I think this would work for the summer months. Overnight storage is manageble/cost-effective by load shifting/battery storage/etc. This is now estimated at about $100/MWh ($0.10/Kwh).
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.
Or some combination of the two. Obviously sounds expensive but 20 years ago this would have been fiction. I think it’s entirely likely that energy storage and production will continue to fall enough in price to make this realistic.
They are indeed fair. The strongest poker bots are not AI in the way it is commonly defined. From my understanding they calculate the nash-equilibrium for a simplified game and extrapolate that to the full game.
In the Netherlands, there is street charging everywhere. It is indeed a bit more expensive if you do not have a dedicated parking place, but not more complicated. By law, public charging has to be available in 'reasonable walking distance' from any EV owner. 'Reasonable walking distance' is defined by muncipalities, and tends to be higher in rural areas. Therefore it varies between a maximum of 150-500 meters depending on municipality.
Netherlands is a rather rich country even by european standards.
Here where I live people sometimes struggle to park their car in a 2km radius from their home and there are like 4 public street charging outlets in a 4-5km radius. We might eventually get there but it will take a while.
Normally a long payback time is fine, but I would expect that in ~5 years, faster charging will be prevalent and the current chargers will already be obsolete, or at least less popular.
This is, at least for now, a relatively small market. Illumina acquired the company manufacturing these chips for $100M. Analysis of a genome in the cloud generally costs below $10 on general purpose hardware.
It is of course possible that these chips enable analyses that are currently not possible/prohibited by cost, but at least for now, this will not be the limiting factor for genomics, but cost of sequencing (which is currently $400-500 per genome)
Not just safety, but also effectiveness. FDA checks whether the trial(s) to prove the drugs effectiveness were run correctly (eg. the randomization, the control group, etc.), if the statistical analysis was done right, if the endpoints are appropriate (response to treatment is not always objective) etc. etc.
The FDA (and EMA in Europe) are the only thing that protects desperate patients from fraudsters, charlatans and pharma-companies just looking for a return on their investment.
Ideally this is what would happen. In practice there have been very public failures in being overly cautious and aggressive.
While Aduhelm reduces Aβ it has no clinically significant effect. Still, the FDA approved it. Mercifully it'll be discontinued in November.
The covid vaccine represented a huge policy failure by the FDA. While people in nursing homes died in droves we got small clinical trials. When you've got 90 year olds in a congregate setting facing a 50% chance of death, maybe it's time to stop pretending thalidomide may be lurking around every corner. The pediatric trials were just as bad. Due to their sizing it was statistically impossible to detect rare adverse effects. Yet, vaccination was delayed for children while these fruitless trials ran.
In my own experience I had a low cost, high throughput covid testing protocol ready to go in early April 2020. It took the FDA until August 2020 to provide templates and another month to grant emergency use authorization. We could've drastically ramped up testing when it was needed most of the FDA has treated an emergency like an emergency.
Is it your opinion that trials for the Covid vaccine should have been skipped to vaccinate people earlier, or that proper trials should have actually been done to know the efficacy and safety before testing it on the public?
Either would've been preferable to what was done. Waiting on a provably fruitless trial in the midst of pandemic is regulatory homicide.
Throughout 2020, more than 9% of all people in nursing homes died of covid. Depending on age case fatality rates were upwards of 50%. The vaccine should've been offered to these people on a compassionate use basis. Even at the time it was obvious that actual harm posed by the virus vastly outweighed any hypothetical risk of adverse vaccine reaction. Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
> Throughout 2020, more than 9% of all people in nursing homes died of covid. Depending on age case fatality rates were upwards of 50%.
That's just about most difficult population to determine primary cause of death for. Most people in nursing homes have multiple comorbidities and a long list of medications. Its easy enough to know when someone died with Covid, its much more difficult (if not impossible) to know after the fact whether that's what caused their death or if the infection began after an existing condition worsened and weakened their immune system further.
> Drastically expanding the vaccinated population through compassionate use would have rapidly provided efficacy and safety data.
That wouldn't have helped get efficacy or safety data for the general public though. Vaccinating that population could absolutely have helped determine efficacy for that population and I agree it feels like a reasonable action given the potential risks for that population, but the data wouldn't be useful for the general public that are younger and/or in better health prior to infection.
At the peak, excess nursing home mortality was nearly 6000 per week. Quibbling about "died with covid" versus "died of covid" isn't a useful exercise. Dead is dead and the excess mortality came from somewhere.
