In the US Nuclear gives about 19% of total generation and hydro another 6%. So you don't have to go beyond 75% renewables to start with.
Long term, we need a combination of the following technologies to get to 100% carbon free electricity with 80% renewables:
1. Long distance transmission lines.
2. Some type of "clean, firm, dispatchable" power. Examples include: Nuclear fission, fusion power, deep geothermal, and space based solar power.
We can certainly use the cost savings from getting to 80% renewables to finance figuring out how to scaling production of one (or more) of the later technologies to lower cost. Simply reducing the regulatory burden on Nuclear Fusion can accomplish that if a society chooses this path.
Lot of work to do. And many economic powers would loose out from this transition (e.g. Exxon or Russia) but totally feasible to accomplish.
If you want to do a deep dive into cost scenarios look at the work of Christopher Clack or Jesse Jenkins.
Those are really expensive. They're part of the toolbox, but they're not tool #1.
> 2. Some type of "clean, firm, dispatchable" power. Examples include: Nuclear fission, fusion power, deep geothermal, and space based solar power.
If you're relying on that to supply power during those winter weeks without sun & wind then it has to scale up to 100% of power needs. And if it can do that, why build anything else?
To get to 100% carbon free with > 99.99% reliability for under $1T, your primary tool is modelling.
Then you reach for:
- source diversity. Wind is more expensive than solar, but it tends to be highest at dawn/dusk so is a great complement.
- overprovisioning. Enough solar to supply needs on a cloudy winter day
- storage.
- long distance interconnect. There's never been an hour in recorded history where there's no sun or wind somewhere in the continental US.
> There's never been an hour in recorded history where there's no sun or wind somewhere in the continental US.
But is that sufficient to handle the full load across the entire continental US? And how do you do that without the really expensive long distance high voltage transmission lines?
Where I live, bad winters can see us go for weeks of full cloud cover and little wind in January. If we really get away from fossil fuels and run heat pumps, that means electrical use in winter will rival that in summer.
No it isn't. That's why I said that modelling is tool #1. The whole US might not go an hour without sun and wind, but your area might go 3 weeks. But the combination of your area and a neighboring area might max at 3 days. So thus instead of building a continent wide interconnect and no storage, you build a regional one and 3 days of storage.
the sun shines and the wind blows in the winter. Plus, batteries. Giant redox flow batteries are coming online now, sodium batteries, it's not like there aren't options for storage people are working on.
Besides the examples you listed, there's also synthetic fuels. I don't know if they'll pan out, but the concept is intriguing.
Essentially, the argument goes that there's a critical solar price point at which synthesizing methane from atmospheric gas capture becomes cheaper than drilling. Said methane can be burned for power in existing plants (forming a closed cycle) or refined into heavier liquid hydrocarbons for vehicles and polymers.
The advantage here is that you don't need batteries or inverters - just dirt cheap panels - and the synthesis plants can be engineered to be productive despite only operating during the day.
I know one company is working on this with industrial scale in mind (Terraform Industries), and I believe SpaceX is also pursuing it on-site for Starship (which consumes ~1000 T of methane per launch, all of which currently has to be trucked in at great expense.)
Probably. Methane is easier to synthesize than fuel alcohols, and has better synergy with existing infrastructure (dead simple, highly responsive gas plants don't care where their fuel comes from, after all - they'll just take the cheapest option.)
> So you don't have to go beyond 75% renewables to start with.
I think the 75% aggregate over some period. If 25% of your total capacity is nuclear/hydro you will still have extreme shortages during peak times if there is no sun/wind.
That why it has to be gas/etc. which can be scaled up and down very rapidly (unfortunately you can’t “overload” a nuclear reactor to make it generate more power for a few hours on a regular basis..)
>(unfortunately you can’t “overload” a nuclear reactor to make it generate more power for a few hours on a regular basis..
