Sonori @ sonori @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Actually it seems to be one of the more talked about aspects, right after the local environmental costs of mining in some poorer countries, dispite being one of the easiest to solve.

You drop EV batteries into a dielectric bath industrial crusher and get thousands of dollars of absurdly high grade lithium-cobalt ore out of it. While there are hard questions that industry has not put much public press into answering, especially when it comes to environmental concerns, in this case the reason is that it’s actually pretty trivial to deal with.

Given that lead acid batteries have a ninety seven percent capture rate dispite only being worth a few dozen dollars at most, we can expect higher rates with the far more valuable EV batteries. Lithium is infinitely recyclable after all, and for all the failings of the free market when it comes to keeping personal electronic’s batteries out of landfills I doubt you need much overarching regulation to get people to take the five to seven thousand dollar payout from recycling in this case.

The reason we don’t see high recycling rates currently in the space is that despite worries that the batteries would degrade to the point of uselessness after a few short years, the vast majority of EVs are still on the road and looking to have a longer average lifespan than gasoline vehicles. On top of that there are a lot of applications which want the reuse them and there is a reason that reduce, reuse, recycle are in that order.

And of course, any talk of the environmental impacts of EVs has to be caveated by the fact that 60 to 70 percent of an EVs emissions cost comes from the power grid itself, which is rapidly changing as renewables push out more expensive coal and natural gas. Of the remainder, most of it is in mining the raw material for the battery itself, which as mentioned only has to be paid once before it is recycled for quite potentially forever.

Unlike a gas car which on average produces more than twice their weight in co2 every single year it’s on the road, an EVs emissions break even after only two to four years, after which that car and its future descendants will continue to just go mile after mile without contributing to gobal environmental collapse.

While things like more of Vancouver’s trolleybus network would obviously be best, given the population densities involved as well as the housing shortage we’re not going to be able to replace all cars in North America on the timelines the laws of physics demand we meet, and it’s important to keep that in mind when discussing it.

Yep, there was a reason why until 2019 i believe Israel publicly funded the Hamas with the intent to weaken the formation of a Palestinian government. Israel’s far right needs someone they can try and look strong against so people stop looking inword ar what thier government is actually doing.

China and Russia’s colonialism and imperialism apparently, since those are the only two countries trying to expand their own new colonial empires anywhere they can.

Russia has troops in half a dozen African countries, expreses military control over several of its neighbors, and is currently invading its neighbor to add it back into its empire.

China is continuing to annex its neighbors waters, building out military bases around the Pasific and Indian oceans, and gaining control over large parts of Africa’s infrastructure.

NATO remains primarily committed to mutual defense and in their own words, “preventing changes to the status quo by force or coercion.”. Yes, the current system is flawed and ineffectual with poor power distribution, but this libertarian ideal, that the world would be better off without defensive alliances and that military force and invasion should be the primary deciding factor of foreign influence is just as silly as all libertarian policy.

We had a system where military power was the primary deciding factor of foreign relations, that was what lead to Europe brutally colonizing most of the world in the first place. We should not seek to return to that era.

Except these things do require action for a lot of people. Their is a good reason why Tesla was required to send out mail to all effected customers.

This may come as a shock to you, but not all people have their cars connected to the internet. While it varies by network, about 30% of the US by area does not even have cell service, and the parts that do can be unreliable, especially if there is a big garage door between you and the tower. And this is the US, Canada is even more rural.

Some people might have also purposely disconnected their vehicles from the cell network, maybe because of evidence that Tesla employees were making highlight reels of customers from the in car camera footage.

In either of these or more cases, an update requires active work and steps to resolve. Indeed there is a reason Tesla has to provide technicians who can come out to their customers address to apply it free of charge. The same language and laws apply to every other auto manufacturer on our shared roads.

To be fair, when talking about a control system that moves tons of metal feet away from bystanders these sorts of safety critical systems should be given a level of weight greater than that given to Candy Crush.

While may always be improvements to such software, it’s not a trivial matter to get it wrong.

So by that logic, if I were to hack your computer, copy the data, and put sell it to some group for them to use, would that be theft. You still have your data, you haven’t lost anything directly, and while the group I sold it to may use a saved credit card or password to harm you I didn’t, so would what I did be considered theft?

Similarly, if I just sold the information gained by it to advertisers, marketers, your friendly neighborhood stalker, etc… Would that have been theft? You weren’t harmed, the demonstrably valuable information was just taken without your consent and given to a third party that wanted it.

There are limits to battery production, especially on short time frames. If your expecting every nation to try and deal with storing days of electricity production to cover for a rainy week your going to run out of easily accessed raw materials such as lithium.

You need either reliable generation, absurd quantities of undersea cables, or scalable storage. The only practical storage tech we’ve seen is hydro, and there are limited places to flood in order to construct built massive resivors, and it has far worse timelines and costs than nuclear, so that means on demand generation.