> Quibbling about "died with covid" versus "died of covid" isn't a useful exercise.
It isn't quibbling when the specific topic is whether or not to treat a population with an untested vaccine (assuming the trials were skipped for at risk populations as proposed above).
In a general sense, I totally agree the "with" versus "of" debate isn't useful. But when considering giving an at risk population an untested vaccine, how is that not important? Any intervention could have downsides, and more importantly an preventative intervention for a secondary infection may not be worth the risk depending on the risk profiles.
One tricky question that would have to be answered is whether the excess deaths were related to changes in nursing home treatment and general conditions. Nursing homes were effectively locked down in many areas, reducing human contact and potentially negatively impacting care. Vaccines would have no impact there, and if the untested vaccine has negative side effects we would have only made things worse.
Totally fair, by far the most common vaccine issues show up soon after injection. There is still the population challenge though. Dealing specifically with patients with multiple comorbidities and prescriptions would make it pretty tricky to recognize and then isolate the risk factors of anything that does show up.
Strokes, heart attacks, circulatory issues, etc are likely pretty common in that population and any increase there after treatment may go unnoticed as a change. If you do recognize it they'd have to stop treatments entirely as you wouldn't know whether its a risk to everyone or specific to some combination of age, comorbidities, and/or other medications.
The nursing homes were charnal houses. You would need one hell of a stroke risk to make the vaccine not worth it. The andrenovirus vector clotting was fast appearing and rare enough continuing was worth it in elderly populations.
People in nursing homes died from untreated illness. They were completely locked down, and isolated from friends and family. They weren't allowed to be transported to actual hospitals. Anyone with simple bacterial pneumonia was left to die.
In the UK, nursing homes were discovered to be sedating patients and not administering water and nutrition. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the same happened in the US.
If something would've gone wrong with rushing the vaccine like that it would've given the anti-vax people a massive boost and the vaccine refusal rates would've skyrocketed.
The refusal rates were already too high with anti-vax people making up lies/distorting data. If they actually had real data things would've been much worse.
Anti-vaxxers simply don't care about truth vs. falsehoods. They don't care about the actual 3-phase clinical trial with tens of thousands of participants.
How about telling the public the truth? Say something like, "This particular vaccine has not been tested up to normal FDA standards. It may not be as safe as other vaccines. But we are convinced that it will do more good than harm, given the danger of Covid for the unvaccinated."
You could let the public make an actual decision based on actual information, rather than telling them little, projecting false certainty, and then trying to force them to do what you think is the best course. I mean, look, not everyone can be treated like adults. But I think the majority of people can. Tell them the truth, and let them decide.
You're not thinking it through. Lets say that vaccine ends up killing thousands of people.
That event will then be used in a way that is wildly out of context as fodder by all the anti-vaxxers out there to scare people into not getting vaccinated later when the vaccine is safer.
For the next 50 years anti-vaxxers and scammers will be using that event to scare people about vaccines.
It is not worth the risk because of the potential outcomes.
It sure sounds like you're coming at this with your mind already set that (a) there is some meaningful number of people that are entirely anti-vaccines and (b) that they are absolutely wrong.
If a vaccine is rolled out and kills thousands, the example you gave, why shouldn't some people take notice of that and be concerned? Is there no level of risk that would also make you consider not taking a new and untested, or under tested, vaccine?
That is why we should never allow a procedure that will roll out a vaccine that will kill thousands. Which we didn't do with Covid because the backlash that would create against ALL vaccines would be terrible and result in massive loss of life long term.
How do we define an acceptable refusal rate? The vaccines were largely untested and given under emergency use authorization. Shouldn't it be reasonable for people to choose for themselves whether to take part in the vaccine campaign or not, especially when we can't provide solid data to support safety or efficacy?
At the end of the day, in my opinion, there is no magic number for vaccine acceptance that is a metric to define beforehand. Refusal rates are a backward looking metric only and simply reflect the willingness to participate and trust in the general public.
How many doses would we need to give out to not call them "largely untested"?
Far more covid vaccines were given out to more people then almost all prescription medications have been. They were FDA approved officially in 2021, and at the end of the day all of the covid vaccines given an EUA were much safer than even mundane things like driving a car.
High vaccine uptake rates save lives. Pretending otherwise requires you to misrepresent the data.
It's not religious to recognize that medical advances, especially in pharmaceuticals, have done more to extend lifespans and save lives in the last 100+ years than anything else.
