SeeingRed [he/him]

Flow batteries seem very promising, but the chemistry required needs more scale/external funding to be viable.

There were some thermal battery retrofits for coal power plants using carbon and steam that looked interesting in principal, though cost and logistics are not fully solved problems, and the round trip efficiency was rather bad compared to other storage methods.

There were also some molten metal batteries that have been working towards useful scale over the past decade or so. They had cheap and abundant matetial inputs and significantly long charge discharge.

There are many neat options out there. I think researching and building out each as they become viable would help to improve system resiliency and long term viability.

Its a vague statement. Not specific enough to be true or false.

We can be more specific by saying something like, “inventions and ideas will become refined and widespread when they are beneficial, useful, and practical.” Or maybe “necessity is a crucible for refining ideas and inventions.”

Even these are only roughly applicable as a generalization and a statement could only be said to be true when given specific conditions and detailed investigation.

For example, the basics of steam power were understood back in ancient Rome, but they didn’t make any steam engines to convert heat to useful work. Why? Because they didn’t need to. They also likely didn’t have the requisite industry to make and maintain them in any useful capacity. The engine was invented before it was necessary, but it didn’t become widespread until material conditions made it useful.

Even ideas like socialism have existed for a very long time, but the only place we see it kicking off (so far, inshallah) is within the places that need it the most. Was it invented in those places? No. Was it refined through those struggles? Of course it was.

Im curious how each agent differs, or is trained. Seems they had doctor and nurse agents, as well as patient agents. This would be a good way to start partial implementation. It would allow some tasks to be taken over by the in a hybrid format which could allow an even richer training environment.

I could never see the west doing this in a way that would actually improve the quality of service.

One of the issues with LLM AIs that we’ve seen time and again is that it can be extremely confident and perfectly incorrect. I have no doubt they are doing their best to train the AI with the best data, but I hope they are also working to solve some of the underlying issues with LLMs.

Getting an ADHD diagnosis and the medication truely is as absurd as they depict it in the video. Literally night and day. Go from not being able to work linearly to suddenly being able to get all your shit done.

I find it doesn’t work as well when I don’t get enough sleep and it’s not perfect. But man, it’s like I was living life on hard mode. And it explains my (now former) Coffee addiction.

I need to work on getting enough sleep and likely seeking out a therapist for monthly sessions.

One thing to point out, she mentioned it briefly how it’s so much harder, and far less studied for women. Yeah, my friends tell me the same thing. Got my diagnosis in less than a month total, and for many of them it took significantly longer.

I believe it could just be “awe” or “awestruck” with it’s roots in both awesome and awful. Though the context of the modern usage of “awe” is maybe not quite right.

The specific context here would be closer to breaking free of the simulacrum of the hyperreal (media, digital life, and our daily work) and seeing reality as it is. I’m not sure that there is a single word for this combined concept and feeling, though it would be a good one to know.

The hyperreal concept is interesting, though I admittedly don’t know much about it.

So often our whole world is just the things on the screen in front of us. Everything around us is filtered out and ignored.

However, every once in a while, that small piece of light ceases to be a world and becomes just a screen. The physical glass and electronics lose their status as a world and become just the physical objects. You now notice how they feel, how the borders of the device look, how it sounds to tap on it. The rest of the room comes into focus and your mind realizes that there is a world outside the room. The room, the screen, the whole world, shaped by other humans fills you with hope and sadness. You realize you live on just one spec of dust in a vast cosmos. But that spec is important and precious, because it is where you, and everyone else is. All these things are real, all have a story to tell. The people all have wants, fears, desires, but your interactions with them are superficial, mediated by tiny interactions, or just through the physical stuff they made which you interact with. You want to scream and cry from the sublime understanding of it all.

As quickly as it arrived, it is gone, the screen beckens you back and the world fades away into the background and you become immersed in the digital realm once again. Your eyes and brain filtering out everything but the screen, your fingers nothing more than a means of changing the screen, your body and mind, no longer important, is forgotten.

This is quite the change. I’m excited to see how it plays out. The one thing that bothers me is that the recommendations of the employee councils are not binding, but it’s far better than not having it at all. Hopefully in practice any company that goes against employee desires will be penalized in some tangible way.

The way I see it is that at least 4% of the workforce will have a say in how the companies are run, and those 4% will be elected by the other 95%. Good law, will probably be popular.

There will definitely be a need to have significant amounts of resource (food and other agricultural products) stock piling as the climate becomes more unpredictable and variable. Otherwise famines will be far more common.

Ultimately it’ll mean analyzing the conditions as they currently exist and will exist in the coming decades and having realistic plans based on local and global conditions.

Citys, regions, countries, will need to look at what is currently lacking in their response and put in the resources to address the deficiencies. This could include things like cold/hot shelters, flood mitigation infrastructure, massive food storage infrastructure, backup sources for water and energy supply.

For a resource perspective, we would need improvement to efficiency (including removal of capitalist incentives for making products that are not needed and over marketing them for the sake of profit, obviously), and retrofitting cities for lower overall energy and resource use. Having the ability to run a city on less means the storage and buffers needed in the event of an emergency are much smaller.

