1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub...
80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules than hydrogen).
And much of it gets applied in the fall, not spring
2. Nitrogen fertilizer varies by crop. Beans crops (soy, kidney beans, chickpeas) fixate their own nitrogen and have zero/minimal applied. Corn and grains, particularly the higher protein varieties need among the most applied.
3. If you like to eat farmed land animals, you’re going to have a bad time from high fertilizer prices. Of traditional edibles: cattle is going to be the worst impacted. Chicken the least. Pork is in the middle. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
I don't know if I agree with their conclusion on #3, beef is fed 90% alfalfa grass which is literally cheaper than dirt and fixates its own nitrogen. Yeah they eat more feed per pound of meat, but alfalfa is literally the cheapest and easiest crop to grow. Sow it, mow it, bail it, now you have good ground to plant grains in without artificial fertilizer next year. You only feed cows grains during their last month to finish them to increase marbling/fat content.
If you produce less beef, you grow less alfalfa, and you end up using more artificial fertilizer which might even raise grain prices.
For the foreseeable future, building enough nuclear for peak capacity is exceedingly expensive.
> None of the power plants ever do a "fast cold start"
Somewhere in each grid you will have “black start” capacity contracts, dunno if nuclear can fills this role (or if grids exclude nukes for one reason or another).
Plenty of peaker plants built with the intention of running double digit hours per year and therefore the tradeoff supports being largely “off” in between those calls. Batteries might fill that gap.
Some of the speed bumps-like techniques here in Sweden will do more than just be a bump, it will severely damage the tires if you don't slow down. Curbs that require the driver to make very tight turns for example can be made from fairly sharp stone with an clear edge. A SUV/pickup truck can speed over it, but the trip to the repair shop will make it less fun.
They added some square-like flower pots in the middle of a lovely road next to where I live in order to force drivers to make a double S turn. Those are made from sharp rust-painted steel, and most of the corners are now painted with other peoples car paint. The only way to make it through is to drive at walking speed, which basically everyone do.
That’s not how speed bumps work. You can drive over a speed bump in a sports car. It’s just uncomfortable and potentially damaging to do so at speed.
Most SUVs ride poorly compared to cars due to solid axles and huge unsprung weight. If you took a speed bump fast you would be very shaken up and possibly launch into the air or tip.
TLDR. Speed bumps aren’t “invisible” to SUVs unless you are in a competition pre-runner or a monster truck.
the SUV/pickup culture is bad enough here in the South but they place speedbumps aggressively all over the place here.
Like 4" tall ones with no curve so that it absolutely slams the shit out of your small car if you're doing anything over 3mph. And they place them like every 8 feet. If you're in the lifted trucks most people drive here you can't even tell.
But if you imported a lifted truck, or another daft US vehicle like the Cybertruck into another country it would probably not be roadworthy and the traffic and speed calming measures are more appropriate.
Bullbars used to be a trend in the UK, for example, until they were band in the late 90s/early 00s because they were fatal to pedestrians.
I'm confused: what didn't work in Seattle/SF/Portland?
Enforcement didn't work because people won't follow the law anyway or engineering didn't work because people tried to drive through the obstacles or approach them with the same speed and smashed/smooshed more?
SF tried a multi-front approach called "Vision Zero". I think initially deaths went down for a couple years but then ticked back up. No, people aren't (usually) driving through obstacles.
Since they bought bitcoin while their stock was worth ~2-4x what it is today, I’d say the “arbitrage paper certificates for digital 1s and 0s” play worked out pretty well overall.
Bought btc for $10k and $51k (about 60/40 respectively) and it’s trading for $65k 5 years later. Dunno what other buying/selling they may have done.
From Wikipedia:
> In October 2020, Square put approximately 1% of their total assets ($50 million) in Bitcoin (4,709 bitcoins), citing Bitcoin's "potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future" as their main reasoning.[52] The company purchased approximately 3,318 bitcoins in February 2021 for a cost of around $170 million, bringing Square's total holdings to around 8,027 bitcoins (equivalent to around US$500 million in 2021, around US$481 million as of July 2024).[53]
You have to compare it to what else they could have done with the money, such as investing in their own growth, or even giving it back to shareholders if they had no good ideas what to do with the money.
I did! If they invested it in themselves it would have been a 50-75% loss, same with doing a buyback (return the cash to stockholders) at a high stock price.
Dunno what better proxy I could
use for how it would have went other than their actual stock price. Unless we are to think their next best idea that they didn’t invest in would have done better than all the other things they did invest in. But that’s very speculative.
Instead they got a blended 300% gain on btc.
Should have sold the entire company for cash and bought bitcoin at the timelines they did.
Maybe if they'd invested in themselves they would have been able to expand (eg. they could have hired more sales people or spent more on advertising).
If they truly were unable to find a reliable investment then they should have given the money back to shareholders instead of speculating on a non-productive non-asset with awful negative externalities.
1. if you’re a natgas producing country with lots of farms (hi USA and Canada) , your mega farm is probably injecting ammonia directly into soil as its nitrogen source, not urea. Pdf pg10, labelled pg5: https://www.ers.usda.gov/sites/default/files/_laserfiche/pub...
80-90% of US nitrogen fertilization is ammonia (because it’s almost entirely nitrogen and the rest are bonded to heavier molecules than hydrogen).
Ammonia prices always have big geographic variations because it’s a pain to ship a hazardous gas versus liquids or solids. https://businessanalytiq.com/procurementanalytics/index/ammo...
And much of it gets applied in the fall, not spring
2. Nitrogen fertilizer varies by crop. Beans crops (soy, kidney beans, chickpeas) fixate their own nitrogen and have zero/minimal applied. Corn and grains, particularly the higher protein varieties need among the most applied.
3. If you like to eat farmed land animals, you’re going to have a bad time from high fertilizer prices. Of traditional edibles: cattle is going to be the worst impacted. Chicken the least. Pork is in the middle. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/peril-and-promise/2022/03/feed-conv...
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