You could throw excess power away from an oversized reactor and not throw it away when it's needed. Financially not very smart, but technologically feasible
Bitcoin mining is doing exactly in some cases. E.g. there's a fair number of small, remote, hydroelectric plants whose construction and/or renovation were financed by Bitcoin mining, with the amount of mining declining over time as the community using them grew and ramped up consumption. Also in Canada there's a company working on making finance deals for small scale nuclear energy plants in the far north where the excess capacity will be temporarily used for Bitcoin mining while the community grows and/or industrial uses like mines ramp up production.
Re: the nuclear version, good chance none of it happens due to anti-nuclear sentiment of course. So far exactly zero of these small scale nuclear plants have been built.
Too little, too late. We should've been switching to solar in the 80s. Even if we could switch to be carbon free tomorrow, the amount of CO2 already in the atmosphere is predicted to cause breadbasket collapses within the next 20 years.
If it makes folks feel better, there's a good chance you probably had no control/influence over this outcome if you were born after 1980.
It's not hopeless. The risk of crop failures may be higher than it would be if we were going to experience less warming, but having a bad harvest year isn't existential. We'll work to mitigate things.
This is why I think we need to roll the dice on geoengineering. We can try to tilt the odds in our favor, but it's still a crapshoot. From what I've read, iron fertilization would be one of the better paths to go. A potentially better path would be the creation of synthetic whale poop.
I can't give you a different economic system than global capitalism. But we know exactly what it will take to dramatically reduce emissions.
Globally, people want electricity, power, cars, hot water ect. When we can provide those goods and services, in a carbon free way at a lower cost than a carbon intensive way - everyone globally will adopt the low carbon technology.
There's great reason for hope. In 1975 solar cells cost $115.3 / watt. Today in China they're available for $0.09 / watt or a price drop of 99.9%. There is no magic, we simply need the low carbon technology to be cheaper.
Now ecosystem collapse and habitat preservation? That's not as simple, but I ask that you lobby your local representatives to build dense housing near parks and public transit. Let's leave nature to the animals and build beautiful cities
> When we can provide those goods and services, in a carbon free way at a lower cost than a carbon intensive way - everyone globally will adopt the low carbon technology.
Even given that, the carbon-free way is still destructive. And wake me up when we're even 20% of the way there. Looking at the CO2 output so far, it looks like it's a pipe dream.
And even then, we still need a return to near pre-industrial levels. More technology will just make it less likely for people to rewild lands, and there will be too many people.
What we need is a complete dismantling of all technology.
The article is paywalled, but more generally, can someone defend EA to me? Does EA offer a specific idea that we should adopt in our thinking?
When I think of other, recent intellectual movements, I can clearly state "why" I should support them.
For example, YIMBY, the "idea" that producing more housing will lead to lower housing costs.
Or, Energy Transition, the "idea" that the falling costs of solar, renewables, and batteries will enable everyone to enjoy the fruits of industrial civilization, at lower costs, and without CO2 emissions.
Or, 15-minute cities, the "idea" that if I can walk to everything, I'll be healthier, it'll be more convenient, and we can save money driving less - with smaller roads and less parking.
But what does EA offer? How should we act differently? And if so, what will get better? I associate EA with concerns about AI safety, but I've never seen a coherent plan to address AI safety. And, if not AI safety - what's the "idea" that EA offers?
The most basic insight of EA is to be efficient in your altruism.
It’s an extension of the effort years ago for nonprofits to report their management costs: If you want to support cancer research, you don’t want to give it to the charity that uses 60% of funds for marketing, you give it to the charity that sends 90% to quality research.
Similar if your goal is more broad than cancer research, like say you just want fewer children dying. Well then you can to the research and find that mosquito nets are dollar-for-dollar the best use of money for reducing child mortality, better than for example paying for more doctors. (*These are just examples)
The more “famous” conclusions of EA are actually less core to the movement, from what I understand. For example, the advise that one can do the most good by getting a high paying job and donating the surplus.
If you’re curious, I would start by listening to William MacAskill’s appearance on “Conversations with Tyler”[1]. It predates the whole Sam Bankman-Fried thing so you can make your mind up purely on the intellectual merits rather than being coloured by that mess.
