The accounting only works if you assume the counterfactual is "same industrial civilization, minus fossil fuels." But there's a strong path-dependency argument that cheap hydrocarbons were the bootstrap not just for energy, but for the plastics, fertilizers, and chemical feedstocks that made modern manufacturing and agriculture possible in the first place. Renewables are downstream of that industrial base. You can't net out the externalities against a baseline that wouldn't exist without them.
Right I'm not saying that they were historically a bad idea, I'm saying that the future value of the industry is probably negative now that we're past the bootstrap to major alternatives in some areas. I don't see a way to get out of the energy trap of an early industrial revolution without concentrated combustion sources.
One does need carbohydrates for industrial bootstrap. Germans during WWII produced liquid fuel from coal. Modern version of this process becomes competitive with oil-base fuel around 80 USD/barrel.
Yes, this process is very energy intensive and generates like twice CO2 per energy used. But in a hypothetical world without oil and natural gas it may lead to earlier start with electric cars and renewables so the total amount of CO2 put into atmosphere would probably be the same. Plus, as coal is much more evenly distributed, there would be much less reasons for wars.
This only works up to a certain volume. The world economy requires about 38 billion barrels of oil per year. If you processed 100% of all grain, sugar crop, tuber and oilseed on Earth into liquid fuel, leaving zero for food, you'd get about 6 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in liquid fuels. Since it has to compete with food, the actual number would be much lower. It's not even close to being able to sustain our civilization.
There is absolutely enough coal to make liquid fuel for the current civilization. But if oil/gas would not exist, then electrical cars would be on the road much earlier as burning coal to produce electricity is much more efficient then converting it into liquid fuel to burn in a car engine. As electrical cars produces roughly the same amount of CO2 when using electricity from coal as ICE car running on gasoline, the climate impact would be roughly the same.
Then in a hypothetical scenario of 20th century without oil/natural gas nuclear energy would be much more widespread at this point and CO2 impact would be lower.
Just to be pedantic: I think you mean hydrocarbons (just carbon and hydrogen) rather than carbohydrates (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen).
You could probably do it with carbohydrates (starches, sugars) or related molecules (wood, alcohol). But I'm pretty sure that hydrocarbons is what you intended there, and it's easier to dig that out of the ground.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
What's a better system that allows patching loopholes of the letter without requiring extensive bureaucracy and potential gridlock in legislature?
There's no mind reading, most of EU's fines only happen after a pattern of non-compliance, complain as much as you want about EU's bureaucracy but it's quite cooperative if you want to figure out a solution. I prefer this system than one where the written laws are worth nothing since well paid corporate lawyers can figure a way out, or hell, they might even be paid to write the laws themselves as it happens in the US.
Thinking of it in terms of vector similarity does seem appropriate, and then definition of similarity suddenly comes into debate: If you don't get Harrison Ford, but a different well-known actor along with everything else Indiana-Jones, what is that? Do you flatten the vector similarity matrix to a single infringement-scale?
I struck a column in a multilevel garage while reversing out of a parking spot, my mistake completely, resulting in damage to the driver door, door hinge, mirror, and front quarter panel. Progressive considered the car totaled due to the cost/availability/labor to fix it. Unsure what the cost would be for a toyota or honda, but I was perplexed at the total loss of my still drivable car.
These topic-adjacent expert responses just reek of point harvesting by an LLM, I didn't do any such downvoting, but in the last year I've changed to this viewpoint.
It's generally just barely on topic, generic fluff. Anything similar could have been posted, topic adjacent, without really contributing to the discussion. Remember we are on a discussion forum, not a place to dump data.
Good y'all, however much I (born human and have all my shots) may have the misfortune to attract downvotes, I'm not a fershlugginer LLM. (Not sure what this says about my social skills, no wonder my dance card is M.T.) I do think that it was an interesting addition to the discussion of giant buglies. I personally had never thought about how predation by birds would have pressured prehistoric insects... and made our feathered friends so specialised and good at what they do.
I don't think you are! I was only moved to comment by the implication upthread that an informative LLM-generated comment might be welcome here. But yes, another HN norm is not making insinuations about commenters on threads (if people have concerns, they're meant to email hn@yc about it). And yet another norm is not to drive threads into their own navels with metacommentary, so here's where I should shut up.
There's the leaderboard. Though the one time I noticed I'd showed up on it (others have long since overtaken me), it felt more like a warning I was spending too much time here.
I didn't know there was a leader board but now that I've looked at it I'm kind of disgusted by the fact that 20-ish percent of it is made up of names that are recognizable in an "oh, it's that guy who's always posting low effort links or riding the coat tails of a popular comment" way.
Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
Since the statistic applies to the whole US, it's biased towards urban population centers.
E.g. the lack of K-12 kids in SF almost caused the shutdown of 11 schools due to the lack of funding that comes primarily from the number of enrolled students, they halted the closures in lieu of other cost saving approaches due to the political pressures of shutting down schools, but the truth remains that there are fewer kids in population centers.
Same here in Seattle, both in the city proper and in the surrounding suburbs. Many public schools closing down due to lower enrollment. Partly because many parents are opting for private school, but also because there are fewer kids in the area. Many possible explanations: It's expensive to afford a big enough house for a family, people are having fewer or no kids, many people unable to find a partner, etc.
Interpreting that to mean that the person said 'it's not for white guys' and parent thinks they meant 'not "just" for white guys'. But the damage had been done regardless of original intent behind the words.
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