO2 emissions released than to produce hydrogen.
Virtually 100% of H2 sold today is 'blue hydrogen,' meaning it is derived from steam methane reforming of natural gas, a process that actually generates more Greenhouse Gas than simply burning natural gas [1].
'Green Hydrogen' produced from the electrolysis of water is incredibly expensive (about 3-4x more than Blue). Both are mature technologies that are unlikely to get cheaper at larger scale.
Ground-based sensors historically undercount methane emissions in 3rd party trials. They have a limited FOV which makes it hard to accurately measure a plume of gas, particularly when the wind blows. I suppose you could create a Dyson sphere of fixed sensors around an O&G asset, but that quickly becomes more expensive than a space based sensor.
Because these leaks can occur spontaneously, you really want real-time, continuous monitoring of a wide area with high resolution. Aerial sensors are impractical for this purpose. Only a large constellation of satellites can offer this.
Little Star Pizza is one, if not the best, pie in the Bay Area. It's very well known and loved. It is surprising that customers wouldn't be willing to order delivery directly from the restaurant, especially if they could pass along some savings.
The article doesn’t say customers wouldn’t order directly from the restaurant.
I think that restaurants don’t want to hire their own delivery drivers and staff.
These Togo orders are basically “extra” that typically wouldn’t exist. And delivery companies know that. So it may be 30-50% of revenue but that’s in addition to what the restaurant would pull down as dine in only. Or just Togo where customers get it themselves.
I think there’s an opportunity for a more efficient Uber eats competitor that charges lower prices. But I think restaurants will just pay their fees.
In my area restaurants just keep jacking up their fees to cover commissions and people keep ordering. My favorite pizza place is $20 in person and $30 through Uber eats. They fired all their delivery people about two years ago.
People order McDonald’s for a $20 happy meal. So people just keep paying.
I wonder if mixed electric vehicles will help. An e-bike is a totally different cost factor than a full fledged car. Just zip around on an electric scooter, bike, or moped for delivery and it is cheap.
I don't think delivery is necessarily "extra". It must be cannibalizing some people that come to the restaurant, and that means they don't order the most profitable items on the menu: drinks.
A delivery service that uses those modes of transport might actually be cheaper and superior to all involved than the current ones in sufficient density areas. A scooter, blade, or moped can quick-park on a sidewalk a lot more easily.
My wife is one of the people that sometimes orders $20 McDs when I'm on the road for my job. It drives me nuts. Twenty fucking dollars for some of the worst food in America.
That is basically the main source of transport for these food delivery people in Barcelona. They're everywhere. Easier to buy an ebike than a car and often faster in traffic and for parking etc.
Glovo is a very successful business here and not without controversy but they're rarely using cars.
Bigger pizza chains use mopeds which are also often electric. Less local pollution and less noise - all round just better.
The idea that people would rather pay unknown extra dollars to middlemen to avoid picking up a phone and talking to someone for 2 minutes is so bizarre to me.
That feels a little reductionist. You’re paying for stuff like order tracking, customer service, easy tipping, a way to talk to the delivery driver, and a centralized place to choose stuff. I don’t think those things are worth the price anymore, but they have value
I wouldn’t pay extra for it (and don’t order food often, since it’s always cold and late), but ordering something over the phone can be rather difficult in America if you don’t have an American accent. Don’t even get me stated on drive-thru speakers.
The killer feature of Doordash is the fact that you can order in a structured textual form. The feature that kills it is their inability to provide a heat-preserving bag for drivers.
It saves you the trouble when your order goes wrong and way easier to argue/negotiate, it's the same reason airbnb works (else why wouldnt you just exchange number with the host and rent it directly)
As a non-native English speaker, calling places is absolutely soul crushing. People cannot understand my name, cannot understand me spelling it, and half of the time I cannot understand them back. Why have me call and tell you my name for you to be typing it when I could enter it in the computer myself?
I've also lived in countries where I'm not a native speaker, so I know how hard it is calling (much more so than speaking in person). But honestly this is a little irrelevant. The split between those who are fine calling and those who really want an app has basically nothing to do with language. Young people in the US often hate the idea of calling even if they are native speakers. That is what I don't understand. As a native speaker of English, calling places is just so easy. I don’t understand the need to replace it with some new process.
So yeah while I understand your issues, they simply don't explain this phenomenon when it comes to native speakers of English in the US.
Online ordering from the restaurant's designated website is fine, but ordering from a third party like Door Dash or Uber or whatever and their jacked up prices is weird to me.
I can call a pizza place and get a pizza delivered using the pizza restaurants' delivery person, or I can use a third party app and pay 100% more?
Or the restaurant could buy ready made solution or some relatively cheap solution that provides them this website. Then do the delivery themselves and only lose a bit on the order.
>It is possible (and not very difficult) to design LED bulbs that will practically outlive their owners
It is also possible (and not very difficult) to design incandescent bulbs that will outlive their owners. In fact, the first mass produced light bulbs generally lasted 2,500+ hours. In the 1920s, the major bulb manufacturers formed the 'Pheobus Cartel' in Geneva and secretly colluded to limit the lifespan of bulbs to 1,000 hours to boost sales [1]. Another example of planned obsolescence harming consumers and the environment.