It was always projection. It’s honestly comical how often that is the case.

It is definitely heavier on the tower defense side. I also usually turn biters off in Factorio, but I found that Mindustry to be well balanced between the logistics and tower defense aspects. You have to build up both constantly, unlike Factorio where you just over build defense and then wait for that to fail before thinking about it again. In Factorio, defense is a nuisance mostly, but Mindustry it’s integral to the gameplay loop. Not sure if that answers it for you. I don’t think I’d recommend it unless you wanted that aspect of the game.

Mostly I play factory management style games. Top 3 being Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, and Mindustry. Though they’ve been more mental effort than Ive been able to muster recently.

Then I am also playing Last Epoch as a co-op game because it’s been a way to connect with an old friend from school (since we live in different cities it’s hard to connect in person).

So nothing too exciting or new.

Truly aspirational!

Hope you have a nice week as well!

From what I’ve seen, the electric cost is actually only a small component, the building, specialized hardware, maintenance and labour make up the majority of the bill for most vertical farming operations.

Further, it’s a matter of how much energy density you need within a given volume compared to the available roof surface. Most plants don’t need full sun, but you might only be able to supply 2-4 times the roof area as internal grow area (when accounting for efficiency losses and the needs of the plants). You would need to provide the majority of the grow area with LED lights anyway. So it might not be worth the resources/labour costs. Though it might be a good supplemental supply of photons.

The only real use case I can see for vertical farming is providing fresh produce nearer to urban centres, or if there is an acute shortage of land, otherwise passive greenhouses (with supplemental lighting and heating if needed) are generally a better use of resources. Specialized produce is another use case, but it seems that we need a lot more research to make it a viable option at scale.

A question of where the energy comes from is also important, solar panels in a desert/on roof tops is good, but if they replace a farm field it’s pointless. Wind, nuclear, hydro are good options.

I’m definitely curious to see how the field grows within the context of China and socialism more broadly. Many of the constraints in current implementations are only important when the only consideration is profit.

Edit: read the article, they have some really interesting use cases in their facility beyond what I could imagine.

It might be a little long if you are looking for a short work, but I’d recommend “the housing problem” by Engels. It’s a good piece about how housing shortages will never be solved under capitalism. As relevant today as it was when he wrote it.

Depends on how your local roads/side walks/pathways are maintained. If the snow is cleared, e bikes work just fine, but your range will be hurt a bit. A bad headwind will also mean your range goes down a lot (wind seems worse in the winter where I am, but that could be some sort of confirmation bias). The times I’ve biked through Blizzard conditions/extreme wind and cold I was very glad to have the e assist on the bike. Those days are rare though, and the primary consideration in my mind is how well things are maintained the rest of the year.

That being said, a path that hasn’t been cleared in days is basically unusable for any bike. Maybe a fat-tire bike could work, but I don’t have experience with that.

In terms of space, I use my bike all the time so I’ve made space for it in my apartment.

Maybe is should ask, what type of ebike are you looking to get? There is quite a range of types. Mine is basically just a normal bike with a motor assist.

I’ll second the boox line of products. No need to go for the color e ink either for it to be very functional as an android tablet. I’d love to have a color one at some point, but I’m happy enough with the basic one and it’s lasted me quite a while.

If you get one with the pen it is quite nice for note taking as well.

That being said, if you just want to read e books, it’s not the cheapest option.

I really dislike ads, so usually I have them blocked, but not all my devices have it done yet. Usually it’s just capital trying to get me to buy things so I just scroll past, but just over the weekend it was scary how quickly ads relating to Iran’s retaliatiatory action started popping up with the obvious slant you would expect in the west. There seems to be a concerted effort to start beating war drums… This is not including the horrific ads I’ve seen coming from Zionists over the last half year with blatantly genocidal language. I even reported those ads and nothing came of it of course.

I guess to sum up: ads can and are used as political tools to shape ideology. Yet another reason to get everyone you know on an ad blocker.

So 6 years to project start. Then just a few more years for completion. All in we are looking to a decade out for project completion +/- a few years.

Meanwhile, in Canada they can’t even get a timeline or funding for a single line on the most obvious corridor. And the second most obvious corridor has no timelines, and is only a study of feasibility at this time.

I think more important than co-op organizational structure would be a question of work place democracy. Are the workers given say over how their work is undertaken, do they have power over decisions? Ultimately under capitalism we are limited by the need to make enough profit to reproduce the business. The form that business takes when given those constraints can only be on some level exploitative.

The best you can do as an owner or part owner in the case of coops is to listen to your employees needs and compensate them as much as possible given the constraints of the budget.

The problem, as always, with capitalism is that exploitation goes into overdrive when the goal is to make a profit above the cost of production (including labour inputs) and this there is pressure to keep wages down and force longer hours.

If we had an unbiased look at his employees perspective and the finances, we could judge if he is engaging in profit making, or just earning enough to keep the lights on and to keep product moving. We can only take him at his word at this point.

Are there issues with this format, probably, but in the final analysis, will another pro communism propagandist be beneficial for the cause?