Then if you’re serious about understanding it further, the logical next step would probably be to read “Doing Good Better”, where MacAskill really sets the whole thing out.
There’s something about the sort of “fundamentalist” utilitarianism of his ideas that really troubles me especially when taken to its logical conclusion so even when I logically agree with them I don’t personally find it easy to actually “sign up” so to speak, but it might resonate with you idk.
That podcast is from August 2022, which is well after SBF began making major contributions to EA organizations using misbegotten funds. In fact it’s likely that his giving helped pay for the entire MacAskill book promotion effort, which could well have been connected to that podcast (which is dated six days before the book publication date.) It’s reasonable to assume that MacAskill and other EA luminaries didn’t know that SBF was funding their organizations with misbegotten funds, but on the other hand there’s no evidence they looked very closely either. SBF’s close involvement and financially-based access certainly do color my impression of the movement.
Those things should definitely colour your opinion[1]. What I’m saying is, if you want to give the EA ideas the benefit of the doubt, this is the strongest possible version that I can think of as an intro - one of the main dudes given a chance to really explain his point of view while being gently challenged intellectually, but without just guilt by association with SBF. Then if it survives that, you can investigate further if curious. If it doesn’t survive that, then the SBF thing might be the thing that finally sinks the ship but it was already taking on a lot of water already.
[1] In my opinion at least- they certainly do for me. I already had some qualms about it before that but it sort of confirmed a queasiness that I had about how it all seems pretty convenient. You can be megarich and live in a very selfish way and that’s alright because you’re earning to give etc. While I like the fact that they try to measure (and optimise) impact, I also have a big problem with the way MacAskill in particular seems to only value impacts he can measure, so philanthropy with social benefits - donating to things like art, culture, museums etc he basically says are completely worthless. That just seems very obviously wrong to me. From a personal point of view, I have seen the social mobility benefits that arise from things like art or music scholarships, where the benefit accrues to the family of the scholarship student even if (maybe especially if) they don’t go on to pursue a career in the arts.
I’ve read some of MacAskill’s writings, and my objection to his philosophy is twofold. First, while he talks about the value of “measurable contributions”, many of the things he finds important aren’t measurable. Longtermist investments and things that maximize the utility of future humans are almost by definition impossible to measure. This undermines the entire founding ethos of EA. What substitutes for true measurement in these cases is something more like opinion, where major EA orgs can then justify buying a luxury retreat for meetings since it will “help to produce an environment conducive to good ideas, and those ideas could save countless lives” and other nonsense like that.
Secondly there’s the obsession with cultivating and catering to high-earning donors, which in this case has a long and “rational” justification. But is, in the end, largely similar to what all traditional (non-effective) charities do. The major difference in EA is that there is even less incentive to look closely at what the donors do, and what kind of human beings they are, since the only measure that “matters” is the donation amount.
In that sense “the SBF fiasco” wasn’t so much an outlier but an inevitable result of the entire approach that specific wing of EA has been taking. I also agree that the focus on measurability harms difficult-to-measure causes like the arts, but I sort of expect that from a tech-nerd focused charity anyway.
And concern about AI safety/ethics is a lot broader than just EA these days. It actually seems to be one of the things that EA got right before they were popular, along with pandemic preparedness and other global risks.
EA (the philosophy) is simple and reasonable: the idea is to engage in altruism that has the greatest impact possible. Essentially, getting the most bang for your buck.
EA (the movement) takes that simple and reasonable idea and extrapolates it out to support some truly crazy and/or questionable efforts, some of which seem very harmful. In my view, the movement is uncomfortably cultish.
> (the movement) takes that simple and reasonable idea and extrapolates it out to support some truly crazy and/or questionable efforts
You've perfectly described the fundamental problem with many recently popular philosophical propositions. The starting premise sounds reasonable because it is reasonable. Yet that basic premise is then extended to include much more controversial things. These initially reasonable things range from "It would be good to incorporate some safety measures as we implement AI" to "Racism is bad." Obviously, reasonable propositions it's hard to disagree with. Yet somehow we end up with influential social movements LARPing Terminator II scenarios and serious people arguing the police should be defunded.