> On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva for a meeting that would alter the world for decades to come. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. As revelers hung Christmas lights elsewhere in the city, the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.
An also should add that color temperature on incandescent lamps play a role on its lifespan, want long lasting lamps? Lower the current (or increase the resistance).
incandescent light bulbs efficiency increases with their temperature/current. At low enough current they will last long enough but waste a lot energy as well.
You can dim them, and provide a slow start to prevent the inrush current (which is like 10times more than nominal with tungsten resistance increasing due so high 2500K temps).
Thankfully, LED lighting will probably be gone within 20 years, while incandescent will be coming back more efficient than LED could dream. Already bumping up against theoretical maximum efficiency, LED lighting can't get any more efficient, and the better LED is at color rendition, the less efficient it is. But there are vast amounts of improvement available for incandescent lighting, and a group at MIT has already created incandescent light that is twice as efficient as LED.[1]
> Exciting, but that article is from 2016 and here we are in 2023 with no commercial availability.
That is a fantastic point. If they can't revolutionizing lighting in 7 years, it will never happen. Oh, btw, LED was invented in 1962, but it only took about half a century for the commercial viability of high powered LED lighting to appear and begin to take over the lighting market in 2011.
The concept is interesting, and reading the article reversed my initial response to treat this as a crank concept.
That said ...
... LEDs involve finding materials which exhibit specific quantum behaviours which correspond to human visual acuity.
Photonic bulbs involve the much simpler blackbody radiation concepts of not only incandescent light bulbs but hundreds to thousands of millennia of previous experience with combustion-based lighting ... and, yes, the added twist of finding viable IR-reflective / visual-spectrum emissive materials.
The second problem seems more reasonably simpler. One would hope that progress might be occuring at a more rapid rate.
(There's a similar argument I've used to contrast nuclear fission, which was commercially exploited within two decades of first demonstration, and nuclear fusion, which coming on a century from its theoretical understanding remains not even experimentally demonstrable on a continuous, energy-positive basis, let alone in commercial application. Some problems are just hard.
Yes, there are thresholds and breakthroughs, and they do occur. But given a few decades of lived experience matching advertisement to delivery, as well as a stronger awareness of historical examples and trends, patterns do become evident.
And that said: I will keep an eye on this. It does have the advantages of being simple, based on very well-proved technology, and a reasonable extension of same.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently. LED has severe problems, some solvable, some not. The article mentions flicker, but really should have specified. Nearly all LED drivers employ PWM. There are constant current LED drivers, and they are more efficient than PWM drivers, but PWM drivers are cheaper to design and manufacture. While many will claim PWM doesn't bother them because they can't detect it, they're not only exhibiting callousness for those that are bothered and harmed by PWM, they're falling into a fallacious trap, i.e. what they don't know and can't detect can't harm them, which is patently false, and one counter example is carbon monoxide. PWM LED drivers are now ubiquitous, and it's effects range from annoying to painful, as anyone that has experienced migraine can attest. Regarding the actual light LED produces, nearly all LED available are weighted towards the blue spectrum, and this light has been shown to massively mess with wildlife and shorten human lifespans by years by messing with circadian rhythms, which strangely can lead to diabetes and heart disease. LED proponents are obsessed with brightness, but this is also a trap, because brightness is not as important as what can be seen. Consensus among lighting and eye experts is that more can be seen with a dimmer light that reproduces color perfectly than with a much brighter light that does not. As we mitigate these issues with LED, the drivers become more expensive and the LEDs become less efficient. And as the article mentions, the phosphors of better color-producing LEDs will fade rather quickly and over time no longer reproduce colors accurately. And best LED can ever achieve is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development, What it looks like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems with LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already had with incandescent. It's becoming a wash.
Most of the capital invested in incandescent technology was related to the Phoebus cartel. The pressure to make incandescent efficient was just never there until very recently.
LED has severe problems, some solvable, some not. The article mentions flicker, but really should have specified. Nearly all LED drivers employ PWM. There are constant current LED drivers, and they are more efficient than PWM drivers, but PWM drivers are cheaper to design and manufacture. While many will claim PWM doesn't bother them because they can't detect it, they're not only exhibiting callousness for those that are bothered and harmed by PWM, they're falling into a fallacious trap, i.e. what they don't know and can't detect can't harm them, which is patently false, and one counter example is carbon monoxide. PWM LED drivers are now ubiquitous, and its effects range from annoying to painful, as anyone that has experienced migraine can attest.
Regarding the actual light LED produces, nearly all LED available are weighted towards the blue spectrum, and this light has been shown to massively mess with wildlife and shorten human lifespans by years by disrupting circadian rhythm, which strangely can lead to diabetes and heart disease.
LED proponents are obsessed with brightness, but this is also a trap, because brightness is not as important as what can be seen. Consensus among lighting and eye experts is that more can be seen with a dimmer light that reproduces color perfectly than with a much brighter light that does not.