The pharma industry has been consistently producing what would easily be called life saving miracles in any other context. Anyone unable to see that is the biased one.
That isn't real data. Anyone can write anything on VAERS. There is no verification. People write crazy stuff like the vaccine turned them into the hulk.
But lets be real, you almost certainly already know that. So you very likely fall into the category of people who intentionally misrepresent the data so you can pretend that vaccines are a bad thing.
That is the same blabla I read from many of your brothers in faith. Up to 2019, there are some studies that clearly show that the VAERS data underestimates the bad side effects of (some) vaccines, up to a factor of 100.
Of course it is possible that the highly political, near-religious atmosphere during the Covid-Circus biased the reporting for the mRNA vaccines in the other direction. But this has to be objectively studied. That never happened. One of the many things that make me deeply distrust the mRNA vaccines.
Your very general statement "so you can pretend that vaccines are a bad thing" shows your propaganda. I am vaccinated against several pathogens. But the topic "immune system" is really complicated, the knowledge up to date is not sufficient to force people. Especially vaccination of children has to be thoroughly justified. Search on Google Scholar for "Peter Aabye".
>Up to 2019, there are some studies that clearly show that the VAERS data underestimates the bad side effects of (some) vaccines, up to a factor of 100.
You mean before vaccines became extremely politicized? I think we can safely assume those numbers aren't useful anymore now that the well has been poisoned.
>But this has to be objectively studied.
There were plenty of double blind studies on the covid vaccines. Those are the gold standard. I'm not even sure what you are asking for here.
What? The numbers from before the poisening are not useful, because of the poisoning?
I asked for studies on the reliability of VAERS data about the Covid vaccines.
RCTs are just one brick of the science building. And of the plenty you think exist, I have encountered only a few good ones, yet.
The Cleveland Clincs study is one of them, but they justctested for infection and didn't include the outcome all-cause mortality or hospitalization for some unknown reasons.
The US veterans study seems to prove a lower mortality for vaccinated, but the cohort is for sure not representative.
Btw, those two showed a clearly monotonic increasing probability of acquiring a Covid19 infection with number of vaccinations.
Which effected almost no one, yet here you are talking about it. Imagine if an early covid vaccine had killed thousands. That would have had a massive chilling effect on vaccine uptake.
> Which effected almost no one, yet here you are talking about it.
So you think the FDA was wrong to recall it? And yes, I'm talking about it because plenty of people were skeptical of the vaccines because they thought they were undertested. And given the recall, they were absolutely right.
> Imagine if an early covid vaccine had killed thousands. That would have had a massive chilling effect on vaccine uptake.
You're making it sound like the chilling effect would be a bad thing, when it would actually be the correct response. There are plenty of examples in the history of medicine of the cure being worse than the disease.
Over 18 million doses of the J&J vaccine were given out. 6 women died. I don't think you could ever have testing to catch such a low rejection rate, and that rate is less dangerous than actual covid was, so those people weren't "right". Also that rate is less dangerous than driving a car, so this whole thing is silly.
We had safer vaccines available though so switching to them is even better, which we did.
> You're making it sound like the chilling effect would be a bad thing, when it would actually be the correct response.
That chilling effect would still exist when the vaccine was safe, making it the incorrect response. Conversations like this make it very clear why we need to be very careful about vaccine safety and we should never release a vaccine that will kill thousands EVEN if that vaccine would save lives overall.
Remember the pandemic? The FDA had safety and effectiveness data by end of August for the vaccine and were unprepared to do an analysis in less than a few months. Nor did they consider drafting the party boys of the Ozarks to get the efficiency data faster. As a result the winter of 2020-2021 saw thousands of preventable deaths.
There's also the part where distribution was done in a way that deliberately killed people so that racial equality goals could be met. Perhaps the worst example of this kind of thinking were teachers in SF getting vaccinated but school not starting again.
"The FDA (and EMA in Europe) are the only thing that protects desperate patients from fraudsters, charlatans and pharma-companies just looking for a return on their investment."
EMA has some people that were recruited from Big Pharma.
Seasonal storage is a completely different story. For my own panels, production in Nov/Dec/Jan is about 20% of that in Apr/May/Jun, and this is typical. That means that you either need 15x solar capacity of what you need on a sunny day, or enough storage to bridge those 3 months, two orders of magnitude storage more than we would need to store electricity overnight.