I'm starting to suspect this repeating dark pattern isn't happening by accident. If your movement has some pretty extreme ideas most people wouldn't agree with, it's more effective to start with ideas almost no one will disagree with. Then, after a lot of reasonable people have bought-in to that, slowly increment toward justifying increasingly extreme measures to achieve "justice". It's essentially bait-and-switch. The unfortunate side effect is now I've learned to be leery of agreeing with even seemingly agreeable things because it's unclear what other things might later be included.
This puts me in the kind of bizarre conversations where someone says "I'm an anti-racist, are you?" and I have to craft a weirdly qualified response like, "Well, I'm certainly opposed to racism but I need to understand what 'anti-racism' includes in this context because some people include policies under that term which have net effects that seem to get uncomfortably close to racism."
I think what you described is something that happens inherently in movements that become echo chambers. As the movement gets more extreme more and more of the reasonable people are driven out or silenced. Eventually the movement is controlled by a tiny minority of extremists and the majority of reasonable people feel compelled to agree with them or leave. Then the movement collapses.
This phenomenon has taken place many times in history. Look at how the ideas of socialism became extreme in China during the cultural revolution or in The USSR during the peak of Stalinism.
Anyway eventually the ultra Maoists in China lost control and China went in a different direction. Russia too. So at the most extreme things do seem to collapse and move in the opposite direction…
There is no greater impact than government action, that is taxation and redistribution. It will reduce inequality and raise the standard of living precisely because the government is cost effective.
> There is no greater impact than government action, that is taxation and redistribution.
The issue is not which has the "greater impact" in the absolute (where government action may win) but which has the greater impact for spending extra money/resources. It's quite clear that EA's are getting a lot more bang for the buck there than, e.g. government foreign aid ever did.
First, the effective altruists did a bunch of harm to get all the money, then put it on something focused that not everyone agrees is the best thing to do with it.
They can measure the results of the spending as being higher, but don't account for the harm they needed to do to accumulate the money.
How do you measure spending that will only affect people living in the distant future? This is the problem with the longtermist end of the EA movement.
As I understand it, EA is about deployment of money, not effort. You accumulate massive money, ostensibly in order to fund things of interest. There is a built-in assumption that other people (labor) will actually perform whatever work you're interested in funding. You don't go build things or heal people, you accumulate wealth and buy from someone the building or the healing.
> Does EA offer a specific idea that we should adopt in our thinking?
The specific idea is that while people at large may have the best intentions about charity and social good, the impact of their money and effort could be greatly magnified if they deployed it better.
For example most donations happen to already overfunded causes (say cancer research) where your dollar is getting lost among executive bonuses and generally not having the kind of impact you think. There are tons of more neglected areas where you can do much more immediate, quantifiable good.
Another example from their website is that governments worldwide spend $280B per year on counterterrorism and $8B on preventing public health crises. If you look at the relative human impact from the two, those numbers are laughable.
There are many, many such examples of obvious inefficiency in the system that can be solved with a better thought framework and more research.
For a decade, "operator" in Silicon Valley as has been used exactly as the commentator above describes it.
Which creates separation from "investor" or "engineer" or "founder" or "PM" or "sales" or "finance". Somebody has to make stuff happen in organizations. And the people who are good at it (Satya is excellent) set their organizations up for unique success.
And yes, ex-special forces people roll their eyes at it. Which is appropriate! But the usage is now totally distinct.
I learned the business context before the spec ops context and honestly the former makes way more sense to me than the latter.
A business operator is like a machine operator. You're pulling levers on a machine that someone else built while optimizing and tweaking to get the best performance out of that machine as possible.
I was quite wrong about this, but I still don't think it's especially relevant that someone else built it. You would never call Zuckerberg an operator? Or when someone else built it does that not mean that you had no role in building it? That would be the exception, but it would be analogous to owner/operator in general business parlance.