As these issues with LED are mitigated, the drivers become more expensive and the LEDs become less efficient. And as the article mentions, the phosphors of better color-producing LEDs will fade rather quickly and over time no longer reproduce colors accurately. And let's realize that the best LED can ever achieve, what the technology has always been striving for, is to perfectly match what incan does with little to no development. Maybe someday LED light will perfectly match incan light, but it is not today and it isn't next year.
What it starts to look like, if the trend can be detected, is that as we fully mitigate the problems of LED, the more expensive it becomes until its cost and durability nearly reaches parity with what we already have with incandescent. It's starting to become a wash.
So unlike LED, if incan can be made more efficient, and there is a massive amount of room for improvement in efficiency there, then incandescent undoubtedly will return and dominate the lighting market. I liberally estimated 20 years, but it may take longer, but it really doesn't matter to my major point, which is that incandescent is coming back, and this is a very very good thing, because LED light, as efficient as it is, still absolutely sucks.
It seems like this could be done differently, and perhaps more cost-effectively. Can't give cites right now, but here's a path I'd explore if I were in the field.
I'd pattern the inner surface of the glass envelope with a cube texture - think of taking a cube and pressing a corner normally into a clay surface, then removing the cube. This pattern is a so-called corner reflector, and returns incident light to its source. Figure the cube indentations at about 0.5mm deep, close packed. I'd deposit a dielectric film reflector stack tuned to reflect most infrared radiation onto this surface.
This combination would transmit visible light, but would reflect IR directly back to the filament, reducing the amount of electrical power needed to maintain filament temperature. Glass textural molding and dielectric film deposition are mature technologies. I think this could readily triple incandescent lamp power efficiency, maybe even better.
Perhaps the planned obsolescence helped the consumer, because perhaps there would have been no willing producers if producing the lightbulbs at a price the users were willing to pay for wasn't going to turn out to be profitable, with respect to setting up production in the first place and then producing until the investment was paid back.
When we're talking market price, we have to acknowledge that it is a meeting of the price needed to bring a product to market and the price the consumer is willing to pay. We can't assume that the price of the longer lasting bulb would have been attractive to consumers, when compared to the price of the shorter-lived bulb, even if they had all the information available.
It's perfectly valid for a person to decide they'll spend more over the long run, rather than ponying up a larger sum now. And it's perfectly valid for producers to take the chance of deciding this for the consumer. As Henry Ford noted, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
Was anybody stopping anyone from offering the consumer a higher-priced and longer-lasting bulb?
>a carbon tax high enough to make your flight cast 8% more, would totally destroy the fossil fuel industry, as everyone would suddenly have a financial incentive to burn less of it.
This is not necessarily true. Oil has a traditionally low elasticity of demand, meaning that demand for it does not change significantly even when its price changes. This is particularly true in the US, where there are few public transportation options in most cities.
>When you’re trying to make the argument that privacy is fundamentally important, you can strengthen your argument by respecting other people’s privacy.
Why is the converse not true as well? If one believes the constitution does not protect the right to individual privacy, then don't expect it.
That's not what the ruling was though. And it makes sense. "If" a fetus is a viable human at some point, then claiming privacy when ending its life wouldn't pass muster any more than privately killing someone in your basement would. It's not a matter of privacy. Privacy has nothing to do with it, which was their point.
Roe was always on shaky ground and it's surprising it took 50 years to get overturned. Meanwhile, these issues can and should be solved through legislation, not cutesy legal arguments in front of judges.
>$13k-20k is the anticipated low range during the next 'slump' year
What is the basis for this assessment? At least with a stock you can point to the underlying performance of the company. What factors affect BTC price other than sentiment?
The basis is the general performance of Bitcoin since its inception. You can look up the chart yourself, use the googley and choose 'log' view...
You're trying to compare to stocks and performance in the Era of Uber.
I can't help but think you jest.
If Bitcoin had a Crack team of VC marketers on the doll you would be buying.
It is hilarious to hear the arguments that point to a rational stock market or valuation based on "performance". You clearly don't participate in the stock market.
Just because you produce a crop doesn't mean it's economical to harvest it. Farmers must produce sufficient yield to cover the cost of harvesting (fuel, manpower, equipment cost, etc) or they will just leave the failed crop to decompose.
The farmer may look disapointed in the photos, but with gov't FCIP crop insurance, he gets paid whether his crop grows or not.
So this is a negative event for the federal budget and taxpayers, but wheat farmers, get paid 85-90% of what the crop would have been worth at market, in the event of crop failures like this.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46686
I believe this kind of risk mitigation is available to AgriCorps as well as individual farmers for all the major crops like cotton, soy etc.
How does the recent decision by the ETH devs to delay a significant change to the difficulty algorithm factory in? This 'difficulty bomb' would have made mining significantly less profitable.
>The Difficulty Bomb was originally put in place for a variety of reasons:
>- To act as a deterrant for miners who wish to continue mining the Ethereum 1.0 (Proof of Work) chain once the network moved fully to the Ethereum 2.0 (Proof of Stake) chain
>- To ensure that the core developers of Ethereum 1.0 are "forced" to upgrade the network via a hard fork (if only to delay the effects of the bomb) so that the network does not stagnate innovation-wise