In this category we have nuclear, and location dependent options like hydro and geothermal. All of these are about as expensive, but output constant or at will power.

If you let the market decide, it’s going to do what its already decided to do, which is cheap solar plus cheap gas and coal. If you ban gas and coal, then it will be cheap solar and batteries for nations that can afford them and all gas and coal for the poorer nations that can’t afford the batteries.

Leave the batteries for applications like transport and smaller grids that need them instead of brute forcing them into places where they don’t fit like long term grid storage.

Finally, though this is the most minor, nuclear is by far the winner in local environmental impact, as it lacks the land use and habitat distruction requirements of solar, wind, and hydro. It’s also location agnostic, and unlike batteries gets cheaper and faster as it scales.

Counterpoint, wind and especially solar are now so cheap that the average grid scale solar plant turns a profit in 10 years and continues that profit for the next twenty plus. It’s cheaper per watt than gas and especially coal.

Perhaps govement subsidies should instead go to the less profitable 24 hour sources of power needed to fill the gaps, like hydro, geothermal, and nuclear, instead of just making already profitable investments a bit sweeter. There is a reason why well managed grids use a diverse set of sources, so unexpected shortages in one tech don’t limit the whole system.

The Osprey definitely has had its fair share of trouble, it’s record means it’s most dangerous plane in the US military fleet while also being the safest helicopter in its fleet.

Ya, the primary problem it’s had is that while profitable, it’s not nearly as profitable as solar and wind. That’s fine if your goal is a stable source of energy to form the bedrock of western society, but not so much if it’s just to make as much profit as possible as quickly as possible.

Not that much actually, unlike most of the world China actually has been scaling up renewables at a significant rate. The only problem is that they’ve been adding new coal plants aswell, and it might be hard to justify shutting down brand new plants, but there is actually a argument to be made that solar production is increasing as fast as economically feasible.

Nuclear is not bottleneckd in the same fields, and does have some significant advantages for supplementing renewables, namely in reliability, transmission efficiency, footprint, and raw resource requirements.

One country called country and one language called language.

While this is exciting and there are many reasons to continue to research fusion, fighting climate change is very much not one of them. It has all of the real problems of fission, namely high cost, low scale, and difficult construction, but exacerbated to an extreme degree. If new fission projects struggle to get investor funding becuse of low profitability and difficult construction times dispite nearly a century of development, it is unlikely that a technology so complex and expensive that we don’t even had a plan for a power plant yet will do better.

We might have a fusion pathfinder plant by 2050 or 2060, we need to be off fossil fuel by 2030 to 2035. We might be able to built sufficient fission by then if we started now at scale, national average construction times tend to be between 5 to 10 years, but fusion is a tool that might at best replace the power plants we build today, not the coal and natural gas plants we built yesterday.

I bring this up not because I oppose funding fusion and pure science, but because any argument that calls it an answer to climate change is going to fall apart the second you consider any alternative on a cost or time basis.

Counter point, I think that Vancouvers new policy has a solid chance of working, and that’s basically the opposite of single family housing. It will take a few years to take effect, but it should have an effect.

Are you kidding? It’s a great idea if you don’t want too much to actually come of it.

The NFT is only pseudonymous so long as the account can’t be tied back to an actual person, since most platforms already allow gifting of games to people’s accounts, it would be trivial to tie them back publicly.

The same authority problems also apply to NFTs, does everyone agree to use the same chain and only that chain, if the chain is forked becuse the founders of etherium loose 15 percent of the entire currency on a obvious scam again which version of the NFTs hosted on it are valid? How to the platforms deal with someone scaming someone else by selling them the wrong version on a third party marketplace?

If publishers can’t be bothered to sell their own games after a while, why would they want to sell someone else’s for free, and why would that incentive disappear if they use their own private API instead of a publicly accessible one?

I mean i’d rather register my license of XXX Hentai Boobmania with a govement office than make it permanently and irreversiblly publicly available for everyone to see.

Again, if they can be bothered to host the game, I don’t see how a database that’s smaller than most modern AAA games is more likely to disappear. You could also forgo a central database in favor of each storefront hosting thier own, and just using a private API. More secure too, since it wouldn’t present an easily attack surface for hackers.

The blockchain doesn’t need incentives to be slow and unwieldy when it takes hours to confirm a transaction, and a gas war can randomly delay things even more.

Archive.org is well, a non profit archive, not a storefront. If you used NFTs and wanted to charge for it, you would need to charge per download. Finally, while a NFT could provide a proof of license, so could any other database.

If the storefront goes bankrupt all that public ledger does is give you a dead link unless another storefront picks it up, but if they wanted to do that they could just as easily buy that database from the dying company anyway.

Moreover why would anyone else have an incentive to pay the significant costs associated with hosting a game ownership was on a blockchain, and therefore could be sold independently without them receiving a cut?