Edit: here's a post with "Founder Operators". Which seems like maybe if you just heard "Operator" you would assume they're not a founder, but also that the term can be applied for those running businesses they founded: https://startupceo.com/2023/01/5-things-successful-founder-o...
It seems like underselling the successful part and overselling the part about not being the founder, but I can see it's a slang term. Thanks.
And yeah I'm wrong about it being the same term, though I did imagine a different use, I was also thinking of smooth operator, apparently I was unfamiliar with the term in tech.
I saw one driving down El Camino (Palo Alto CA) and thought it looked great.
Respectfully, what generation are you? (Approximately how old are you?)
I ask as there are really big difference in how it appeals to different demographics. And all the guys who saw the vehicle with me thought it looked really good. (Admittedly we're former engineering students, so your milage may very...)
I have a mechanical engineering degree, but IDK why that’s relevant.
I demographically live in a state with a LOT of trucks and it sticks out, not in a good way.
I say this as someone who loves weird car designs. I’m on /r/weirdwheels and I genuinely think the BMW i3 looks fun.
I’m okay with funny looking cars that are self aware (like a Prius with a “cool Prius said no one” sticker). But the cyber truck isn’t that, it’s taking itself too seriously it’s trying too hard. Which makes the dissonance funny.
I respect your opinion is different, I’m asking you to respect my lived experience too. I guess I’m just not their target audience.
It's completely evolutionary! To add context here. The B-21 is an manned version of a drone called a RQ-180, which is an extremely stealthy flying wing. Coupled to existing engines (widely believed to be F-35 engines possibly with an increased bypass ratio).
The B-2 had this huge problem where the original design (called "Senior Ice") was a stealthy high altitude bomber - like the B-21. But, at the last moment, the B-2 was completely redesigned to have low altitude flying capabilities - greatly increasing the cost of development and timeline.
With the B-21, Northrop reverted to the original (Senior Ice) design. Building on top of all the technologies proved out by the RQ-180. And with a development team at the Strategic Capabilities Office organized to prevent anyone from adding or changing requirements.
Evolutionary design + proven subsystems + focused and stable requirements.
Likely the best managed DoD acquisition program in the last one to two decades.
>the B-21 is an manned version of a drone called a RQ-180
No it's not. The RQ-180 as a HALE drone with no weapons. The B-21 is a dedicated bomber. Despite both being flying wings with roughly the same basic shape the airframe requirements are completely different.
> the B-21 is an manned version of a drone called a RQ-180,
that's interesting, i wonder if that's where the unmanned mode of the B-21 comes from. Being able to fly unmanned would be useful in very high risk scenarios.
What I think's fascinating about this quote is we've US VC back multiple attempts to create WeChat in the US. (Specifically an "Everything app + payments + chat + universal login.")
Both the Sequioa response to this pitch. And basically the same pitch/goal that Elon raised money on for the Twitter/X deal - and what he's trying to build.
I'm very curious to see if Apple/Meta rotate out of an attempt to have separate apps for different functions (e.g. Messenger separate from Facebook, or Apple Pay separate from iMessage) and rotate back toward building an integrated "SuperApp."
Certainly the "WeChat of the US" would be infinitely valuable.
Nothing has helped my sleep more than using 3M medical tape to tape my mouth shut during sleep. So I'm forced to breath through my noise when I sleep. (Or I wake up and remove the tape if I'm stuffed up.)
I had sleep issues all my life. My dentist said it looked like I had sleep issues (one side of my teether pushed on more than the others) and a surgeon recommended increasing the size of my nasal cavity. But I didn't want surgery. When the book "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art" by James Nestor I saw several unrelated people report success with this. It's completely changed my life and I wish I had started this long ago.
(Obviously not medical advice, I'm not a doctor at all, do your own research etc.)
Is the only way to access if new home construction will affect prices. NYC is chronically underbidding.
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