> -- That will eventually happen, and electricity will be just as "expensive" as it is now, simply because the price of a product has nothing to do with its cost and everything to do with the purchasing power of its intended audience.
100%
If we had fusion tomorrow it would help decarbonise our grids, which is a great thing, but the consumer would see zero financial benefit. Companies would charge the same and make record profits.
This is literally happening right now! The market price of energy in Europe has dropped after a huge hike when Russia invaded Ukraine, but customer bills are still extortionately high
4) useful bipedal robots - this one is probably just around the corner (see boston robotics). We often talk about how much AGI could benefit humanity, giving knowledge workers a digital "team" of helpers, but we gloss over the physical version. Everything from dangerous industries all the way through health services and into retail could be enhanced by having robots do all the literal heavy lifting.
5) programmable matter / nanobots - the applications of a swarm of nanobots or even microbots are pretty much endless.
I think you're mixing up dystopian with apocalyptic.
webster's dystopia definition is "of, relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives : relating to or characteristic of a dystopia"
Someone posted a link to a page of "broken arrow" incidents yesterday, and I recalled reading this one a while back.
To me it's the scariest broken arrow case. Two bombs were dropped from a disintegrating B52. One of the bombs parachuted into a tree with 3 of the 4 arming switches live. The other disintegrated in a field with live arming switches. The plutonium 'pit' was recovered, but most of it is still buried in that field.
The wikipedia page on military nuclear accidents has a good few more entries than this list, including what I assume is the classified "Spring 1968, Atlantic" entry, which wikipedia says was the loss of the USS Scorpion in May '68 off the Azores, with two nuclear torpedos aboard that were never recovered.
> A Broken Arrow is defined as an unexpected event involving nuclear weapons that result in the accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon.
and then
> The CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) "Oscar II" class submarine, Kursk, sinks after a massive onboard explosion. Attempts to rescue the 118 men fail. It is thought that a torpedo failure caused the accident. Radiation levels are normal and the submarine had no nuclear weapons on board.
I don't understand how this is on the list, if it had no nuclear weapons on board.
surprised to read this, I don't find it invasive in the slightest. I've turned off notifications for most things but its the only "social" app I have on my device.
I will say it's gotten a lot more content focussed lately, with everyone and their mom sharing their thoughts on jobs and employment. Personally I just use it as a profile for recruiters to hit and a way for me to talk back to them
Too many posts on here link directly to twitter. I don't think this is a great idea.
IMO a tweet is not a valid destination for a HN post, unless the conversation unfolding on twitter is the story. We should try and find a better source as you have done
I know you're trying to compare geothermal to these sources, but I'm now in shock from the comparison between solar and wind. 1 large wind turbine (3MW) is equivalent to 7,500 x 400W solar panels. That's mind blowing.
I would love to see a grid of all these values for all the latest battery technologies, to see what's leading the field between solid, sodium, aluminium, Sulfur Selenium, iron, etc
> Pollution is a huge problem, but climate change is literally an existential problem
100% agree. If there's a choice between a small amount of pollution vs a large payoff to cut carbon emissions, it's definitely a good idea. For instance, any pollution that comes from the production of solar panels and batteries is probably something we should accept, because the payoff is a large cut in emissions.
But we're not talking about pollution directly in the cause of cutting emissions here. We're talking about separate pollution which is avoidable and has nothing to do with cutting emissions.
The point is, if we use all of this phosphate to make better batteries it would be great and have a good impact on emissions, but most of it will be spread on the ground and let run into rivers because that is the main industrial use of phosphates
Phones are only the first battlefield in the AI marketing war. Just wait a decade until the bipedal robot industry kicks off and you'll have robots knocking on your door to sell you shit
> A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.
90% of mined phosphates are used for fertilizer and pollution of waterways with it is a growing problem, but the mining company PR firm is telling us about electric cars and solar panels.
This is similar to discovering a massive new oil field, and telling the world that it'll help with electric cars because they all have plastic components.
Far Cry was an excellent multiplayer game, we use to play it at LAN parties (remember those?)
The huge maps, tropical setting and vehicles meant you could hide in the jungle and snipe at someone on the other side of a bay, or sneak right up behind them.