> I believe the anger, if you distill it a bit, comes from an "unlevel" playing field, right?
Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.
> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.
I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because
1. It's a more recent development
2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.
The lore was annoying to listen to; whenever I wanted to listen to an audio log, I had to stop playing the game and watch the exact same video of a man smoking and being mysterious.
The cool game mechanics were basically just the gravity gun from Half Life 2, which came out over 20 years ago.
It did have some cool environmental set pieces, but overall I just found the game too pretentious for something that was basically a rip off of the SCP wiki.
To be able to see and remove them as soon as they can. And even in those scenarios not everybody wear them. Run my own little study at beaches, concerts and other outdoor activities and noticed less people wear glasses than I was expecting in ideal conditions to do so (<50%)
Most electricity is generated by using steam to turn turbines, right? So it definitely seems more efficient to just use the steam directly, instead of converting it to electrical energy and then converting it back to heat.
That reasoning isn't enough on its own, because on the clients' end, electric heat pumps can be more efficient than direct steam heating. Actually their "efficiency" is far above 100%,
Yep and IIRC you can even dump waste heat back to the loop at what would normally be just consumers - eq. to cool a hockey stadium or for a big building AC system.
Here is a great Technology Connections video which lays out why the sizing issue might not be as bad as you're thinking. The gist is that many people are steered away from heat pumps (or sold very expensive oversized units) by outdated industry thinking which vastly overestimates load calculations.
I won't try to make his case here, but he is pretty convincing that a reasonably sized heat pump system can be sufficient even in very cold climates (by US standards).
It's all theoretical. In real life, retrofitting heat pumps into exisinting homes is a bit different, as those homes are neither made for air heat sources (at least in my region), nor they are insullated well. You might say, dough, insulate it, but it is easier said than done, as a lot of those old homes relied on their leakage for ventilation, not to mention that is very expensive investment (much more expensive than the heat pump itself).
I would reccommend keeping backup heat source when installing heat pumps into older homes. A simple wood stove, used during cold spikes, could be enough.
My country has subsidies for heat pump installations into older homes and it had requirement to get rid of chimneys to get that. After the whole europe energy crisis thing, this requirement is gone now. Turns out having alternatives is a good thing :)
This is not theoretical: my heat pump purchased in 2021 worked well for four straight days of below 0F. Kept our temp at 68 inside. We live in an old home from 1917 with poor insulation between the brick exterior walls and drywall.
This is why I opposed historical designations. Most old buildings are obsolete and need to be destroyed. There are only a tiny number of buildings that are really historic, sure save them, but the vast majority are just old and need to be knocked down for something better. If it isn't taught in history class then it isn't historic.
It is easy to see the loss of something old. However the opportunity cost from not building new is something that is very hard to get people to understand.
It will still work, just not as efficently as in normal temperatures. So you're using 50kWh for the 3 days a year it's that cold and 10kWh for the other 362 - better than using 20kW every day.
This is actually terrible and supports their point. Heat pumps are not sized as if they were running at a mere 100% or less, they are sized for the btus they normally produce, and aim to run close to 100% of the time, meaning they will be too small and not be able to do the job when they drop below 200-300% efficiency, unless they are grossly oversized. That leads to short cycles which makes condensation and moisture in the summer and wear and tear all year and less electrical efficiency because starting a pump and blower costs more than running it.
Current inverter types that can run slow do allow them to be oversized but it's still not great. Those are more expensive and have more failure points in electronics too.
Sure, you can still find good weather heat pump that crap their pants near or under freezing. However, the majority sold here in Europe still stay well of 200% down to -15C, some even -25C.
I believe in the NYC case, the steam is also not right off the reactor— it's waste steam that has already been through a turbine and so is still hot and under some amount of pressure, but is no longer economically valuable in a power plant context. So it's run into the city as an alternative to just venting it into the atmosphere.
Except you can ONLY use steam for heating and transporting it over distance is not efficient. If you turn steam into electricity you can use it for ANYTHING and transport it over long distances efficiently.
It also means that at the local scale it might be better to distribute steam. Think about future residential nuclear plants. It might not be worth investing into steam distribution on top of electrical as electrical is more flexible, but there might be steam that's residue otherwise that could be used on heating.
What does this mean? Are you imagining a future where individual houses have their own nuclear plants? Or where nuclear plant workers live on-site?
I'm get the argument that we should have more nuclear power, and that some future reactors may be small, but I don't understand the expectation that they would be close enough to residences to pipe steam.
In many places in the world people don't live on ranches or in 1000 m² houses, but in 80-150 m² twin houses or even flats.
In such tighter conditions, you can easily have enough inhabitants per km² that it would justify building small mobile nuclear reactors.
Who would like to live next to a reactor if it can melt down? Well, you have reactors using fuel pellets locked in marbles that due to their diameter can never meltdown.
There's no single efficienty number for "steam". Steam turbines in large power plants for example are >90% efficient when considering just the thermodynamics. There are a hundred other variables involved.
I'll note that powerplant steam turbines are often pretty cutting edge & supported by essentially a special plant to achieve this levels of efficiency and reliability. Stuff like hydrogen cooling the generator bit:
The inefficiencies come from infrastructure. Transferring electricity is so goddamn cheap, that city planners and developers hardly consider it a footnote. Water, sewage and drainage on the other hand are much, much more expensive. They require much more space, and oft times need to be pressurized. Imagine that with steam pipes where the steam on top of all that, needs to be heated too. Sure, hooking up to an existing steam main probably doesn't cost too much, but building new mains can't be worth it, even in the long run, as infrastructure constantly needs to be upgraded.
Where I live most electricity is generated from wind. Solar also has a large share of some grids. Your location may be different but it should have a significant renewable share by now.
> Most electricity is generated by using steam to turn turbines
That is true. It is also true that renewables usually do not use steam. But they don't answer for "most electricity". That's natural gas, coal and other types of thermal plants, including nuclear.
Gas combined cycle power plants get part of their power from gas in the turbine directly, and part of it from steam cycles. I can't figure out what % over of power comes from which part, and not all gas power plants are combined cycled.
It seems reasonable to say that most electricity is not generated by steam turbines. However I'm not sure how to find the real data to verify this. (and pedantically the gas in a gas turbine is mostly steam)
Geothermal plants also use steam (not to be confused with geothermal heating/cooling, which is just a heat pump with the heat exchanger underground rather than in the air).
> Humanitarian aid should be tied to contraceptive use, World Bank loans as well.
That sounds an awful lot like eugenics, were poor people were paid money to have themselves sterilized. It's also backwards; the best way to get people to stop having kids is by raising their quality of life, at which point they will want to use contraception.
Why is "unlevel" in quotes? When it comes to physical activities, biological males have a huge advantage over biological females; high school boys routinely beat professional adult women's sport teams.
> But, when students use AI, and if there are some students that don't, the playing field is "unlevel" there as well. The students that don't perhaps want to learn a craft rather than take a shortcut to getting a grade.
I agree that this is a bigger problem than trans kids in sports. I think people are less upset about this because
1. It's a more recent development 2. They think that the kids using AI are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage, albeit one that will only become apparent after they graduate.
reply