Current legal setups generally actively encourage people to waste water that they have property rights to. It would be infinitely better return on investment to reform that and put proper incentives in place, rather than work around it with technology.
and there was a huge fire at the moss landing plant which left heavy metals and god knows what else raining down onto sensitive marine mammal habitat. kayak up elkhorn slough and you'll encounter dozens of otters, seals... less than a kilometer from the battery plant.
I don't think we're going to be appreciating the environmental consequences of that accident for years. heavy metals don't decay, they'll be there forever.
a pox on david brouwer and his faux environmentalism, and the politics and economic machinations that ever proposed solar and batteries as an alternate to baseload fission plants. (in fact brouwer did his damage long before solar was ever practical, so he has even less ground to stand on)
Not too familiar with any games in this category, but I’ve been vaguely following development of this game on Twitter and one of the more interesting features is the passenger demand stuff is based off of current US census metrics about commuting methods, so I imagine this is probably better than NIMBY rails in that regard
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
Looks like they received $1 billion in private + government grants, so upper end would be 15%?
> The University ended fiscal year 2024 with an operating surplus of $45 million compared to $186 million in fiscal year 2023, on an operating revenue base of $6.5 billion.
"The first scientists to succeed, in 1995, were Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman at JILA (formerly known as the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics), a research institute in Colorado." incredible underhanded dig from the NYT (against the rest of the Boulder physics dept)
I think it’s just lazy reporting as JILA google search comes up with those exact words but the insult is that you would ordinarily just say The University of Colorado, or say JILA at The.. Leaving it out completely is quite a diss but probably not intentional.
JILA is the golden child of the physics dept for reasons no one quite knows. Better facilities, higher stipends, separate events programming, same department!
muni has "relatively level routes" because the routes that were preserved were ones with tunnels that buses couldn't fit through (or narrow ROW in the case of the J), and given sf geography those tunnels invariably go through hills. muni, and especially the J, is one of the steeper adhesion railways in the world
nuclear war is a lot more survivable than people make it out to be. if you can get your hands on enough clean water to hide in a basement for a week you'll basically be ok
> China appears to be working hard to deal with this problem, and it’s very possible that they can locate the carriers reasonably effectively, but they have dozens of satellites and large, expensive over-the-horizon radar systems, which any other power is unlikely to be able to match.
Seven years after this article's writing, "dozens of satellites" doesn't seem like that high a bar given Starlink's many thousands. (And we've seen huge bandwidth increases, too, which makes real-time imaging and analysis looking for ship wakes etc. far more doable.)
Since we haven’t had a war against a peer in like 80 years, we have basically no idea what it’d look like, right? I mean, everybody has a bunch of satellites up there right now, and nobody wants to kick off Kessler syndrome. But if two sides with serious navies started fighting and everybody’s carriers were getting spotted by satellite, is it obvious that nobody would start running that calculation?
In any major near peer conflict the satellites will obviously be among the first casualties. The USA and China have been quietly engaging in an ASAT arms race for several years.
Nuclear war may happen. I am giving more than a 50% chance that some form of nuclear weapon use in war will happen in my lifetime. But there are so many ways this could happen, from just a resumption of underground testing, to atmospheric testing, to dropping a bomb on an uninhabited island of the adversary, to detonating a bomb in space, to detonating a bomb inside your own territory while it's being overrun by the adversary, to detonating a bomb undersea with plausible deniability, and all the way to wiping out one city, or lots of cities. Nuclear war does not mean automatically end of civilization. Russia would like you to believe so, so they can prepare for all contingencies, but we don't.
This adds a sort of weird bit because, of course, it isn’t really clear why we’d care about carrier performance against China, if we assume it would be an ICBM war anyway.
Maybe a proxy war or some sort of limited thing could be envisioned… but it seems really risky. I hope we don’t do it obviously.
This starts with the false premise that the adversary needs to search the entire ocean.
In reality, the comings and goings of our ships are as public as it gets, and our peers quite easily track and maintain awareness of the locations of all our battle groups.
There's a huge difference between knowing the general location of a ship and generating a track good enough for weapons guidance. And much of the searching is done by reconnaissance satellites, which are highly vulnerable and likely to be destroyed in the opening moves of any major conflict.
Well they don't just know the "general location" of a ship. The article addresses the problem of terminal guidance (using out of date information) but it seems to treat targeting issues as fatal flaws, rather than acceptable risks. It doesn't matter if it the hit rate is 25%, they're going to fire ten of them. There might be collateral damage due to misidentification? Boo hoo, you're in an all out war.
I get it, you're convinced ASAT warfare is inevitable. The reality is it's akin to MAD. No one's going to start that war because it's lose-lose.
The problem is that to saturate the defences of a carrier's escorts you need hundreds of missiles not dozens. The Chinese have lots of missiles but not an infinite amount; especially not of the modern, purpose-built weapons that can pose a real threat to the carriers.
In reality they're going to have just a few tries before they run out of ammo. Just shooting at everything that might be a carrier is a great way to lose the war.
To actually pull this off you need to be able to rapidly locate and identify the target, communicate it's location to all your various launchers, then coordinate a complex time-on-target attack between all of them.
Any mistakes or disruptions in the chain can ruin your whole attack; misidentify the target and your attack misses, fail to communicate and a portion of your launchers never fire, fail to coordinate and your missiles arrive too spread out and are shot down, take too long to do all of this and the carrier will clear datum and you're stuck waiting for the next pass of a recon satellite that may never come.
This is all extremely difficult even under ideal conditions let alone when Uncle Sam is jamming your comms and blowing up your servers.
Not to say it's impossible, just that it's not as easy as you may think and that accurate targeting is a major factor.
Nah. The whole "Kessler Syndrome" thing is overblown. No one is going to refrain from shooting down satellites if it will gain them a temporary military advantage in a hot conflict. This is not even remotely close to MAD.
